Literary Arts

Abraham Verghese is a physician, writer, tenured professor, and senior associate chair for the theory and practice of medicine at Stanford University. Verghese’s first book, My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story, was inspired by his early years practicing medicine as an orderly, taking care of terminal AIDs patients. The book...

Timothy Egan is an American journalist and author of ten books. The most recent, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, was an immediate New York Times bestseller. Egan worked for The New York Times for 18...

Masha Gessen is a Russian American author, activist, translator, and journalist. They’ve written 11 books, including Surviving Autocracy, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaiming Russia (winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction). They’ve written for many US publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The...

In partnership with Multnomah County Library and the Library Foundation, Literary Arts is proud to host an evening with Javier Zamora as the culminating event of the Library’s Everybody Reads program. This year’s selection is Zamora’s memoir, Solito. Everybody Reads is an annual community-wide project that promotes shared reading and...

Emily Wilson is a classicist, translator, professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of the bestselling translations of Homer’s The Odyssey and The Iliad (winner of the 2024 Audie Award for Best Literary Fiction and Classics). In addition to Wilson’s translated works, her other books...

The Oregon Book Awards program honors the state’s finest accomplishments by Oregon writers who work in the genres of poetry, fiction, graphic literature, drama, literary nonfiction, and literature for young readers. The finalists for the 2025 Oregon Book Awards will be announced in January 2025, and the winners will be...