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In this episode, we feature a conversation with Michael Lewis from the 2023 Portland Book Festival. Lewis is one of the most accomplished and celebrated writers of nonfiction at work today. He is the author of 17 books of nonfiction including Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, the Big Short and Flashboys. All his books are about unconventional people doing extraordinary things, usually behind the scenes. We’re excited to say that we will welcome Lewis back to Portland on October 29 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall to talk about his new book, Blockers, about the courageous civil servants, everyday Americans, who have stood up to the worst impulses of the Trump administration. You can get your ticket here. For now, we’re going back to 2023, when Lewis joined us to talk about his book, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon.  It’s a book about Sam Bankman Fried and the eventual collapse of this crypto currency hedge fund, Alameda Research, and the exchange he also founded, called FTX.  When we sat down to talk, Bankman Fried had just been found guilty of seven Federal charges, all finance related, and was awaiting sentencing.  It was a trial that many consider the biggest and most important in the world of finance in decades, and was one that was watched closely all across the world.  Lewis had unrestricted access to Bankman Fried, spending over year reporting as Bankman Fried amassed one of the largest fortunes in the world and then lost everything as his businesses collapsed.  The result of that reporting in Going Infinite paints a picture of a Bankman Fired that is very different than how he was portrayed in the press and by government prosecutors. Lewis offers a perspective on Bankman Fried and many of his closest colleagues that is rooted in understanding their deeper motives, how they were shaped as a generation, and how and why they made the mistakes they made.  His conclusion is both startling and important to reckon with for its consequences for our society, regardless of whether you followed the case closely or not. Michael Lewis is the best-selling author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, The Undoing Project, The Fifth Risk, and Giong Infinite. His most recent book is Blockers. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his family.   For over fifteen years, Andrew Proctor has led Literary Arts, growing it into the largest literary center in the United States, opening a new headquarters in Portland in 2024 after a $23 million dollar capital campaign. Previously, he worked in New York in the publishing industry and in the human rights sector, and also in London for the cultural affairs office of the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.  He has served in a variety of national and local boards and councils and currently sits on the board of the Central East Side Industrial Council and is a member of Mayor Wilson’s Central City Roundtable in Portland.

This week, we’re reaching way back into our archive to feature a talk from Pulitzer Prize winning writer Annie Dillard’s special event in 1989.  We’re broadcasting this talk now to celebrate her incredible contribution to American literature, as she passed away in September 2026 at the age of 81. When Annie Dillard won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, she was the youngest woman ever to do so. She won for a book published the previous year called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which is a nonfiction book that meditates on writing, solitude, the natural world, and spirituality. The book had a profound impact at the time of its publication and garnered comparisons to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Dillard has gone on to have genre bending career, publishing over a dozen titles including book-length nonfiction, novels, essays, and criticism, in addition to more than 25-years of teaching at universities in the Pacific Northwest and the east coast. In 2015 she was awarded the National Humanities Medal for her life’s work. In this talk, her characteristic sense of irony and humor elicits huge laughs from the audience and her generous spirit invites quiet attention when she tells a story. She reads two excerpts — first from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and then from a book of essays called Teaching a Stone to Talk. Whether she is describing muskrats in Virginia or witnessing an eclipse in the Yakima Valley, she draws profound insights into the nature of existence and what the natural world has to tell us about ourselves. Annie Dillard, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1945, was a poet and author best known for her prose in both fiction and nonfiction. Dillard has been considered a major voice in American literature since she published Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in 1974 and won a Pulitzer Prize. Influenced by Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, Dillard writes compressed, lyric poetry and prose that engages the balance of daily life within the frame of literature and ideas. Dillard’s numerous books include the poetry collections Tickets for a Prayer Wheel and Mornings Like This: Found Poems; the nonfiction books Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, For the Time Being, and The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New; and the novels The Living and The Maytrees. A member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Dillard also holds honorary doctorates at Boston College, the University of Hartford, and Connecticut College. Additional honors include grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, a New York Press Club Award for Excellence, an Appalachian Gold Medallion, a Campion Award, and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She received the National Endowment for the Humanities Medal in 2014, awarded to her by President Barack Obama. Annie Dillard passed away September 15, 2026 at the age of 81.

This week features a conversation on humor in fiction featuring two masters of the genre: Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Things and, most recently, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One, the story of a lesbian clown navigating life, love, and art in Florida; and Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins and, most recently, So Far Gone, about a journalist living off the grid who is forced back into society to help his grandchildren. The conversation is moderated by OPB’s Jess Hazel, host of Morning Edition. As they discuss, Jess and Krisetn are both writers of place, and are often writing about people who might be thought of as outsiders or marginal. Kristen is a Florida writer, by her own description everything she writes is about Florida, specifically Orlando and Central Florida. And Jess ranges in his work but often, including in So Far Gone, returns to the American Northwest, here to the Eastern Northwest; he also delivers a defense of Spokane, his birthplace and long-time hometown. The episode starts with the author’s favorite knock-knock jokes, both of which are very personal choices and give some insight into what these funny writers find funny. What comes through as a primary connection between Jess and Kristen’s work is their fascination with people. Writing is a way to try to better understand people, including people drastically different from the writer, which is a deeply empathetic project. Humor is a way to understanding other people and to connecting with people across some of the things that might seem to divide us. Kristen Arnett is the author of the novel With Teeth, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction, and the New York Times bestselling novel Mostly Dead Things, which was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, TIME, The Cut, Oprah Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in Orlando, Florida. Jess Walter is the author of eleven books, most recently the novels So Far Gone, The Cold Millions and Beautiful Ruins; The Zero, a finalist for the National Book Award and Citizen Vince, winner of the Edgar Award for best novel. His work has been published in 34 languages and his short fiction has won O. Henry and Pushcart prizes, appeared three times in Best American Short Stories, and is collected in the books The Angel of Rome and We Live in Water. Walter lives in Spokane, Washington. Jess Hazel has hosted Morning Edition for OPB since 2024. They graduated with a BA in Journalism at the University of Montana and have previously hosted Morning Edition in Montana and Southern Colorado. Hazel has a voracious appetite for stories and treasures books that make them laugh, cry or cringe.

In this urgent presentation, strategist and democracy defender Scot Nakagawa, co-founder of the 22nd Century Initiative, makes the case that artistic freedom is not a cultural amenity but democratic infrastructure. It is the most sensitive indicator we have of the health of a free society. Drawing on the historical record from Nazi Germany to contemporary Hungary, and on the latest research on nonviolent civil resistance, Nakagawa argues that the assault on arts funding, public media, and free expression we are witnessing right now is not a culture war. It is an infrastructure attack. And artists are already on the front lines, whether they know it or not. For artists and cultural workers who have been watching mass mobilizations and asking themselves, what is my role in this?, this talk offers some answers. Nakagawa reframes the question entirely: you are not watching the resistance from the outside. You are making the resistance possible. From documenting reality against the falsification of history, to humanizing the people authoritarians want to erase, to building communities that no government authorized, the work artists do every day is the cultural foundation that democratic movements depend on. The conversation ends with a specific ask: a commitment never to self-censor, and an invitation to understand the arts community as what it has always been—a river made of springs, each distinct, all moving in the same direction. Scot Nakagawa has been an organizer and social justice advocate since 1979. Since 1988, Scot’s main focus has been on the rise and mainstreaming of authoritarian movements, and of political violence in the name of ethnic and racial nationalism. He has worked with organizations such as the Coalition for Human Dignity, the National Anti-Klan Network, the National LGBTQ Task Force, the Highlander Research and Education Center, and numerous political campaigns to limit the power and influence of racist, antisemitic, patriarchal, and religious fundamentalist leaders and groups. Scot is also the co-founder and past Senior Partner of ChangeLab, an Asian American think/act laboratory addressing issues of social justice and Asian American leadership, work for which he was recognized by the Association of Asian American Studies, Community Leader Award. He is a past Open Society Foundations fellow, and Senior Fellow on Nationalism, Authoritarianism, and Race of Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation. He is a writer whose essays on authoritarianism and resistance can be found online in The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook on Substack, and co-host of the Anti-Authoritarian Podcast.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a discussion on late writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s legacy of pacifism and environmentalism. Our moderator is Theo Downes-Le Guin, Ursula’s son and literary executor. Theo is in conversation with Oregon-based writers Juhea Kim, author of the novel Beasts of a Little Land, a finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Michelle Ruiz Keil, author most recently of the young adult novel Summer in the City of Roses, which was a finalist for the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. In her speech at the 2014 National Book Awards, accepting the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, Ursula said: “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.” Juhea Kim and Michelle Ruiz Keil are two of those voices that we need now. In this conversation, Juhea and Michelle discuss how they came—and returned—to Le Guin’s work, her influence on their writing, and how they are carrying her legacy forward, including the responsibility of the artist as a humanitarian. This conversation was recorded in front of a live audience at Literary Arts on July 15, 2022. “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) was a celebrated author whose body of work includes 23 novels, 12 volumes of short stories, 11 volumes of poetry, 13 children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, and SFWA’s Grand Master, along with the PEN/Malamud and many other awards. In 2014 she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2016 joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America. Michelle Ruiz Keil is an author, playwright, and tarot reader with an eye for the enchanted and way with animals. She is the author of the critically acclaimed young adult novels All of Us With Wings and Summer In The City of Roses. Her writing for adults can be found most recently in Bitch, Cosmonauts Avenue, and the anthology Dispatches From Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin. She is a 2021 Tin House Scholar and the recipient of residencies from Hedgebrook, The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and the Bloedel Reserve. Born in San Francisco, Michelle has lived in Portland, Oregon for many years where she curates the fairytale reading series All Kinds of Fur and lives with her family in a cottage where the forest meets the city. Juhea Kim is a writer, artist, and advocate based in Portland, Oregon. Her bestselling debut novel Beasts of a Little Land was named a finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and a Best Book of 2021 by Harper’s Bazaar, Real Simple, Ms., and Portland Monthly. Her writing has been published in Granta, Slice, The Massachusetts Review, Zyzzyva, Guernica, Catapult, Times Literary Supplement, The Independent, Sierra Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the founder and editor ofPeaceful Dumpling, an online magazine at the intersection of sustainable lifestyle and ecological literature. She has received fellowship support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Regional Arts & Culture Council, and Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. She earned her BA in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University.

Stacey Abrams is probably best-known as a politician and political organizer; she the first Black woman in U.S. history to become the gubernatorial nominee of a major political party. Abrams has launched multiple nonprofit organizations and for-profit companies, with a longstanding focus on voter registration and voters’ rights.      What you might not know is that Abrams has published 17 books in the last 25 years, including thrillers, romance novels, children’s books, memoir, and more. She started writing novels while in law school, and her new book is the thriller “Coded Justice,” which is about a topic on everyone’s minds these days: AI.   Abrams was interviewed by the host of OPB’s Think Out Loud, Dave Miller, at the book festival. They discuss her early choice to use a pen name (Selena Montgomery) and the importance of community and having a team. Their warm, wide-ranging conversation reveals Abrams’s deep curiosity and immense intellect. One thing that really struck me is when Abrams talks about the relationship between her author life and her political life; she says, “Good policy is storytelling.”  Stacey Abrams is a New York Times bestselling author, entrepreneur, and political leader. She served as Minority Leader in the Georgia House of Representatives, and she was the first black woman to become gubernatorial nominee for a major party in United States history. Abrams has launched multiple nonprofit organizations devoted to democracy protection, voting rights, and effective public policy. She has also cofounded successful companies, including a financial services firm, an energy and infrastructure consulting firm, and the media company, Sage Works Productions, Inc. Abrams’s latest novel is titled Coded Justice.  Dave Miller is the host of Oregon Public Broadcasting’s daily talk show, “Think Out Loud.” Before coming to OPB, Dave was the senior producer of “Open Source,” a nationally syndicated radio show based at the NPR affiliate station WGBH in Boston. He began his radio career as a documentary producer at Sound Portraits Productions and StoryCorps. From 2008 to 2011, he worked as the online host of the show. His stories have aired on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” “Morning Edition” and “Weekend Edition Saturday.” Dave graduated from Harvard University with a degree in English.

This episode, we bring you Marjane Satrapi. She gave this talk on April 7, 2008, just about one year after the film adaptation of her comic Persepolis had been featured at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for best animated feature. Sastrapi’s death was announced on June 4, 2026. President Emmanual Macron of France said in the announcement, “Her passing marks the loss of a leading figure in French culture and a freedom-loving artist whose work carried a universal message and earned her immense international acclaim.” Satrapi was an Iranian born French author and film director and is considered one of the greatest contemporary graphic novelists.  Her work includes critically acclaimed and canonical books Persepolis and Persepolis 2, graphic narratives which both feature a protagonist, Marji, whose life parallels Satrapi’s. The books follow Marji from a childhood in Iran to spanning some of the most intense years of contemporary Iranian history during the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, with Marji leaving the country as a teenager to study in Europe, returning to Tehran for a period before eventually setting in Paris. Satrapi was an Iranian women, working in France, and became one the bestselling writers & artists in the United States. The specifics of her story are of course, unique to her, but like great storytellers she connected with millions of readers because of the universal nature of her work. In addition to Persepolis and Persepolis 2, she wrote several children’s books and other graphic novels, and she directed several feature films, including 2019’s “Radioactive,” about the life of Marie Curie, adapted from the graphic novel by Lauren Redniss and starring Rosamund Pike. Though she continued living in Paris, she remained an activist against Iran’s Islamic regime, in particular protesting the restrictions on women. She said, “We artists must be humble but doing nothing is worse, being indifferent is worse. In this talk, Satrapi is wry, ironic and occasionally sarcastic.  She references the influence of Persian miniatures and Art Speigelman’s Pulitzer Prize winning graphic narrative Maus – the first comic ever to win the Pulitzer Prize.  I use the work “comic” here instead of graphic novel intentionally since Satrapi rejects the term “graphic novel” as pretentious.  To the end, she is grounded and funny, whether she is talking about American culture in Tehran in the 1970s or the personal challenges she faced as an artist working for the first time on film and being forced to collaborate with a huge group of people – a process she at first disliked, then came to appreciate. “Any intellectual and any artistic work, by definition, is an anti-fanatic work. Fanaticism presses on the button of emotion…When you make an intellectual and artistic work— when you don’t pretend that you have the answers, but you only have questions to ask—when you make this work, for the person who listens to or reads you, not only do you ask them to be smart, but to work—to try to find the answers themselves.” Marjane Satrapi is an Iranian-born French graphic novelist, illustrator, film director, and children’s book author. She was born in Iran in 1969 and grew up in Tehran in a middle-class Iranian family, attending the Lycee Francais until she left for Vienna and, later, Strasbourg to study Decorative Arts. She eventually moved to France, where she now lives with her husband, Mattias Ripa. Satrapi has worked on many graphic novels and animated films, but she attracted worldwide attention for her autobiographical comic series Persepolis. The work chronicles her childhood in Iran and her adolescence in Europe. In 2007, Persepolis was adapted into a critically acclaimed animated film of the same name that received over 25 major international award nominations and over 15 major international awards.

We’re taking it back to the 2025 Portland Book Festival this weekend, with poets m. mick powell and Taylor Byas, and moderater Jae Nichelle.   Taylor Byas’s second collection, Resting Bitch Face, uses watching and surveillance to explore Black female subjectivity. Byas engages with multiple art forms — painting, film, sculpture, and photographs – to explore the perspectives of artist and muse, of watcher and watched.   Taylor is in conversation with m. mick powell, whose debut poetry collection Dead Girl Cameo: A Love Stroy in Poems features of chorus of pop stars – Aaliyah, Whitney Houston, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, and more – in an exploration of grief, sexuality, and celebrity. Powell refers to the collection as a documentary, and it includes imagery, speculative verse, and more.   Poet Jae Nichelle leads a conversation that starts from the prompt “pop culture poetry.” Engaging with pop culture, as these collections do, is an act of engaging with the cultural moment. Done well, it doesn’t “date” the work, but creates a time capsule – a documentary. Both collections are deeply researched, and Taylor and mick discuss their relationships to art, scholarship, and commerce, and the interplay between those different aspects of publishing this particular collections.    In the conversation, first we’ll hear m. mick powell read the title poem of their debut collection, Dead Girl Cameo, followed by a reading by Taylor Byas of the title poem of Resting Bitch Face and then a conversation between mick, Taylor, and the moderator, Jae.   A heads up – there’s some mature language that may not be appropriate for all listeners, and you’ll hear some bleeps in the opening poem.  Taylor Byas is an award-winning poet and a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her poetry collection I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times won the Maya Angelou Book Award, the Ohioana Book Award, the CHIRBy Award, and the BCALA Best Poetry Honor. m mick powell is a queer Black Cabo Verdean femme, poet, artist, Aries, and the author of DEAD GIRL CAMEO (One World Books, 2025) and threesome in the last Toyota Celica & other circus tricks, winner of the 2023 Host Publications Chapbook Prize. An assistant professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut, mick enjoys chasing waterfalls and being in love.  Louisiana-born Jae Nichelle (she/her) is the author of God Themselves (Andrews McMeel, 2023) and the chapbook The Porch (As Sanctuary) (YesYes Books, 2019). She was a finalist for a 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship and won the inaugural John Lewis Writing Award in poetry from the Georgia Writers Association. Her poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2020 (University of Virginia Press, 2020), the Washington Square Review, The Offing, Muzzle Magazine, and elsewhere. She believes in all of our collective ability to contribute to radical change.

In this episode we feature one of the giants of story telling and of long form journalism, Tracy Kidder. Kidder passed away at the age of 80 in March 2026, and so we are sharing this recording from 2011 as a way for us to celebrate his life and work, and all that he has given to readers. Spanning over 50 years, Kidder’s career began at the Iowa Writers Workshop where he enrolled in 1974 after military service in the Vietnam war. He began with aspirations to be a novelist but soon found that he had talent for seeing the through line of the lives of the people all around him. And so for his entire storied career, Kidder wrote compellingly about ordinary people from all walks of life, including carpenters, home builders, computer programmers, Haitian doctors, schoolchildren, and nursing home residents  – just to name a few. Along the way he earned a Pulitzer, a National Book Award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, for his ground breaking books like The Soul of a New Machine and Mountain Beyond Mountains. His body of work included dozens and dozens of articles, and twelve books, which came to redefine an entire genre of nonfiction. He joined us in 2011 after the publication of a book called Strength In What Remains, and he tells the story of learning to write in Iowa, and then his apprenticeship turned life-long professional relationship with Richard Todd who was one of the Atlantic Magazine’s famed editors. It’s an extraordinary story in which Kidder reveals his mistakes, uncertainties, and vulnerabilities as much as his successes. And he does so with self effacing humor and quiet wisdom. This is a must-listen for every aspiring writer, and for every reader who wants deeper insight into the creative process and to understand how many of the stories that have come to define modern journalism were made. Tracy Kidder graduated from Harvard and the University of Iowa. He won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, and many other literary prizes. He is the author of Rough Sleepers, A Truck Full of Money, Good Prose (with Richard Todd), Strength in What Remains, My Detachment, Mountains Beyond Mountains, Home Town, Old Friends, Among Schoolchildren, House, and The Soul of a New Machine. Kidder passed away in 2026.

The City of Portland is engaged in a national dialogue about public art, history, monuments, and memorials. With support from the Mellon Foundation, the Portland Monuments Project is a multi-year project with the goal of deciding on the future of seven monuments that were damaged, toppled, or removed following demonstrations in Portland in 2020-2021. Portland Monuments Project aims to foster public dialogue to reimagine and transform the purpose of monuments and memorials in Portland. This episode is part three, the final installment of a three-part series as part of the Portland Monuments Project. This week we explore the city’s potential futures; episode one looked to the past, and episode two explored the present. Literary Arts is involved in this project because storytelling is at the heart of our mission, and monuments tell a story about who we were, who we are, what we value, and who we aspire to be. They tell stories about different communities and the stories they tell are dynamic, in so much as our community is changing, time is passing, and the context for these fixed objects and changes around them. In this episode, we’ll think about the monuments we need. We’ll hear from Literary Arts executive director Andrew Proctor, whose voice you might recognize as the other co-host of this show. We have a conversation with Portland writers Mitchell S. Jackson and Renée Watson about who they think should be honored with a monument in Portland. And we’ll hear from the people of Portland about the monuments they want to see and the stories they want to be told about this city, where we’ve been, and where it’s going. Our guide for today’s episode is Archive Project editor and producer, Matthew Workman.

The City of Portland is engaged in a national dialogue about public art, history, monuments, and memorials. With support from the Mellon Foundation, the Portland Monuments Project is a multi-year project with the goal of deciding on the future of seven monuments that were damaged, toppled, or removed following demonstrations in Portland in 2020-2021 by fostering public dialogue  to reimagine and transform the purpose of monuments and memorials in Portland. This episode is part two of a three-part series as part of the Portland Monument Project. The first episode revisited the city’s past, part two will look at the present, and the culminating episode explores what may come to fruition in the future. Literary Arts is involved in this project because storytelling is at the heart of our mission, and monuments tell a story about who we were, who we are, what we value, and who we aspire to be.  They tell stories about different communities and the stories they tell are dynamic, in so much as our community is changing, time is passing and the context for these fixed objects changes around them. In this episode, we’re tracing the path of a monument that went from a guerilla artwork, to a museum piece, and will soon be a monument again. Join us as we travel from the top of Mount Tabor to the mouth of the Columbia River to learn more about this particular monument and its subject – York the Explorer – from art curators, historians, and some nice people enjoying an afternoon in the park.  Our guide for today’s episode is Archive Project editor and producer, Matthew Workman.

In the words of the Los Angeles Times, “A new book by (Patrick Radden) Keefe means drop everything and close the blinds; you’ll be turning pages for hours.” Keefe is an award-winning investigative journalist, a staff writer at the New Yorker, the creator of a popular podcast, and the author of six books, including the bestsellers Rogues, Empire of Pain, and Say Nothing. “When I go out looking for a good story,” says Keefe, “I almost never find one. Instead, the really good ones tend to fall in my lap.” Say Nothing was prompted by reading an obituary. A wild-seeming rumor about the 90’s heavy metal band The Scorpions led to the podcast Wind of Change, a sweeping tale of government secrets, Soviet spies, propaganda, and 90’s power ballads. To call his research “meticulous” is an understatement. Keefe’s book, Snakehead, required over 300 interviews to complete. Say Nothing found him speaking to thousands of sources. While writing about the opioid epidemic in EMPIRE OF PAIN, Keefe was blocked from speaking to the Sackler family, so instead, he amassed thousands of correspondences from personal emails to Bar Mitzvah announcements. Though Keefe’s doggedness recalls the detective stories that inspired him early on, he is perhaps more hopeful than hardboiled. By approaching those forces that appear too vast to unravel, he proves that even institutions and systems that seem unassailable can, in fact, be broken down and examined—one interview, one receipt, one wedding invitation at a time. Like all the great whodunnits, his books contain breathtaking plot twists. Though he has, on at least one occasion, solved a murder mystery, Keefe is less interested in pointing to a perpetrator and more interested in holding up a mirror. The question at the heart of his work is one that pertains to everyone: What does it mean to be human? His newest book, London Falling, is an investigation into the mysterious death of 19-year-old Zach Brettler and its connection to both London’s criminal underworld and its elite circles. The author Katherine Rundell says, “Nobody writes like Patrick Radden Keefe; nobody makes achieving something so powerfully complex and difficult look so easy. It’s a form of intellectual generosity and, I think, a form of genius.” Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the New York Times bestsellers Rogues, Empire of Pain, and Say Nothing, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, was selected as one of the ten best books of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal, and was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of the decade by Entertainment Weekly. His previous books are The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. He is also the creator and host of the eight-part podcast Wind of Change.

The City of Portland is engaged in a national dialogue about public art, history, monuments, and memorials. With support from the Mellon Foundation, the Portland Monuments Project is a multi-year project with the goal of deciding on the future of seven monuments that were damaged, toppled, or removed following demonstrations in Portland in 2020-2021 by fostering public dialogue  to reimagine and transform the purpose of monuments and memorials in Portland. This episode is part one of a three-part series as part of the Portland Monument Project. This episode explores the city’s past, and part two will look at the present and the future. Literary Arts is involved in this project because storytelling is at the heart of our mission, and monuments tell a story about who we were, who we are, what we value, and who we aspire to be.  They tell stories about different communities and the stories they tell are dynamic, in so much as our community is changing, time is passing and the context for these fixed objects changes around them. In this episode we’ll talk to the staff at the City’s Office of Arts and Culture who are leading this initiative, hear from experts, from historians, from passersby, and from other stakeholders who are questioning our past practices, and hope create change in how we, as a community choose our monuments – who gets to decide which ones are put up and where they go. Our guide for today’s episode is Archive Project editor and and producer, Matthew Workman. For a hands-on experience, join local nonfiction comic artist Shay Mirk for a free creative zine-making workshop on the monuments we need on May 9th and May 10th. Click here to learn more and register.

Jill Lepore is a Harvard professor and contributing writer to the New Yorker. Her books include The Secret History of Wonder Woman, New York Burning, These Truths: A History of the United States, and her latest, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution – and instant New York Times bestseller.   This year is the semi-quincentennial of the United States of America and, as Lepore points out, also the anniversary of constitutionalism.  There’s no better guide through American history than Jill Lepore, and it is a delight to spend an hour in civics class led by someone who readily references Mel Brooks and AI in a discussion about the Constitution. Lepore is interviewed by OPB’s Geoff Norcross, host of All Things Considered. They discuss Lepore’s Amendments Project, which catalogues all the amendments that have been proposed throughout history, and explore why it is so difficult to amend the Constitution and the story of how some of the amendments we do have (there are 27, including the 10 in the Bill of Rights) came to be. They talk about originalism and the pessimism of the framers, who believed that any man would be a tyrant if given power, and set up the checks and balances in our Constitution to give the legislature, the court, and the people – with the vote – the power to oust a tyrant.    A few notes to listeners just for clarity:   It’s mentioned “what is Congress doing right now,” this was during the November 2025 government shut down.  Jill is not in the room with the audience; Jill was unable to join us in Portland due to a last-minute travel issue (related to the shut down, frankly), but very gamely came in on video while Geoff Norcross and the audience were in the theater.   Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. As a wide-ranging and prolific essayist, and winner of the PEN prize for the Art of the Essay, Lepore writes about American history, law, literature, and politics. She is the author of many award-winning books, including the international bestseller, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). Her newest book is We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, which was published this September.  As one of the local hosts of OPB’s “All Things Considered,” Geoff Norcross shares local and regional stories to audiences of NPR’s flagship newsmagazine. Previously, Geoff was the host of OPB’s “Morning Edition” for 15 years. He was part of the team that built the program into one of the most listened-to presentations of “Morning Edition” in the country.

Each year, Portland youth spend months writing and competing in poetry slam competitions on high school campuses across the city. Each April, about 20 finalists compete for the title of city-wide Portland slam champ at Verselandia!, in front of an audience of nearly 1,000. The 2026 Verselandia! competition returns to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Thursday, April 30 at 7 pm. For more information and tickets visit our website literary-arts.org. On this episode, we go backstage at Verselandia! 2025 to talk to student poets as they wait to take the stage at the Schnitz, and then hear them perform.  We’ll also hear some poems from people competing in this year’s Verselandia!, and talk to them about their work. A quick note to listeners: Portions of this episode contain mature themes that may not be suitable for all audiences.