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If you missed this year’s Portland Book Festival, you’ll get a chance this weekend to listen to one of the event’s most popular talks.
This week’s episode of The Archive Project, a podcast produced by Literary Arts, features Omar El Akkad’s conversation with Karen Russell at the festival, which took place Nov. 8. The talk, moderated by WW Arts & Culture reporter Rachel Saslow and titled “American Reckoning,” addressed both the destruction of Palestine and Americans’ failure to address the climate emergency.
The talk drew a capacity crowd at the First Congregational United Church of Christ, which can hold about 700 people, and festival volunteers (which included this reporter) had to turn dozens of interested patrons away.
El Akkad, who lives in Portland, won the National Book Award for his book One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This in late November. The book blends essay, history and memoir to examine Israel’s retaliation against Palestine following the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, and the United States’ role in that retaliation. Russell is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and MacArthur Fellowship recipient perhaps best known for Swamplandia!, the epic story of a family of alligator wrestlers in Florida. Her most recent book, The Antidote, is another family epic, this time chronicling the aftermath of a dust storm in a small Nebraska town and examining a nation’s forgetting of even recent history.
The episode will be broadcast on Oregon Public Broadcasting at 7 pm Sunday, Jan. 4. Afterward, it will be available as a podcast through The Archive Project’s website or wherever listeners get their podcasts.
