The Archive Project

The City of Portland is engaged in a national dialogue about public art, history, monuments, and memorials. With support from the Mellon Foundation, the Portland Monuments Project is a multi-year project with the goal of deciding on the future of seven monuments that were damaged, toppled, or removed following demonstrations in Portland in 2020-2021 by fostering public dialogue to reimagine and transform the purpose of monuments and memorials in Portland. This episode is part two of a three-part series as part of the Portland Monument Project. The first episode revisited the city’s past, part two will look at the present, and the culminating episode explores what may come to fruition in the future. Literary Arts is involved in this project because storytelling is at the heart of our mission, and monuments tell a story about who we were, who we are, what we value, and who we aspire to be. They tell stories about different communities and the stories they tell are dynamic, in so much as our community is changing, time is passing and the context for these fixed objects changes around them. In this episode, we’re tracing the path of a monument that went from a guerilla artwork, to a museum piece, and will soon be a monument again. Join us as we travel from the top of Mount Tabor to the mouth of the Columbia River to learn more about this particular monument and its subject – York the Explorer – from art curators, historians, and some nice people enjoying an afternoon in the park. Our guide for today’s episode is Archive Project editor and producer, Matthew Workman.

The City of Portland is engaged in a national dialogue about public art, history, monuments, and memorials. With support from the Mellon Foundation, the Portland Monuments Project is a multi-year project with the goal of deciding on the future of seven monuments that were damaged, toppled, or removed following demonstrations in Portland in 2020-2021 by fostering public dialogue to reimagine and transform the purpose of monuments and memorials in Portland. This episode is part one of a three-part series as part of the Portland Monument Project. This episode explores the city’s past, and part two will look at the present and the future. Literary Arts is involved in this project because storytelling is at the heart of our mission, and monuments tell a story about who we were, who we are, what we value, and who we aspire to be. They tell stories about different communities and the stories they tell are dynamic, in so much as our community is changing, time is passing and the context for these fixed objects changes around them. In this episode we’ll talk to the staff at the City’s Office of Arts and Culture who are leading this initiative, hear from experts, from historians, from passersby, and from other stakeholders who are questioning our past practices, and hope create change in how we, as a community choose our monuments – who gets to decide which ones are put up and where they go. Our guide for today’s episode is Archive Project editor and and producer, Matthew Workman. For a hands-on experience, join local nonfiction comic artist Shay Mirk for a free creative zine-making workshop on the monuments we need on May 9th and May 10th. Click here to learn more and register.

Each year, Portland youth spend months writing and competing in poetry slam competitions on high school campuses across the city. Each April, about 20 finalists compete for the title of city-wide Portland slam champ at Verselandia!, in front of an audience of nearly 1,000. The 2026 Verselandia! competition returns to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Thursday, April 30 at 7 pm. For more information and tickets visit our website literary-arts.org. On this episode, we go backstage at Verselandia! 2025 to talk to student poets as they wait to take the stage at the Schnitz, and then hear them perform. We’ll also hear some poems from people competing in this year’s Verselandia!, and talk to them about their work. A quick note to listeners: Portions of this episode contain mature themes that may not be suitable for all audiences.

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.

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!

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.

We’re back at the 2025 Portland Book Festival this week, with poets m. mick powell and Taylor Byas, and moderater Jae Nichelle. Taylor Byas’s second collection, Resting Bitch Face, uses watching and surveillance to explore Black female subjectivity. Byas engages with multiple art forms — painting, film, sculpture, and photographs – to explore the perspectives of artist and muse, of watcher and watched. Taylor is in conversation with m. mick powell, whose debut poetry collection Dead Girl Cameo: A Love Stroy in Poems features of chorus of pop stars – Aaliyah, Whitney Houston, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, and more – in an exploration of grief, sexuality, and celebrity. Powell refers to the collection as a documentary, and it includes imagery, speculative verse, and more. Poet Jae Nichelle leads a conversation that starts from the prompt “pop culture poetry.” Engaging with pop culture, as these collections do, is an act of engaging with the cultural moment. Done well, it doesn’t “date” the work, but creates a time capsule – a documentary. Both collections are deeply researched, and Taylor and mick discuss their relationships to art, scholarship, and commerce, and the interplay between those different aspects of publishing this particular collections. In the conversation, first we’ll hear m. mick powell read the title poem of their debut collection, Dead Girl Cameo, followed by a reading by Taylor Byas of the title poem of Resting Bitch Face and then a conversation between mick, Taylor, and the moderator, Jae. A heads up – there’s some mature language that may not be appropriate for all listeners, and you’ll hear some bleeps in the opening poem.   Taylor Byas is an award-winning poet and a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her poetry collection I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times won the Maya Angelou Book Award, the Ohioana Book Award, the CHIRBy Award, and the BCALA Best Poetry Honor. m mick powell is a queer Black Cabo Verdean femme, poet, artist, Aries, and the author of DEAD GIRL CAMEO (One World Books, 2025) and threesome in the last Toyota Celica & other circus tricks, winner of the 2023 Host Publications Chapbook Prize. An assistant professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut, mick enjoys chasing waterfalls and being in love. Louisiana-born Jae Nichelle (she/her) is the author of God Themselves (Andrews McMeel, 2023) and the chapbook The Porch (As Sanctuary) (YesYes Books, 2019). She was a finalist for a 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship and won the inaugural John Lewis Writing Award in poetry from the Georgia Writers Association. Her poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2020 (University of Virginia Press, 2020), the Washington Square Review, The Offing, Muzzle Magazine, and elsewhere. She believes in all of our collective ability to contribute to radical change.

In this episode, we feature two of Oregon’s most accomplished writers, Omar El Akkad and Karen Russell from a conversation that took place at the 2025 Portland Book Festival. They were joined onstage by Willamette Week‘s arts and culture editor Rachel Saslow for a conversation about the ongoing American reckoning of its violent past and present. Russell’s novel The Antidote is set in the Great Depression Dust Bowl in a fictional town in Nebraska and examines the history of the American colonialism and the violence it enacted. It is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities At the center of El Akkad’s book One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This is the present-day destruction and violence in Palestine, and the realization how much of the West’s moral promises are lies. The book is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage. At the time of the live event, both El Akkad and Russell were finalists for the National Book Awards in nonfiction and fiction respectively. El Akkad would go on to be given the award for nonfiction just a few weeks later, joining just a small handful of Oregonians ever to receive a national Book Award — including Ursula K Le Guin, William Stafford, Barry Lopez and Mary Szybist. A note to the listener this episode contains mature themes and discussions of violence that may not be suitable for all listeners. The Archive Project airs audio from live conversations and events, edited for length and clarity to better serve a listening audience. An earlier version of this episode omitted a portion of the conversation, as well as the audience Q&A. An extended edition is now available. Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager, and now lives in the United States. He is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and the Oregon Book Award for fiction. His books have been translated into thirteen languages. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of one hundred novels that shaped our world. His latest book is titled One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Karen Russell is the author of six works of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has received two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award, and was selected for the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” prize and The New Yorker‘s “20 under 40” list (She is now decisively over 40). She has taught literature and creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of California-Irvine, Williams College, Columbia University, and Bryn Mawr College, and was the Endowed Chair of Texas State’s MFA program. She serves on the board of Street Books, a mobile-library for people living outdoors. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, son, and daughter. Russell’s new book is titled The Antidote. Rachel Saslow is the arts and culture reporter at Willamette Week. She began her journalism career at the Washington City Paper in Washington, D.C., followed by a staff writer position at the Washington Post, where she wrote the Arts Beat column for the Style section. She now lives in her hometown of Portland, Ore., with her husband and their three children.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a discussion on late writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s legacy of pacifism and environmentalism. Our moderator is Theo Downes-Le Guin, Ursula’s son and literary executor. Theo is in conversation with Oregon-based writers Juhea Kim, author of the novel Beasts of a Little Land, a finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Michelle Ruiz Keil, author most recently of the young adult novel Summer in the City of Roses, which was a finalist for the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. In her speech at the 2014 National Book Awards, accepting the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, Ursula said: “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.” Juhea Kim and Michelle Ruiz Keil are two of those voices that we need now. In this conversation, Juhea and Michelle discuss how they came—and returned—to Le Guin’s work, her influence on their writing, and how they are carrying her legacy forward, including the responsibility of the artist as a humanitarian. This conversation was recorded in front of a live audience at Literary Arts on July 15, 2022. “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin Find your copy of these books through the Literary Arts Bookstore. Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) was a celebrated author whose body of work includes 23 novels, 12 volumes of short stories, 11 volumes of poetry, 13 children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, and SFWA’s Grand Master, along with the PEN/Malamud and many other awards. In 2014 she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2016 joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America. Michelle Ruiz Keil is an author, playwright, and tarot reader with an eye for the enchanted and way with animals. She is the author of the critically acclaimed young adult novels All of Us With Wings and Summer In The City of Roses. Her writing for adults can be found most recently in Bitch, Cosmonauts Avenue, and the anthology Dispatches From Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin. She is a 2021 Tin House Scholar and the recipient of residencies from Hedgebrook, The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and the Bloedel Reserve. Born in San Francisco, Michelle has lived in Portland, Oregon for many years where she curates the fairytale reading series All Kinds of Fur and lives with her family in a cottage where the forest meets the city. Juhea Kim is a writer, artist, and advocate based in Portland, Oregon. Her bestselling debut novel Beasts of a Little Land was named a finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and a Best Book of 2021 by Harper’s Bazaar, Real Simple, Ms., and Portland Monthly. Her writing has been published in Granta, Slice, The Massachusetts Review, Zyzzyva, Guernica, Catapult, Times Literary Supplement, The Independent, Sierra Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the founder and editor ofPeaceful Dumpling, an online magazine at the intersection of sustainable lifestyle and ecological literature. She has received fellowship support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Regional Arts & Culture Council, and Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. She earned her BA in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University.

This episode of The Archive Project features a lecture from Tommy Orange in Portland, Oregon. This lecture was the culminating event of the Multnomah County Library’s 2020 Everybody Reads program—an annual shared reading experience that includes city-wide events for readers of all ages. In his lecture, Orange details his experience as a Native American growing up and working in Oakland, California. He didn’t always want to be a writer, and he shares the twisting path that led him to this work. His debut novel, There There, is a winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. It was shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and named one of the best books of the year by numerous publications. There There—and Orange himself in this lecture—explores a multitude of themes, from identity and ownership to the urban-rural divide. Link to “Ghost Dance” short film referenced in Orange’s lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5plHAdBums Tommy Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland, California.

Angela Flournoy came to Portland for the 2025 Portland Book Festival, where she discussed her new novel The Wilderness in conversation with Renée Watson, award-winning author of skin & bones. The title of The Wilderness refers to what Flournoy describes as the true “coming of age” — instead of the transition out of adolescence, the decades from one’s twenties onward. The book revolves around four friends as they navigate those years, when you confront who you thought you might be as an adult, and what is actually happening in your life: your friendships, romances, success, grief, career, and so much more. The “found family” of long, deep friendship is the center of the book, and Flournoy and Watson discuss the constant choosing that creates and sustains a found family, the ongoing making and remaking that happens over decades of friendship. Angela Flournoy is the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, an Indie Next pick, and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, and she has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Flournoy has taught at the University of Iowa, Princeton University, and UCLA. She lives in New York. Flournoy’s latest novel is titled The Wilderness. Renée Watson is a #1 New York Times bestselling author. Over the past decade she has authored twenty books for young readers including Black Girl You Are Atlas and Cicely Tyson, which have collectively sold more than a million copies. She received a Coretta Scott King Award and a Newbery Honor for her novel Piecing Me Together and high praise for 1619 Project: Born on the Water, co-written with Nikole Hannah-Jones. Her debut adult novel, skin & bones, was published May 7th, 2024. Watson is on the Council of Writers for the National Writing Project and is a member of the Academy of American Poets’ Education Advisory Council. She splits her time between Portland, Oregon and New York City. Her latest middle grade title is All the Blues in the Sky.

Every once in a while, a writer arrives in a historic moment who can explain it, even while it is still actually occurring. M. Gessen is one of these writers. They are a part of the lineage of other incredible writers of their moments, like George Orwell, and Hannah Arendt. Gessen is the author of eleven books and has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 2014, and is a columnist for the New York Times. They won the National Book award in 2017 for The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, and became a household name with their bestselling book Surviving Autocracy, which was published in 2020 and written as both a warning and a call to action in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election. Gessen’s talk is a rare glimpse into their childhood and early professional life – growing up in the Soviet Union and emigrating at the age of 14; their early experience in Boston and how it shaped their life personally and professionally; their return to Moscow as a journalist and a rare and strange meeting with Vladimir Putin, and how their grandmothers’ life stories shaped their work. Gessen is one of the rare contemporary commentators on authoritarianism who has lived under such a regime, and in a democracy – and they have an urgent warning for us all. “I’ve always thought that I was very lucky to know when I had to leave (Russia) because one of the hardest decisions that somebody has to make…is figuring out when your home is no longer your home. It was kind of a great favor that Putin did to me.” M. Gessen is a Russian American author, translator, and journalist. They’ve written 11 books, including Surviving Autocracy, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction), and an award-winning account of the Boston Marathon bombers titled The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy. They spent years covering Putin’s regime in Russia and was famously dismissed as the editor of the Russian popular science magazine Vokrug sveta for refusing to cover a Putin event they felt was propaganda. Gessen received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, the Hitchens Prize, an Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary, and the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. They’ve written for many US publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker. Gessen is a distinguished professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College. They live in New York with their wife and children.