Singer-songwriter – and children’s book author – Ani DiFranco and Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Richard Powers will headline the Portland Book Festival.
More than 150 writers and artists will participate in the Nov. 2 festival, presented by Wells Fargo, in venues in and around Portland’s South Park Blocks. Festival organizer Literary Arts announced the lineup during a wine-and-cupcake reception Wednesday evening at what Executive Director Andrew Proctor called the organization’s “global headquarters, but only for a little while longer,” alluding to the nonprofit’s move this fall to a new, expanded space on Portland’s east side.
DiFranco is best known as a Grammy winner whose music roams from punk and funk to jazz and electronica. Her 2019 memoir, No Walls and the Recurring Dream, was a New York Times bestseller. What brings her to the book festival is her second children’s book, the timely Show Up and Vote, which her website calls an “age-appropriate call-to-action for all young citizens.”
Powers won the Pulitzer in 2019 for The Overstory, an eco-novel about the destruction of forests in which the characters are both nine people whose lives are connected to trees and the trees themselves. Barack Obama said of the book, “It changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it.” Powers’ new book, Playground, has been described as The Overstory set in the ocean. It is long-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize.
DiFranco and Powers will appear in individually ticketed events during the daylong festival.
Other authors scheduled to appear include poets Monica Youn and Danez Smith; poet Morgan Parker, who released her first collection of essays this year; Washington Post reporter Robert Samuels, co-author of the 2023 Pulitzer winner in general nonfiction, His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice; R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries, named a best book of the year by more than 40 publications; and Eugene native Rachel Kushner, whose new spy story, Creation Lake, “consolidates Kushner’s status as one of [the] finest novelists working in the English language,” writes the New York Times’ Dwight Garner. Andrew Child, who is taking over the Jack Reacher series from his brother Lee Child, will talk with OPB’s Dave Miller.
Local favorites appearing at the festival include Willy Vlautin, Kimberly King Parsons, Carson Ellis, Shayla Lawson, Chelsea Bieker, Waka T. Brown, Renée Watson, and Joe Wilkins.
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With nearly two months before the event, organizers noted that the lineup is more writ on water than set in stone, as authors continue to be added. The complete roster – as of today – is here.
The festival, originally called Wordstock, was started in 2005 by Oregon writer Larry Colton and acquired by Literary Arts in 2014, receiving its new name three years later. Tickets start at $18 in advance, with $5 Arts for All passes available to SNAP/Oregon Trail Card holders. Admission is free to veterans, people with an active military ID, and youth 17 and younger and those with an active high school ID. Appearances by DiFranco and Powers are ticketed separately.
With genres ranging from comics to cookbooks and subjects as diverse as Mosab Abu Toha’s poetry about life in Gaza to Mitchell S. Jackson’s fusion of basketball and fashion, the book-rich day promises to fulfill festival director Amanda Bullock’s closing words Wednesday: “We hope every kind of reader can find their story at the festival.”
