Books

Ai in 1972 Photograph by LaVerne Harrell Clark, courtesy of The University of Arizona Poetry Center In 1979, a book of poetry by a writer known simply as Ai caused a small sensation in the literary world. Killing Floor—Ai’s second book of poems—won the Lamont Poetry Prize of the American Academy of Poets, an award […]

Suzette Smith This year’s Portland Book Festival really seemed to work. The weather was outstanding! (That’s not something Literary Arts could control, but it was still nice.) The festival was crowded, but more manageable than previous years. At festivals this popular, attendees sometimes can’t even stop at booths because the river of people sweeps them […]

Suzette Smith Last night was perfect weather for a LitCrawl, just cold enough to justify a thermos of tea, but not so cold that literary revelers minded waiting outside a Lit Crawl venue that went over their scheduled 45 minute window. The Portland Book Festival Lit Crawl is a fun pre-PBF tradition that places readings […]

This year, local nonprofit Literary Arts (who acquired Portland’s big literature festival Wordstock in 2014) renamed Wordstock with the more homogenous title of Portland Book Festival. Though this made the festival impossible to search for online, the fest itself appears to be retaining the originality, talent draw, and excellent curation of literary voices that made […]

LIMERENCE PRESS “Honesty keeps us alive” is a recurring phrase in Open Earth, the debut graphic novel penned by comics writer, author, and (full disclosure!) former Portland Mercury reporter Sarah Mirk. The motto refers not only to the practice of sharing the small quarters of an Earth-orbiting space station, but to its citizens—especially a polyamorous […]

From Dungeons & Dragons: Art & Arcana, art by Michael Komarck “I grew up in the 1980s, and despite what Stranger Things would have you believe, in those days, Dungeons & Dragons wasn’t cool. In fact, mentioning it at all opened you up to various forms of societally accepted ridicule and potential physical altercations,” writes […]

Courtesy of the artist, author photo by Connie Tsang You’re a time traveler. Your time machine broke and you’re trapped in the past. There’s no way you’re getting back to the future, but you can invent a new one. That’s the premise of How to Invent Everything, the new book from Ryan North, best known […]

left to right: Anastacia-Reneé, Emily Sieu Liebowitz, and jamie mortara STANTON STEPHENS, JOSHUA SIMPSON, JAMIE MORTARA Poetry feels like an artform ill-suited for our current era. As we untangle the threads of multiple #MeToo investigations or seek reason from the people in power, we grasp at direct communication. But that’s also why we need poetry […]