Reading can be a solitary pursuit. Therefore, getting out of the house for the Portland Book Festival isn’t just a fun way to spend a Saturday in November—it’s probably good for your mental health.
Every year, nonprofit Literary Arts brings a passel of writers, publishers, and book lovers to the Portland Art Museum and South Park Blocks to mark the start of cozy-nights-in-with-a-good-book season—on the other side of summer’s debaucherous beach read bacchanals. This year marks the 20th anniversary of what began as Wordstock—renamed in 2018—where attendees get to interact (no touching) with authors from all genres and backgrounds, hawking their words in the most enjoyable way possible: via talks and readings that’ll give you way too many good ideas of what to read next. Bring a tote, because you’re going to take home an armful of new things to stack on the nightstand.
Hot on today’s announcement of this year’s lineup, here are eight—from the long list of authors, poets, and comics artists—we’re excited to see:
Reginald Dwayne Betts
Poet and prison reform advocate Reginald Dwayne Betts is the founder of Freedom Reads, which gives prisoners access to literature—something that changed Betts’s life when he was incarcerated as a teen. He named his latest collection of poems Doggerel, but it’s anything but: These are poems about the moments of gentle truth and beauty that come from a freedom hard won.
Omar El Akkad
The name of Omar El Akkad’s book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This comes from a 2023 tweet of El Akkad’s that went viral in the weeks after Israel’s initial assault on Gaza. The tweet has become a perfect encapsulation of the passivity of Western onlookers, growing in incisiveness as that assault has metastasized into an undeniable genocide. The Portland-based novelist and journalist—a longtime reporter for Toronto’s Globe and Mail and author of American War and What Strange Paradise—reckons with the impotence of America’s empty promises and the responsibility of fatherhood in a society where the privileged continue to dehumanize and, in some cases, destroy those they deem expendable.
Related: Author Q & A: Omar El Akkad on Gaza, Power, and the Stories Empires Steal
Angela Flournoy
Following up her acclaimed debut novel The Turner House, Angela Flournoy’s The Wilderness depicts a group of five Black women during the first two decades of their young adulthoods. Using each character as a different lens to view the social, economic, and political upheavals of the 21st century, Flournoy has attempted something you just don’t see on new-release bookshelves all that often: a modern American epic, driven by emotion, personality, and the realities of contemporary life.
Susan Orlean
Susan Orlean has no shortage of accolades, but for my money her most prestigious credit is as a writer on the excellent HBO series How To with John Wilson. That show gave investigative journalism a brilliant new form, something Orlean has done several times over her career with nonfiction books like The Orchid Thief and The Library Book. Her new one, Joyride, is a memoir about her life as a writer, exploiting her global adventures and detailing the nuts and bolts of her craft. It might be the most useful volume for aspiring authors since Stephen King’s On Writing.
Pádraig Ó Tuama
As host of the Poetry Unbound podcast, Pádraig Ó Tuama doesn’t just present some of the finest examples of contemporary poetry (delivered in his irresistible Irish accent)—his subsequent decompression and illumination of the texts provides sparkling literary analysis that conveys his joy at the power of the written word. Ó Tuama often uses an inspirational approach to his readings, delivering insights that listeners can apply to their own lives and relationships. Chances are good he’ll read from his own recent collection of poetry, Kitchen Hymns, which reckons with theology, queerness, and the undeniability of the natural world.
Jon Raymond
Updike or Mailer never dared to title a book God and Sex, but Portland author Jon Raymond did—showing sly awareness of the current state of straight-white-male-protagonist narrative fiction. Raymond’s story is about an unsuccessful woo-woo West Coast writer schtupping his buddy’s wife, but when she goes missing in a forest fire, the writer begins some serious spiritual bargaining. God and Sex packs an emotional punch even as it skewers its protagonist’s pretensions—no surprise when you remember that Raymond co-wrote several of Kelly Reichardt’s best films.
Related: God and Sex and Trees
Craig Thompson
Portland graphic novelist Craig Thompson has returned to the memoir form that made his Blankets such a breakthrough, but Ginseng Roots is much more than a recounting of Thompson’s memories of working as a child on a Wisconsin ginseng farm with his siblings. The book is also a multi-dimensional immigrant tale and a document of the ginseng industry in America, amid the shifting labor, agricultural, and immigrant policies of the United States over the past few decades. Like so many American tales that began in 20th-century optimism, this particular ginseng farm collides with 21st-century institutionalized racism and corporate greed. And yet Thompson makes it all personal and effortlessly page-turn-able; the New York Times called Ginseng Roots “a shaggy, imperfect, often beautiful almost-diary.”
Lidia Yuknavitch
Following up The Chronology of Water with her second memoir, Reading the Waves, prolific Portland author Lidia Yuknavitch explores the power of writing as not just a craft but as a method to process past trauma and reshape memories. Yuknavitch is brutally honest with her words, and Reading the Waves has received widespread accolades for the way it bursts through the boundaries of the memoir format.
Related: Reading the Waves Fucks
Here’s the full list:
Fiction
Stacey Abrams*, Coded Justice
Emily Adrian, Seduction Theory
Kristen Arnett, Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One
Olufunke Grace Bankole, The Edge of Water
Quan Barry, The Unveiling
Emma Donoghue, The Paris Express
Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness
Jasmine Guillory, Flirting Lessons
Adib Khorram, It Had to Be Him
Katie Kitamura, Audition
Patricia Lockwood, Will There Ever Be Another You
Cleyvis Natera, The Grand Paloma Resort
Anna North, Bog Queen
Emma Pattee, Tilt
Eliana Ramage, To The Moon and Back
Jon Raymond, God and Sex
Karen Russell, The Antidote
Souvankham Thammavongsa, Pick a Color
Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., The El
Jess Walter, So Far Gone
Daniel H. Wilson, Hole in the Sky
Rebecca Yarros*, Onyx Storm
Leni Zumas, Wolf Bells
Nonfiction
Nicholas Boggs, Baldwin: A Love Story
Jason De León, Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling
Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex
Jill Lepore, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution
Tyler Malek, America’s Most Iconic Ice Creams: A Salt & Straw Cookbook
Joshua McFadden, Six Seasons of Pasta
Julian Brave NoiseCat, We Survived the Night
Susan Orlean, Joyride
Tara Roberts, Written in the Waters: A Memoir of History, Home, and Belonging
Chyana Marie Sage, Soft as Bones
Craig Thompson, Ginseng Roots
Lidia Yuknavitch, Reading the Waves
Shay Mirk & Eleri Harris, Making Nonfiction Comics
Poetry
Reginald Dwayne Betts, Doggerel
Taylor Byas, Resting Bitch Face
Pádraig Ó Tuama, Kitchen Hymns
m. mick powell, Dead Girl Cameo
Patricia Smith, The Intentions of Thunder
Mai Der Vang, Primordial
Young Adult
Aashna Avachat, Love Craves Cardamom
Kalynn Bayron, Make Me a Monster
Alanna Bennett, The Education of Kia Greer
Alexis Castellanos, Lemons and Lies
Courtney Gould, What the Woods Took
Marissa Meyer, The House Saphir
Dustin Thao, You’ve Found Oliver
Trang Thanh Tran, They Bloom at Night
Middle Grade
Derrick Barnes, The Incredibly Human Henson Blayze
Michael Buckley and Forrest Burdett, The Weirdies
Nidhi Chanani, Super Boba Cafe #2: Home Sea Home
Jonathan Hill, Lizard Boy 2
Brándon Hoang, Minecraft: One Last Quest
G.T. Karber, Murdle Jr.: Sleuths on the Loose and Murdle Jr.: Ready Set Solve!
Jose Pimienta, Halfway to Somewhere
Aron Nels Steinke, Speechless
Misa Sugiura, Momo Arashima Duels the Queen of Death
Shana Targosz, River of Spirits
Renée Watson, All the Blues in the Sky
Picture Book
Zoey Abbott, The Kite Collector and This Year, a Witch!
Vera Ahiyya, Getting Ready for First Grade and Getting Ready for Halloween
Emily Arrow, Dear Bookstore
Derrick Barnes, I Got You
Michelle Jing Chan, Weiwei’s Winter Solstice: A Dōngzhì Story
Nora Ericson, The Bunny Ballet
Donna Barba Higuera, The Unlikely Aventuras of Ramón and El Cucuy and Xolo
Tae Keller and Rachel Wada, We Carry the Sun
Curtis Manley and Tracy Subisak, Grace Builds an Almost-Perfect Dog
Dan Santat, The Day the Books Disappeared
Carrie Tillotson, Alpacas Here, Alpacas There
Rachel Michelle Wilson, To Catch a Ghost
Pop-Up Authors
Karleigh Frisbie Brogan, Holding
Amanda Hawkins, When I Say the Bones I Mean the Bones
Justin Hocking, A Field Guide to the Subterranean
Sara Jaffe, Hurricane Envy
Ever Jones, Transanything
Jennifer Perrine, Beautiful Outlaw
Keith Rosson, Coffin Moon
Leah Sottile, Blazing Eye Sees All
Gabriel Urza, The Silver State
Lisa Wells, The Fire Passage and more to be announced.
Portland Book Festival happens at Portland Art Museum and neighboring venues in the South Park Blocks around 1219 SW Park, Sat Nov 8, 10 am–6 pm, admission $18 and up, free for youth 17 and under, along with veterans and active military, Arts for All passes available those receiving SNAP benefits, tickets at literary-arts.org, all ages.
*Abrams and Yarros appear at ticketed headliner events at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.
