Portland Book Events: February 13-19

From what we could find (please contact us if you have an event you would like us to add to this or future schedules), the local book events for the week of February 13, 2010 through February 19, 2010 are:

Saturday February 13-

Sweethearts Bazaar (Cosmic Monkey Comics, @12:00pm): Come down and check out creative work from Portland artists Sean Christensen, Katy Ellis O’Brien, Alicia Moreland, Andrice Arp, Theo Ellsworth, Amy Kuttab, Stumptown Underground, and more!  You’ll find romance inspiring creations like the hand-dyed vintage slips, prints of anthropomorphic animal characters, buttons, ninja turtle fantasies, octopus wallets, and all kinds of zines from the featured artists — all at affordable prices for your last minute, gift giving budget! We’ll have all these arts and crafts set up on tables around Cosmic Monkey Comic’s spacious store.

Paul Flores (Milagro Theatre, @2:00pm): Paul Flores, hip-hop poet and actor from San Francisco, has been in Portland since early February for workshops with the Spanish English International School (SEIS) at Roosevelt High School. Raised on the Tijuana/San Diego border, issues of immigration, border experience and Latino identity are central to Flores’ work, and he is recognized as a trailblazer in new Latino performance arts as both an artist and producer. His residency program will culminate in a bilingual spoken-word presentation at Milagro Theatre that features Flores’ writing as well as selected original work by SEIS students.

Author Reading: They All Sound Like Love Songs, Women Healing Israeli-Palestinian Relations (In Other Words Women’s Books & Resources, @2:00pm): The book consists of an introduction, and 14 poems which were written in response to my participation in the Joint Venture for Peace. The poems are short, and focus on healing, connecting and meeting the other. They describe real interactions between women that took place over a two day gathering in Beer Sheva, Israeal. The book is beautifully illustrated by Einat Ben Shalom. Brief Bio of Author: Yvette Nahmia-Messinas is the co-founder of ECOWEEK and a participant in the Joint Venture for Peace, a Venture that brings Israeli and Palestinian women together to co-create businesses and peace.

Wine & Chocolate Party (Writers’ Dojo, @6:00pm): Celebrate Valentine’s and The Chinese New Year. Please join us for music and laughs among Dojo members and friends. Sponsored by CH Wine and Moonstruck Chocolate.

“For Your Pleasure” Release Party and Film Night (Floating World Comics, @6:00pm): “For Your Pleasure” is the sixth monthly anthology from Stumptown Underground, centralized around the theme of sex.. In this issue, you’ll find comics, writing, and illustrations from the likes of Acey Thompson, Sean Christensen, Hazel Newlevant, Tonya Jones, John Landolfe, Christina “Blue” Crow, James Michael Williams, Dylan Williams, and many more.  The release party for “For Your Pleasure” will be a joint venture between Stumptown Underground and local animators and film makers Carolyn Main, Los Moustachios and others with independent shorts all themed around sex.

Sunday February 14-

Hillary Manton Lodge (Powells Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, @2:00pm): With Plain Jayne (Harvest House), Hillary Manton Lodge brings a new twist to the popular Amish novel. Jayne Tate loves her fast-paced life in the big city, working as a newspaper reporter. When her father dies and she loses out on the big career opportunity she was hoping for, she seeks solace in Oregon’s Amish country. Publishers Weekly cheers, “Smart, fast-paced and chock-full of endearing characters, Lodge’s entry into inspirational fiction is a keeper, plain and simple.”

Portland Poetry Slam featuring Karen Finneyfrock (Backspace, @7:30pm): Our Valentine’s Day spectacular featuring Karen Finneyfrock. There will also be an open slam with some of PDX’s finest poets battling it out for $50. Sign ups @ 7:30pm. Karen Finneyfrock is a writer and teaching artist living in Seattle, WA. As a member of three National Poetry Slam Teams, Karen was published in two poetry slam anthologies created by Poetry Slam Inc. and honored as a “Legend” at the National Poetry Slam in Austin, 2006. She has toured nationally as a Spoken Word Artist and authored one full-length book of poems titled “Welcome to the Butterfly House” (en theos press, 2004). Her new chapbook is called, “When the Squirrels Came for Her, She was Already Dressed and Waiting.” A recent alumna of Hedgebrook writers’ colony, Karen’s recently completed book of young adult fiction is titled “Celia, the Dark and Weird.” She is a Writer-in-Residence at Richard Hugo House in Seattle and her new book of poems is forthcoming from Write Bloody Press in February, 2010.

Monday February 15-

The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050 (Powells City of Books, @7:30pm): In The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050 (Penguin), visionary social thinker Joel Kotkin looks ahead to America in 2050, revealing how the addition of 100 million Americans by midcentury will transform American families, towns, and industries. “A fascinating glimpse into a crystal ball, rich in implications that are alternately disturbing and exhilarating,” declares Kirkus Reviews. This event is co-sponsored by Bright Lights, a city-design discussion series presented by Portland Spaces and the City Club of Portland.

PSU MFA Monday Night Lecture Series Features: Barry Sanders (Portland State, Shattuck Hall Annex, @7:30pm): Barry Sanders will lecture about his work! The public is invited (its free, tell your friends).

Tuesday February 16-

Penelope Scambly Schott and Henry Hughes (Broadway Books, @7:00pm): Two of Oregon’s most respected poets, Penelope Scambly Schott and Henry Hughes, will be with us tonight to read from new books. Henry Hughes will present his new collection, Moist Meridian (Mammoth Books). It’s a daring mix of savagery and civilization, eros and wit that show us the growing range and depth of this accomplished writer. Henry teaches at Western Oregon University. His first collection, Men Holding Eggs, received the 2004 Oregon Book Award. Penelope Scambly Schott, also a winner of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry, will be reading from her new book Six Lips (Mayapple). In this collection, the speaker instructs her lover, thinks about what animal she might become in her next life, discusses having one tail, two vaginas, three ears, and so forth, all the time chronicling her mother’s decline. “Nimble and tender, sensuous and biting, deliciously daring, and always grounded in felt experience….Six Lips is one of the strongest, most inventive books I’ve read in years.” –Ingrid Wendt

The Naughty List (Powells Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, @7:00pm): In Suzanne Young’s new young adult novel, The Naughty List (Razorbill), Tessa Crimson is the sweet and spunky leader of the SOS (Society of Smitten Kittens), a cheer squad-turned-spy society dedicated to bringing dastardly boyfriends to justice, one cheater at a time. When Tessa’s own boyfriend shows up on the List, she turns her sleuthing skills on him. Is Aiden just as naughty as all the rest, or will Tessa’s sneaky ways end in catastrophe?

And&Review Release Party (Tiga Bar, @7:30pm): Mia Nolting and Rachel Peddersen present and&review, an arts publication based in Portland, Oregon that shares work from local and international artists and writers. A compilation of work that loosely adheres to a chosen theme for each issue, showing both contemporary trends in art-making as well as work from the past.

Kim Stafford Musical Performance & Reading (Annie Blooms Books, @7:30pm): Oregon essayist, poet, and singer-songwriter Kim Stafford will be performing songs from his new CD, Pilgrim at Home: Vagabond Songs. These songs celebrate encounters by the road—with a witness in New Orleans, a lonesome woman at the Kaupo Store, the family of three lost boys in Rasharkin, a homeless saint in Portland, and other precious strangers. Kim is accompanied on the album by Jan DeWeese and Harriet Wingard.

Wednesday February 17-

Writers Talking: Bonnie Jo Campbell (Central Library, @6:00pm): Bonnie Jo Campbell’s energy and biting wit make her work both brutal and laugh out-loud funny. All is weird, immediate and raw in Campbell’s stories and poems. Bonnie Jo Campbell’s new story collection, American Salvage, was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award. She is also the author of the novel Q Road, and the story collection Women & Other Animals. She has won the AWP award for short fiction, the 2008 Eudora Welty fiction prize, and a Pushcart prize, and she was named a Barnes & Noble Great New Writer. The New York Times has called her stories “Bitter but sweetened by humor,” and Publisher’s Weekly said Campbell details, “domestic worlds where Martha Stewart would fear to tread.”

Death Magazine Launch Party (Reading Frenzy, @7:00pm): Fresh from his Portland Stock victory, Forrest Martin will launch his new magazine tonight at Reading Frenzy! Death magazine isn’t simply reports of human mortality, but perspectives on how death arranges, enhances or obfuscates life – at times metaphorically, at times not. In a bed, on the train, at a computer, at the mall; we all have daily relationships with it. Alongside every overlooked gesture, death is the shadow reality reminding us, “this isn’t going to last forever.” Free beer from Ninkasi!

Figures of Speech featuring Daniel Skatch-Mills and Anne Jennings Paris (100th Monkey Studio, @7:00pm): Daniel Skach-Mills award-winning poetry has appeared in a variety of publications and anthologies, including: The Christian Science Monitor; The Christian Century; Sojourners; Open Spaces; and Prayers To Protest: Poems That Center And Bless Us (Pudding House Publications, 1998). His chapbook, Gold: Daniel Skach-Mills’ Greatest Hits, 1990-2000 appeared in 2001 from Pudding House; and a full-length collection, The Tao of Now, (Ken Arnold Books, 2008) was recently cited as one of the 150 outstanding Oregon poetry books.

Anne Jennings Paris is a writer and visual artist living and working in Oregon City. She has an MFA in creative writing from San Jose State University and a BA in English Literarture from Wesleyan University. Anne’s first book, a collection of historic, narrative poetry entitled Killing George Washington, was just released by Ooligan Press. Anne’s work–both her painting and her writing–explores the intersection of natural history and popular culture. Anne currently teaches grades 3-12 at Alliance Charter Academy in Oregon City.

Ralph Ellison Book Release and Reading (Lewis & Clark College, Agnes Flanagan Chapel, @7:30pm): At his death in 1994, Ralph Ellison left behind roughly two thousand pages of his unfinished second novel, which he had spent nearly four decades writing. Long awaited, it was to have been the work Ellison intended to follow his masterpiece, “Invisible Man.”

In order to bring “Three Days Before the Shooting…” to life, John Callahan, the literary executor for Ellison’s estate, enlisted the help of Adam Bradley. A former student of Callahan’s, Bradley is now a professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Together, Callahan and Bradley sorted through Ellison’s collected notes, files, and manuscript pages. A profile in The Washington Post details Callahan and Bradley’s collaboration as they edited the posthumous novel, released January 2010.

Mountain Writers Series featuring Barbara Drake and Bill Siverly (The Press Club, @7:30pm, Suggested Donation $5): Barbara Drake‘s most recent book of poetry, Driving One Hundred, was published in 2009 by Windfall Press. Other books of poetry include What We Say to Strangers, Love at the Egyptian Theatre, Life in a Gothic Novel, Bees in Wet Weather, and Small Favors. She is also the author of Writing Poetry, widely used as a college textbook, and Peace at Heart: an Oregon Country Life, a memoir, which was an Oregon Book Award finalist in 1999.

Bill Siverly has published three books of poems:  Parzival (1981), Phoenix Fire (1987), and The Turn (2000). He taught literature, composition, and creative writing at Portland Community College for twenty-five years. Since 2002 he has been co-editor with Michael McDowell of Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place, which features poetry of the Pacific Northwest and appears twice yearly on the equinoxes. His most recent book of poems, Clearwater Way, was published by Traprock Books in August 2009.

Thursday February 18-

Diane Jacobs (A Children’s Place Bookstore, @4:00pm): Illustrator Diane Jacobs will read, sign, and discuss Grappling with the Grumblies. Everyone grapples with the grumblies from time to time, but this lovely (and funny!) book will help your child—and you—discover new ways of dealing with difficult feelings.

Visiting Writers Series: Jon Raymond (Reed College, Psychology 105, @6:30pm): Jon Raymond is the author of The Half-Life, a novel, and Livability, a collection of short stories named as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick for Spring 2009. He is an editor at Plazm magazine and his writing has appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, Tin House, and The Village Voice, among other publications. For more information, visit the Visiting Writers website.

VoiceCatcher 4 Reading (Looking Glass Bookstore, @7:00pm): VoiceCatcher 4 editors and contributors invite you to celebrate the diverse voices of local women writers reading new poetry and prose selections from the latest annual anthology. Readers include: Ariel Frager, Amy Katz, Carolyn Martin, Alida Rol, Cecilie Scott, and JS Nahani. VoiceCatcher is a non-profit collective offering both experienced and emerging writers the venue to publish their work and receive respectful feedback.

Darlene Pagán (Paper Tiger Coffee House-Vancouver, @7:00pm): Darlene Pagán is a writer and educator, mother and wife, scholar and activist, whose poems have appeared, or are forthcoming in Hiram Poetry Review, Two Review: An International Journal of Poetry and Creative Nonfiction, Willow Springs, The Birmingham Poetry Review, and VoiceCatcher. Her essays have appeared in The Nebraska Review, Literal Latté, and Mother Writer’s Literary Magazine. Her hobbies include playing troll in the Billie Goats Gruff and looking for worms in the rain with her two toddler boys. She has just completed her first book of poems, titled Something’s Liable to Break, and is already at work on another.

Dana Stabenow (Powells Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, @7:00pm): A Night Too Dark (Minotaur) is the 17th book in New York Times-bestselling author Dana Stabenow’s series chronicling life, death, love, tragedy, mischief, controversy, nature, and survival in Alaska — America’s last real frontier. This time, smart, sexy P.I. Kate Shugak, her wolf/husky hybrid Mutt, and Chopper Jim are only just beginning to realize the fallout from the discovery of the world’s second-largest gold mine in their backyard. Publishers Weekly proclaims, “Stabenow deftly explores the environmental and economic impact of gold mining in her sizzling 17th novel.”

Crossing the Gates of Alaska (Powell’s Books on Hawthorne, @7:30pm): In the spirit of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, seasoned wilderness survivalist Dave Metz takes on Alaska’s backcountry in his most daring trek to date. Crossing the Gates of Alaska: One Man, Two Dogs, 600 Miles on the Map (Citadel) is Metz’s inspiring account of survival on a death-defying trek across the perilous Alaskan Arctic.

Binford Reading Series presents Debra Spark (Marylhurst University, Villa Maria, @7:30pm): Fiction writer Debra Spark will read from her latest novel. Spark teaches creative writing at Colby College in Maine and is an award-winning author of three novels: Coconuts for the Saint, The Ghost of Bridgetown, and Good for the Jews. She’s also published a book of craft essays, titled, Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing.

Visiting Writers Series: Bonnie Jo Campbell (Pacific University, Taylor Auditorium, @7:30pm): A prize-winning poet and novelist, Bonnie Jo Campbell’s energy and biting wit make her work laugh out-loud funny and dazzling. Campbell is the author of the novel Q Road, and the story collection Women & Other Animals. Her second story collection, American Salvage was published to acclaim in the Spring of 2009 and has been nominated for a National Book Award. She has won the AWP award for short fiction and a Pushcart prize, and she was named a Barnes & Noble Great New Writer. The New York Times has called her stories “Bitter, but sweetened by humor,” and Publisher’s Weekly said Campbell details, “domestic worlds where Martha Stewart would fear to tread.”

Friday February 19-

Mapping History: How Narrative Nonfiction Brings the Past Alive (PSU, Smith Memorial Student Union, Room 298, @11:00am): What is narrative nonfiction? How does it differ from other literature? How do writers use it to bring history alive? In this public conversation, award-winning author Paul Collins will discuss how various authors use narrative nonfiction to animate works like The Ghost Map. Collins, a professor at Portland State, is the author of five books and regularly appears on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday as their “literary detective.”

Young Writers’ Workshop (Powells Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, @4:30pm): Children’s authors Rosanne Parry (Heart of a Shepherd), Fran Cannon Slayton (When the Whistle Blows), and Edith M. Hemingway (Road to Tater Hill) demonstrate how writers can help make each other’s writing stronger in a workshop titled An Inside Look at Story Critique: How Writers Help Other Writers. Writers of all ages are invited. Observe, ask questions, share ideas, or bring the first page of something you’ve written and receive friendly suggestions.

Exploring History through Poetry with Allison Cobb and Kaia Sand (St. Johns Books, @7:00pm): Allison Cobb and Kaia Sand will read from their newest collections. Each just-released book shares several features: each combines essay-writing with poetry to investigate the political history of a specific place (for Cobb, Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn New York; and for Sand, the Expo Center in Portland), making connections to our present moment.

Story and Song: A Benefit for Bradley Rosen (The Blue Monk, @7:00pm, $8): Bradley Rosen was recently hospitalized with a staph infection in his spine, and now his fellow Dangerous Writers members are holding a benefit reading to help pay for his medical bills.  An impressive line up includes Tom Spanbauer, Margaret Malone, Monica Drake, Cheryl Strayed & Emily Chenoweth.  There will be music too!

Black History Month lecture Melissa Harris-Lacewell (Reed College, Vollum Lecture Hall, @7:00pm): Melissa Harris-Lacewell is an associate professor of politics and African American studies at Princeton University. Her academic research is inspired by a desire to investigate the challenges facing contemporary black Americans and to better understand the multiple, creative ways that African Americans respond to these challenges. She received her BA in English from Wake Forest University, her PhD in political science from Duke University, and she is currently a student at Union Theological Seminary in New York. For more information, visit the Black History Month website.

Cheeky Pages Romance Book Group (Powells Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, @7:00pm): This month we meet to discuss My Zombie Valentine by Katie MacAlister. Join us!

Heidi W. Durrow (Powells City of Books, @7:30pm): Winner of the Bellwether Prize, Heidi W. Durrow’s debut novel, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky (Algonquin), tells the story of Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., who becomes the sole survivor of a family tragedy. Growing up in the 1980s, she confronts her identity as a biracial young woman in a world that wants to see her as either black or white. “[A] post-postmodern novel with heart that weaves a circle of stories about race and self-discovery into a tense and sometimes terrifying whole,” hails Ms. magazine.

Live Wire Radio (Mission Theater, @7:30pm, $20): Guests include: Actor DANIEL STERN (Diner, City Slickers, Wonder Years), Writers for The Family Guy, JOHN VIENER and ALEC SULKIN, Fisher Poet DAVE DENSMORE, Storyteller and Pop Culture Commentator DAYVID FIGLER. Musical guests HOLCOMBE WALLER and rising star HALEY BONAR.

For further events check out the links to the community calendars for Tri-County area Libraries: Washington County, Multnomah County, Clackamas County.

Image credit Zorger.