Reading can be solitary, so attending the Portland Book Festival offers social connection and likely mental health benefits. Nonprofit Literary Arts convenes writers, publishers, and readers at the Portland Art Museum and South Park Blocks each year to inaugurate the cozy reading season after summer. The event celebrates its 20th anniversary, tracing origins to Wordstock and a 2018 renaming. Attendees engage with writers across genres through talks and readings and often purchase many books to take home. Featured participants include poets and advocates such as Reginald Dwayne Betts, who founded Freedom Reads, and novelists like Omar El Akkad, who addresses contemporary political crises.
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,
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.
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