Big themes swirled in thoughtful, even intimate, conversations Saturday at the sold-out Portland Book Festival.

Headliner Rebecca Yarros talked about how her work centers on themes of inclusion, representation, and authoritarianism, as well as about what it’s been like to ride a huge wave of book sales that has altered the publishing industry in some ways.

Nicholas Boggs and Mitchell S. Jackson mused about love and the creative process.

Omar El Akkad and Karen Russell grappled with chickens coming home to roost in the aptly titled panel “American Reckoning,” moderated by Rachel Saslow.

Jason De León and Megha Majumdar explored “The Cost of Hope” in a panel sponsored by the National Book Foundation and moderated by the foundation’s executive director, Ruth Dickey. 

Rebecca Yarros: Onyx Storm

Rebecca Yarros, author of the mega-selling romantasy Empyrean series about young-adult dragon riders, was unquestionably the draw of this year’s festival. Her 10 a.m. appearance with Portland fantasy writer Laini Taylor sold out in a flash. As she walked onstage at Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, the audience of mostly young women, many wearing Empyrean-inspired merch, erupted in a sustained scream. 

When Yarros said, “Give me a cheer if this is your first Portland Book Festival,” she got a big response. Another cheer came when, referring to being the mother of a University of Oregon freshman, she promised, “You’re gonna see a lot of me the next four years.” 

Sponsor

Yarros was officially at the festival to discuss Onyx Storm, the recently released third title in her series. But she and Taylor also touched on how she started writing (to get through anxious nights while her husband was deployed overseas); how the series addresses erasure of history, diversity and inclusion, border politics and sexual consent; and how her books’ sales have opened a space in publishing for what’s now called “new adult,” defined as ages 18 to 25. She enjoys young adult fantasy but, she added mischievously, she also likes sex. (Cue more cheers.)

Yarros’ book sales have also helped drive a current publishing industry trend: sprayed edges. After her publisher started releasing special editions of her books with illustrations and colors on the outside edges of the pages, sprayed edges began appearing more frequently.

Yarros is still stunned by the massive popularity of the series, she said. “My dream was to, like, hit The New York Times once so I could look at my mother and say, see?” She had thought that her 2019 romance, The Last Letter, which was well received by critics, would be her breakthrough. When she wrote the first Empyrean book, Fourth Wing, she was thinking of giving up. Then her editor said, “I think you gave me the next Hunger Games.” Since Fourth Wing came out in 2023, it has sold more than 2 million copies and has been translated into 30 languages.

Yarros is by no means done with the series, as Onyx Storm ended with a surprise twist. She said she’s now plotting Book Four and Book Five. She also teased the audience, saying she’d just gotten some very big news but couldn’t share it yet. While fans wait for the next book and whatever that news is, she urged them to spread the wealth and read other fantasy authors. 

Nicholas Boggs: Baldwin: A Love Story

When New York author Nicholas Boggs was a child, he recalled, he saw a photo of James Baldwin and was immediately taken by his eyes. Years later, he began his biography of the iconic author, Baldwin: A Love Story, by describing how a young Baldwin also became transfixed by a pair of eyes: those of actress Bette Davis, which resembled his.

Baldwin’s father had long called him ugly because of his eyes. Seeing them in a movie star’s face helped Baldwin realize his father’s opinion might be worthless. “This journey to self-love is what the book is about,” Boggs said at the start of his hourlong appearance. 

Boggs and Mitchell S. Jackson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who grew up in Portland, went on to discuss Baldwin’s relationships: with art, language, Black nationalism and, of course, his fellow humans. Boggs said he wanted to push back against narrower depictions of Baldwin, especially as a tragic figure: “The source of his genius was not suffering but his interest in connecting with other people.”

Sponsor

To that end, Boggs structured his 700-page biography around Baldwin’s “four great loves,” the first of whom was the painter Beauford Delaney. He became a “spiritual father” to Baldwin, showing him that a Black man could be an artist and teaching him about the act of looking. “Baldwin always saw himself as an artist,” Boggs said.

Within that identity, Baldwin contained much. He was a writer who pivoted with ease among novels, essays, plays, and poems. He was what he termed a “witness” to the civil rights movement, calling whiteness a moral decision and pushing the Kennedy Administration into a stronger stance on civil rights, Boggs said.

For all of Baldwin’s passion for connecting with others through his writing and activism, he seemed to seek out relationships with stark inequalities, such as in age or emotional or geographic availability, Jackson noted. Boggs agreed: “I think he was drawn to the impossible relationships,” including the ultimate impossible relationship, that of a Black man with America. He could transmute those relationships into his writing, Boggs said. He’d take something negative and curate something beautiful out of it.

Omar El Akkad & Karen Russell

At first glance, Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This and Karen Russell’s The Antidote might seem an odd pairing. True, both books are 2025 National Book Award finalists and both are by Oregon writers. But El Akkad’s nonfiction book is a searing reflection on the Israel-Hamas war, while Russell’s novel is a Wizard of Oz-esque Dust Bowl story about entangled fates and “omissions of memory.”

Ah, but themes of denial, complicity, apathy, occupation, and collapse pulse through both books, as moderator Rachel Saslow, Willamette Week’s arts and culture reporter, deftly teased out in the “American Reckoning” panel. 

Take Russell’s title character, a witch who earns her living as a human vault, “storing things people can’t bear to know.” The consequences of these “strategic attacks on memory” come back to haunt the residents of her fictional Nebraska town. 

El Akkad described his book as “trying to figure out what it means to live in the U.S. amid two years of genocide,” all the while knowing his tax dollars are playing a key part. He added later that it’s easy for him to support nonviolent resistance when he’s “on the launching side of the missiles.” 

Sponsor

The panel also discussed the power of narrative. In answer to a question about how being parents influenced the authors, Russell said that as she wrote about the seizure of Pawnee homelands by white settlers, she could understand “how you could tell yourself the story: I came here to give my children a horizon, and it’s going to be predicated on taking away a horizon from other people’s children.” 

El Akkad, whose personal history spans two Middle Eastern and two Western nations, said he’s “constantly thinking in narrative,” especially when it comes to power and weakness. Systems that rely on exploitation or physical violence need the support of linguistic and narrative violence, such as that the people from whom we want something just happen to be irreconcilable savages. “If you wrap it up in enough narrative,” he said, “you can get away with anything.” 

Jason De León & Megha Majumdar

If the National Book Foundation hosts a panel, make time for it. Those who stuck around for the 5 p.m. session with Jason De León and Megha Majumdar got a thought-provoking conversation about hope as complex, powerful, and “snarling.” Both authors drew on training in anthropology to, as Dickey put it, “write human stories across borders and genres” — De León’s Soldiers and Kings is nonfiction and Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief is fiction.

Majumdar’s novel (a 2025 National Book Award finalist) is set in her birthplace of Kolkata, India, and was inspired by news reports about the effects of climate change there. What struck her, she said, were residents’ declarations of hope. But, she thought, “what if my hope clashes with the hope of others?” In her novel, that’s what happens to two families each seeking to protect their children amid a food shortage.

De León’s book (a 2024 National Book Award winner) is the result of several years he spent with young men who eke out a living by guiding others from Honduras to Mexico, with the ultimate goal of crossing the U.S. border. He wrote the book from a first-person perspective. “I did not intend to become a character in the book,” he said, “but those guys changed me … in more ways than I can count.” 

Among the themes the panel tackled were the impact of climate change, the impossible choices that capitalism forces, and the deception that sometimes goes hand in hand with hope. 

De León said that when he talked about the intersection of migration and climate change 15 years ago, he was accused of being overly liberal. Now it’s clear that when people experience catastrophes such as the major hurricanes that hit Honduras back to back in 2020, they will migrate. Majumdar said that raises questions about which places will be the safe havens. “What will we do when these questions of escape come up?” 

Sponsor

As for capitalism, De León said, “You can’t talk about migration without talking about capitalism.” He called human smuggling a “service industry” that American consumers benefit from daily. Majumdar said fiction allows her to take a moral question, such as what is the right way to live in a capitalist society, and push it to an extreme.

Dickey closed the discussion with a question about the role of deception in the books. In Majumdar’s novel, that happens most notably in phone calls between the mother and her husband, who is in America waiting for his family. Her lies, Majumdar said, are “modes of love, gifts of assurances.” In De León’s book, deception takes the form of revealing things gradually to the reader for effect: “You don’t have to know everything all at once.”