In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong from Portland Arts & Lectures in January 2022. Hong became nationally famous in the spring of 2020 for her essay collection Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, a book so searing and powerful it landed her on the cover of Time magazine’s 2021 issue featuring the 100 most influential people in the world.

Minor Feelings is a collection of seven essays is both a deeply personal account of Hong becoming—and being—an artist, and is also an account of her and her family’s experience as Korean Americans in this country. But she has emphasized that this is a book about America, not necessarily about being Asian. It is also a book infused with her sensibility as a poet, as someone who is fascinated with the endless mutability and power of language. Hong has published three acclaimed collections of poetry, and many listeners who know and have read Minor Feelings might be surprised to learn she primarily identifies as a poet not as an essayist.

The theme of her talk is “community and belonging” and she threads a narrative through pop culture, religion, autobiography, and 20th century history, in order to try to understand the rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans during the pandemic, and the broader discrimination so many Americans experience in their daily lives. That she does this with anger, humor, and tenderness speaks to her remarkable powers as a writer and speaker.

Cathy Park Hong is the author of three poetry collections and Minor Feelings, a New York Times bestselling book of creative nonfiction which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. Hong is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and other journals. She is the poetry editor of The New Republic and full professor at Rutgers University–Newark.

This week features a conversation on humor in fiction featuring two masters of the genre: Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Thingas 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.

Portland Book Festival has been a proud partner of the National Book Foundation Presents program for many years now, and at the 2025 festival we featured a program called “The Cost of Hope,” moderated by National Book Foundation executive director Ruth Dickey, and featuring 2024 National Book Award in Nonfiction winner Jason De Leon, author of Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling, and 2025 National Book Award finalist in Fiction Megha Majumdar, author of A Guardian and a Thief.

The intersections between Jason’s book, in which he embeds with a group of smugglers moving migrants across Mexico over the course of seven years, and Megha’s novel, about two families in a climate-ravaged near-future Kolkata, are abundant. In fact, the two authors share a background in anthropology, and talk about how that education has shaped the way they interpret the world.

Their wide-ranging conversation starts with a discussion of how hope can be “snarling and aggressive,” and idea of hope as a refusal to back down. They also talk about the ways both of their stories connect climate change and migration, and how inescapable that connection is. In different ways; for Jason, through reporting, and for Megha, through fiction, both books are able to interrogate huge systems through the individual lives, making these incomprehensible forces in the world legible by finding the storytelling.

This is a conversation between two artists thinking deeply about some of the most pressing issues of the day, and approaching them from places of care and, indeed, ultimately, from places of hope.

Jason De León is professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o Studies and Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also Executive Director of the Undocumented Migration Project, a 501(c)(3) research, arts, and education collective that seeks to raise awareness about migration issues globally while also assisting families of missing migrants reunite with their loved ones. He is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow and author of the award–winning books The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail and Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling, Winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Megha Majumdar is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel A Burning, which was Longlisted for the National Book Award, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and a finalist for the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. It was named one of the best books of the year by media including The Washington Post, the New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, Vogue, and TIME Magazine. A 2022 Whiting Award winner, she was born and raised in Kolkata, India, and holds degrees in Anthropology from Harvard and Johns Hopkins. She is the former Editor-in-Chief of Catapult Books, and lives in New York. A Guardian and A Thief is her second novel.

Ruth Dickey has spent 30 years working at the intersection of community building, writing, and art, and is the Executive Director of the National Book Foundation. The recipient of a Mayor’s Arts Award from Washington DC, and a grant from the DC Commission and Arts and Humanities, Ruth is the author of Our Hollowness Sings (Unicorn Press, 2024), and Mud Blooms (Harbor Mountain Press, 2019), and an ardent fan of dogs and coffee.

CW: The podcast version of this episode is uncensored and contains strong language. Listener discretion is advised!

Every year, the Multnomah County Library chooses one book they hope the whole city will read. Between January and April, the Library, and their partner organizations, host events based around the themes of the book, and they distribute thousands of free copies—thanks to the Library Foundation—to readers of all ages from across the county. At Literary Arts, our role is to bring the author to town for a talk in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.

The 2025 Everybody Reads book was the memoir Solito by Javier Zamora.

Written from the perspective of his nine-year-old self, Solito is a gripping and beautiful account of Zamora’s three-thousand-mile journey from a small village in El Salvador to his new home in United States. Epic in scope and intimate in detail, it’s a book about the family one comes from, the family one longs for, and the family one makes. Zamora conjures all the wonder, fear and imaginative capacity of his young self; clear-eyed in his depictions of cruelty and danger, insistent on recognizing kindness. He also renders his journey with vivid detail with breathtaking lyricism, paying close attention to the power of language – this comes as no surprise, given that Zamora is also an award-winning poet.

The writer Sandra Cisneros said, “I have waited decades for a memoir like Solito.”

But, Solito isn’t simply a story of a migrant’s harrowing journey, it’s the story of a writer becoming a writer. It is also one of the most important American stories of our time.

“Poetry and history were the first tools I had to begin to explain my life so far away from the land that watched me be born and grow up for the first nine years of my life.”

Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador in 1990. When he was a year old, his father fled El Salvador due to the US-funded Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992). His mother followed her husband’s footsteps in 1995 when Javier was about to turn five. Zamora was left at the care of his grandparents who helped raise him until he migrated to the US when he was nine. His first poetry collection, Unaccompanied, explores some of these themes.

In his debut New York Times bestselling memoir, SOLITO, Javier retells his nine-week odyssey across Guatemala, Mexico, and eventually through the Sonoran Desert. He travelled unaccompanied by boat, bus, and foot. After a coyote abandoned his group in Oaxaca, Javier managed to make it to Arizona with the aid of other migrants.

Zamora is the winner of a 2024 Whiting Fellowship and the 2022 LA Times-Christopher Isherwood Prize. He holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University (Olive B. O’Connor), MacDowell, Macondo, the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Foundation (Ruth Lilly), Stanford University (Stegner), and Yaddo. He is the recipient of a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University, a 2017 Lannan Literary Fellowship, the 2017 Narrative Prize, the 2016 Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award for his work in the Undocupoets Campaign.

Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, three short story collections and several works of nonfiction. He has written countless articles, plays, an opera libretto and a collection of poetry, and been a finalist for the Booker Prize multiple times

He is perhaps best known for his novel Brooklyn, which was made into a movie that was nominated for three Oscars. Set in the middle of the 20th century, Brooklyn is about Eilis Lacey who leaves her small town in Ireland for New York. After building a life there, she is drawn back home and has to choose where she wants to forge her future.

Tóibín opens his lecture with the moment of his father’s wake in his childhood home in which he hears, as a child, the real life story that would later inspire his character of Elis Lacey. From there, Tóibín’s talk is a captivating story of all of his stories, and a kind of master class for writing a novel. He is a writer known for rendering the quiet intimacies between characters, revealing powerful emotional undercurrents and their deep longings. He is a writer who makes you care about the tiny details of a life – the buttons on a coat or the emotional reverberations of a silence. In this talk, he illuminates his craft, and pulls the curtain back on how his own life shaped his most famous novels.

Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including Long Island, an Oprah’s Book Club Pick; The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; and Nora Webster; as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and was named the 2022–2024 Laureate for Irish Fiction by the Arts Council of Ireland. He was shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize. He was also awarded the Bodley Medal, the Würth Prize for European Literature, and the Prix Femina spécial for his body of work.

In 2016 Tara Roberts was living in Washington DC feeling, in a new way, the deep fractures in America, including the way we understand our history. She felt called to be part of trying to heal these divisions. It was a chance encounter with a photograph at the National Museum of African American History and Culture that changed the trajectory of her life. It was of a group of Black women on a boat in diving gear who she quickly discovered were from an organization called Diving with a Purpose, an underwater archeology group with a mission to discover and document the wreckage of slave ships scattered on the ocean floor around the world, and by doing so recover a crucial part of history.

Roberts soon quit her job and joined the group to document their work, learning to scuba dive in order to do so. She turned that journey into an award-winning National Geographic-produced podcast called “Into the Depths” and became the first Black female explorer ever to be featured on the cover of National Geographic Magazine. This work also resulted in a memoir Written in the Waters which both invites us into the fascinating and groundbreaking work below the surface of the Ocean around the globe, and her own personal transformation.

Roberts has travelled the world as a diver, backpacker, and adventurer, bringing to this conversation a global view of history and culture, and a devotion to tell the stories that can bring us together. She is currently Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society.

Here’s Tara Roberts in conversation with Shayna Schlosberg from the 2025 Portland Book Festival, on Literary Arts, the Archive Project.

Tara Roberts spent the last six years following, diving with, and telling stories about Black scuba divers as they searched for and helped document slave shipwrecks around the world. Her journey was turned into an award-winning National Geographic-produced podcast called “Into the Depths” and featured in the March issue of National Geographic magazine. Tara became the first Black female explorer ever to be featured on the cover of Nat Geo. In 2022, Tara was named the Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year. Currently, she is an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. And her book Written in the Waters: A Memoir of History, Home and Belonging hits stands in January 2025.

Tara also worked as an editor for magazines like CosmoGirl, Essence, EBONY and Heart & Soul and edited several books for girls. She was a Fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab. She founded her own magazine for women who are ‘too bold for boundaries..’ And Tara spent an amazing year backpacking around the world to find and tell stories about young women change agents. The journey led to the creation of a nonprofit that supported and funded their big ideas.

Shayna Schlosberg is the Vice President of Community Connections at OPB and KMHD, where she leads initiatives to ensure that both organizations authentically reflect and serve the diverse communities of the Pacific Northwest. In this role, she shapes and drives the strategy, vision, and implementation of community representation and inclusion across all aspects of OPB and KMHD’s work.

Shayna joined OPB and KMHD in 2022. Prior to that, she was the Director of Operations and Strategy at Women of Color in the Arts, a national service organization committed to advancing racial and cultural equity in the performing arts. From 2017 to 2021, she served as Managing Director of The Catastrophic Theatre, an acclaimed experimental theater company in Houston, Texas. Before that, she was Associate General Manager at the Alley Theatre, where she played a key role in expanding the theater’s international programming, particularly through partnerships with Latin American artists and companies.

Shayna’s expertise has been recognized nationally—she has served on grant panels for the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a graduate of several leadership programs, including the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture’s Advocacy Leadership Institute, Women of Color in the Arts’ Leadership Through Mentorship program, and the 2020 New Leaders Council Fellowship. She was also a founding advisory committee member of the Houston BIPOC Arts Network Fund, a groundbreaking effort born out of the Ford Foundation’s America’s Cultural Treasures initiative.

Shayna served in the Peace Corps in Armenia from 2010 to 2012.

Baldwin was key figure in the American civil rights movement of the last 1960s, and he is one of our most important American writers. Author of the novels If Beale Street Could Talk, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and Giovanni’s Room, he was also an essayist, poet, and playwright. Baldwin’s influence continues to grow, but even if you’ve never read a word James Baldwin has written – first, you should – you will find something to treasure in this conversation.

Boggs’s biography centers on the artistic and intimate relationships that informed Baldwin’s life and work. Douglas Brinkley, author of Rosa Parks: A Life, said “Nicholas Boggs’s meticulously researched and passionately written Baldwin is the crown jewel of the ongoing James Baldwin revival. … this epic biography captures Baldwin in full.”

Our interviewer is Mitchell S. Jackson, author of The Residue Years, Survival Math, and a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. Jackson is one of the best interviewers — I genuinely think he should have his own talk show — and he brings so much care and curiosity to the conversation.

We start with a passage from the audiobook, which is published by Macmillan Audio and read by Ron Butler.

Nicholas Boggs is a writer and independent scholar, born and raised in Washington, DC, now living in Brooklyn, New York. He rediscovered and coedited a new edition of James Baldwin’s out-of-print collaboration with the French artist Yoran Cazac, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (2018), and his writing has been anthologized in The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin. He received his BA in English from Yale, his MFA in creative writing from American University, and his PhD in English from Columbia. Baldwin: A Love Story is Nicholas Boggs’ debut novel.

Mitchell S. Jackson is the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and the 2021 National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. Jackson is the critically acclaimed author of The Residue Years, Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family, Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion, and John of Watts (to be published soon). His writing has been featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, Time, Esquire, and Marie Claire, as well as in The New Yorker, Harpers, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Jackson’s nonfiction book Survival Math was published in 2019 and named a best book of the year by fifteen publications, including NPR, Time, The Paris Review, The Root, Kirkus Reviews, and Buzzfeed. Jackson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, covers race and culture as the first Black columnist in the history of Esquire, and serves as the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professor in the English Department of Arizona State University.