Calendar
JOHNNY COLEY - AS I SLIP INTO THE SKY
With heavy hearst and joy, we come together to celebrate Johnny's life with his friends and collaborators from Birmingham, AL, Joel Nelson and Jasper Lee. Johnny's album will be released on the label Lobby Arts, whose founder Sam Wenc will be part of a sister event to this celebration in Brooklyn, NY. Joel (multi-instrumentalist and composer) and Jasper (recordist and co-founder of Sweet Wreath) worked closely with Johnny on multiple releases, including Mister Sweet Whisper, and supported the distribution of his late-career output.
Readings by Maudie Ainsworth and Brian Orozco
Johnny Coley (1950–2025) was a Birmingham, Alabama-born poet, artist, and performer active in the Southern underground scene since the 1970s. He collaborated with improvisers like Davey Williams and LaDonna Smith, becoming a beloved "unofficial poet laureate" of Birmingham’s experimental music community. His work blends surreal, Lynchian spoken-word poetry with Southern gothic imagery, humor, tenderness, and deep emotional resonance—often recorded from hospital bed as multiple sclerosis limited his mobility. As I Slip Into the Sky (Lobby Art Editions, Brooklyn, NY – cat. LA030) is his final work, recorded in early 2025 while bed-bound. Joel Nelson provides nearly all-electronic backdrops (Buchla Music Easel and analog synths), creating a tender, emotive soundscape reminiscent of Broadcast or early Oneohtrix Point Never. It explores love, family, loss, and reality in Johnny’s signature slippery, heartfelt style
BOOK LAUNCH | Like Songs About Airports by Leijia Hanrahan
Join us for the book launch of LIKE SONGS ABOUT AIRPORTS by Leijia Hanrahan (Ill Will Editions).
Leijia Hanrahan (1987-2022) was a revolutionary, geographer, essayist and poet. This collection of poems and essays, a sequence of places lived and traversed, of avenues and cartographies, traces the human geography of lives enabled, contorted, limited or destroyed by capital. In lucid prose and luminous verse, Hanrahan writes of cities, bodies and movement through urban space and across distant borders. Daring, vulnerable and irreverent, she is an impeccable guide through landscapes beautiful and terrible, both real and imagined.
There are very few voices in our field capable of seeing the whole picture and what's at stake: the future, and nothing less. Leijia Hanrahan, through a layer of wit and sometimes withering irony, could see that future.
— Kate Wagner, architecture critic for The Nation and creator of the blog McMansion Hell
With an eye to its undoing, she shows how the logic of capital inheres in the built environment, in structures guarded by policemen who will never be able to neutralize the seething underbelly of rioters and fare evaders waging class war on the architecture of control.
— Jackie Wang, author of Carceral Capitalism
A portion of the proceeds from this book will go to support the Poetry Field School's Leijia Hanrahan Scholarship for Communist Women Smokers.
Introduction by Madeline Lane-McKinley. Afterword by Beck Levy.
Madeline Lane-McKinley is a feminist writer, parent, and teacher based in Portland, Oregon, whose books include Solidarity with Children (Haymarket Press, 2025), Fag/Hag (Rosa Press, 2024), and Comedy Against Work (Common Notions, 2022). Madeline is also an editor for Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry.
Other People's Poems (OPP)
Other People's Poems (OPP)
Memorize someone else’s poem and come recite it (or just listen).
Friday, August 7
7 PM sharp
715 SE Grand Ave
![Just Above/Just Below – movement, sound, and poetry by Angela Falk, Anthony J. Stillabower, Jean-Paul Jenkins, Robert Blatt and [----------].](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60fb32db994f6e7700a89754/1783274939436-IBFLBMY8KAL9NXRN3TMT/Capture+d%E2%80%99e%CC%81cran+2026-07-05+a%CC%80+11.04.20+AM_ret_a.png)
Just Above/Just Below – movement, sound, and poetry by Angela Falk, Anthony J. Stillabower, Jean-Paul Jenkins, Robert Blatt and [----------].
Join us this August 7th for the third of the Just Above/Just Below series – featuring movement, sound, and poetry by Angela Falk, Anthony J. Stillabower, Jean-Paul Jenkins, Robert Blatt and [----------].
The series is inspired by the following quote:
‘The cut I Imagine making might be visualized as what lies just below and just above
“music”, as presently understood. This seems at first like an impossible space in which to
operate: below music (nothing but “raw” sound and “silence”) and just above music are
the primary materials (i.e. chords, scales, durations, etc.). And yet this is the vicinity in
which many of us continue to find things to do.’ - Michael Pisaro-Liu
Angela Falk
Angela Falk is originally from Lafayette, California. She is currently a member of the CCN Ballet de Lorraine, based in France. She has previously danced for the Twyla Tharp Dance Company, the Limòn Dance Company, and performed in the Merce Cunningham Trust’s “Night of 100 Solos” in 2019 in New York City. She also performs regularly in La Fièvre Cabaret, based in Nancy, France. She was a Jacob’s Pillow Hicks Choreographic Fellow in 2022, and has presented her choreography in France, New York City, New Orleans, Florida, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Angela studied at The Juilliard School. She was awarded the school’s highest prize, the Joseph W. Polisi “Artist as Citizen” award for her work in the community and was a recipient of a Juilliard Career Advancement Fellowship. She was born and raised in Lafayette, CA, and received her early training from the California Academy of Performing Arts.
https://www.angelafalk.com/
Anthony J. Stillabower
Anthony J. Stillabower’s improvisations are shaped by voice, feedback percussion, and machine learning algorithms. Situated at the threshold of audibility, his approach to sound inhabits a moment of friction and flow, where presence flickers between memory and material flux.
What is the source of a sound? Is something sounding now?
Jean-Paul Jenkins
Jean-Paul Jenkins (b. Chicago Illinois, 1973) His primary focus is improvisation. While improvising his attention moves from low to high, from soft to loud, from near to far, from narrow to wide. His attention is what your attention follows while listening to him, it is your attention following his. He plays guitar, a sampler and claves. His current focus is decoding the Tim Bradley Spatialization Cues and asking himself "How old does it need to be to be considered Old Music?" Jenkins currently resides in Portland Oregon. Contact him, he will probably invite you over for tea.
https://iwonderwhatthissoundslike.bandcamp.com/music
Robert Blatt
Robert Blatt is an artist, musician, and writer. His practice investigates sound and listening through diverse media, exploring interconnections with environment, community, and language. His work expands from experimental music to include book arts, installation, new media, performance, photography, poetry, printmaking, and video, alongside difficult-to-categorize situations and encounters. Recent projects include the essay "Considering Non-anthropocentric Music," published in Solitude Journal, from which emerged both Oenothera, a collaboration with Carla Cao exploring plant acoustics, recently presented at Phonos in Barcelona, and the ongoing residency Expanded Situations of Environmental Co-Creation, engaging the gardens at Winslow House Project in Vallejo, California; Harmonie Universelle, a speculative experimental lecture-demonstration with Michael Winter reconsidering the history of acoustics as an experimental music practice, performed at The Lab in San Francisco and Trade School in Los Angeles; and How to Read a Book, an edition of bookmarks produced at Kala Art Institute containing text scores for experimental reading that have been realized as site-specific performances at Passages Bookshop in Portland and Motto Berlin.
https://www.robertblatt.ricercata.org/
[----------]
[----------] is a writer and sound artist who lives and works in the Pacific Northwest. Focuses include observational writing and field recordings, sometimes of industrial and interior landscapes.
Hannah Glavor & Aly Rowell (CA) & Alexis Mahler
Join us for an evening of Indie Pop & Folk singer songwriters at Mother Foucaults Bookshop with Hannah Glavor & Aly Rowell
Donation - $10 (cash / venmo at doors)
Doors @ 7 pm
Music at 7:30 pm
HANNAH GLAVOR: Hannah Glavor is a Portland based singer-songwriter with a cinematic range of indie rock revelry and raw folk spirit, clutched together by catching pop elements. She has been on the West Coast scene for the past decade and a half sharing the stage and touring with a broad range of sounds like Y La Bamba, Joseph and Sixpence None the Richer.
ALY ROWELL: Aly Rowell (b. 1997) is a Filipino-American short story writer and indie-folk musician based in southern California. Her upcoming LP, Where it All Goes, will be released on October 16, 2026.
ALEXIS MAHLER:
Like a late summer bloom casting shadows in the sunlight, Alexis Mahler’s singular voice creates moments that are precious and delicate; heart-breaking and soul warming.
Michigan-made, and classically trained, Mahler has made a musical home for herself in Portland, Oregon. Quieting rooms with her intimate blend of classical, jazz, and folk - she has endeared herself to audiences across the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Her music contains thoughtful, elegant strings layered with memorable, and sweetly delivered vocal melodies. In her own words: “Music should be connective, accessible, expressive, expansive, often imperfect, healing - a release”.
BOOK LAUNCH - Undead By Madeline Vosch with music by MAITA
Join us for the book launch of Undead: A Memoir of My Suicide by Madeline Vosch, featuring a live musical set from MAITA.
A revealing memoir about the complicated truths of surviving a suicide attempt and rethinking the concept of "suicide prevention" to create a world that people want to live in.
Madeline Vosch did everything she was supposed to do when the suicidal thoughts started. Or she tried. Between studying, working three jobs to make rent, navigating the impossible bureaucracy of Boston's welfare system to access food stamps and nominally affordable mental health care, there was not a moment she was not fixated on survival. One night in April 2018, weeks before her graduation from Harvard Divinity school, she walked home from a party with a single intention: to take as many pills as she could stomach, and never wake up.
But then she did. And she was left with a question: what now?
In Undead, Vosch deftly weaves together lyric prose, memoir, and cultural commentary to tell the story of what happens after a suicide attempt. Here, she sets off on a journey to find her kindred spirits in surviving the end of a story, investigating the various scripts she encountered in the weeks and months after her attempt—from other works of art that touch on the topic of suicide, to Christian theology, to medical texts, to episodes of ER, to the news cycle as reports of increased suicide rates confirmed her suspicion: she was not alone in her attempt, even if she had no one to talk to about what came after. She might be changed, but what did that matter if the world that had ground her down wasn't?
Vosch turns the concept of "suicide prevention" on its head, asking what it might look like to reconceive suicidality as a response to a social problem. She challenges us to incorporate "prevention" into a larger social vision that intersects with increased access to housing, to food, to healthcare—in short, creating a world that people can and want to live in.
"Harrowing, completely without flinch, Madeline Vosch's Undead may be the most uncomfortably human book I've ever read."
— Peter Rock, author of My Abandonment
"Madeline Vosch's Undead is a rare, ferocious memoir—scrappy, brilliant, and impossible to put down."
— Greg Marshall, author of Leg
Madeline Vosch
Madeline is a writer, translator, and professor. Her first book, Undead: A Memoir of My Suicide, was published by Beacon Press. An excerpt of Undead was selected as the winner of the Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Contest in 2021. She is the recipient of a Fulbright grant and was an Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow in 2021. Madeline is represented by Ayla Zuraw-Friedland at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency.
Madeline teaches at a community college and feels an affinity with all monsters.
Portland Songwriters Week at Mother Foucault's featuring VHS Ghost and Max Marcos
A week-long celebration of songwriters in PDX. Portland Songwriters Guild is holding the first ever Songwriters Week in Portland. Modeled after some of Portland’s favorite weeks: Burger week, Pizza week, Beer week, Songwriters week brings two shows a day across the city ranging from $0-$10. Get a taste of the music makers in PDX and come join us for a show or two or 14.
Max Marcos
Max Marcos is an independent singer, songwriter, and producer crafting atmospheric indie-pop built around vivid imagery and emotional momentum. His 2024 singles “Waiting For Thunder” and “On the Sun” showcase a style that blends warm melodies, reflective lyrics, and cinematic natural imagery—storms, sky, and light—to explore anticipation, hope, and the feeling of moving toward something bigger. Writing and producing much of his own work, Max creates songs that feel intimate yet expansive, inviting listeners into moments of wonder, patience, and forward motion.
https://maxmarcos.bandcamp.com/
VHS Ghost
Here's to the afterlife
https://vhsghost831.bandcamp.com/
More Info: https://portlandsongwritersguild.com/events/portland-songwriters-week
Black Ocean's 20th Anniversary
Celebrate indie publisher Black Ocean's 20th Anniversary and the launch of Zachary Schomburg's Wool Moon with readings by poets Zachary Schomburg, Carrie Olivia Adams, Josh Foman, Nathan Hoks, and Anastacia-Renee.
Black Ocean is an independent literary press founded in 2006 and based in Boston and Chicago. Black Ocean exists to foster a community where innovative voices in contemporary poetry and literature can thrive, offering access to boundary-pushing, transformative works that challenge conventional narratives. As a nonprofit, Black Ocean seeks to uplift underrepresented authors and create a platform for meaningful literary engagement that resonates with readers around the world.
Carrie Olivia Adams lives in Chicago, where she is the executive editor for the nonprofit press Black Ocean and the promotions and marketing communications director for the University of Chicago Press. Her books include The Book of Marys and Glaciers, Be the thing of memory, Operating Theater, Forty-One Jane Doe's, and Intervening Absence in addition to the chapbooks "Proficiency Badges," "Grapple," "Overture in the Key of F," and "A Useless Window." She writes the "Poetry & Biscuits" newsletter on Substack and curates a house reading series by the same name. When she's not making poems, she's making biscuits.
Josh Fomon is the author of Our Human Shores and Though We Bled Meticulously, both published by Black Ocean. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals, including Afternoon Visitor, Caketrain, DIAGRAM, DREGINALD, The Georgia Review, jubilat, mercury firs, Poetry Northwest, TYPO, and Yalobusha Review. He lives on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish peoples in Seattle.
Nathan Hoks is a poet whose books include Nests in Air, The Narrow Circle, Reveilles, and most recently, Moony Days of Being. His poetry has been awarded the National Poetry Series, the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and the Iowa Review David Hamilton Prize. He has also published translations of work by Vicente Huidobro, Henri Michaux, Tristan Tzara, and Christian Dotremont. He teaches poetry writing at the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and lives in Chicago with his family.
Anastacia-Renee is an award-winning writer, interdisciplinary educator, multi-modal artist, and former Seattle Civic Poet. She is the author of Afrofuturist-fiction-fantasy book Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere (HarperCollins/Amistad) as well as the author of two full-length books of experimental poetry: Side Notes from the Archivist (HarperCollins/Amistad), and (v.) (Black Ocean). Renee's experimental cross-genre work can be found or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, The American Academy of Poets, Moss Lit, Logic(s), Callaloo, Blue Mountain Review, Ms. Magazine, Essence, and others.
Zachary Schomburg is the author of seven books of poems, all published by Black Ocean, including the award-winning The Man Suit. He is also the author of a novel, Mammother. He is also a founding editor of Octopus Books and a painter. He lives in Portland, OR.
PALLIGRAPHY | the magic of end-of-life storytelling
Sabrina Görlitz is a writer, hospice companion and palliative care lecturer from Hamburg, Germany.
She has invented "palligraphy", a short biography written at the end of life that captures the most important stages and formative memories of palliative care patients - a wonderful opportunity to securely record personal thoughts about life and death for family and friends.
Introducing her special approach based on Joseph Campbell's "the hero's journey" to the US for the first time, Sabrina will tell us more about the palligraphy process and share some very moving patient stories with us. They illustrate how the power of story can bring peace, healing and relief - even in the midst of utter heartbreak.
BOOK LAUNCH | John James — Extinction Song
Extinction Song combines fixed poetic forms with longform meditative lyrics to explore questions of agency in the Anthropocene. The book begins with a tender depiction of early parenthood, as the speaker cradles his newborn son while imagining a dystopian climate future. The poems open into a broader consideration of overlapping and interrelated systems, from the confines of received knowledge to the closed circuit of ideology to the circularity of pollutive environmental cycles. Attentive at the levels of sound and of visual architecture, these poems highlight both destruction and unseen possibilities. By turns meditative and probing, and sometimes slyly funny, these poems highlight the perils and the joys of our precarious climate future.
John James
John James is the author of two collections of poetry, The Delusion of Being Absolute (Milkweed, forthcoming 2028) and The Milk Hours (Milkweed, 2019), selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. He is also the author of three chapbooks, most recently Extinction Song (Tupelo, 2026), winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Award. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, New England Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere, and his work has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, the Academy of American Poets, and the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University. He holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia and is completing a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley.
"The feeling and thinking in Extinction Song arise from the experience of fatherhood in a time of climate crisis. An immaculate craftsman, James has fashioned a prosody that holds in productive relation 'the real and imminent,' the provocative fact that life 'tends/in directions/almost infinite' even during the Sixth Extinction. Most intimate in their meticulousness, each syllable bearing his measured touch, these agile lines track the syntax of 'thought as it motions/through the channels of the mind' until the experience of 'feeling/thinking' comes alive with riveting immediacy. Calling upon the power of a visionary tradition that includes Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Duncan, and Inger Christensen, Extinction Song reveals the peril and terror within the way we love this world." —Brian Teare, author of Doomstead Days and Poem Bitten by a Man
BOOK LAUNCH -Fragments of an America, Volume II — Chris McNally
Join us for a reading and celebration of Chris McNally's Fragments of an America, Volume II, a collection of poems and essays offering a fierce meditation on the American character — moving from political critique to intimate reflections on love, loss, and what remains. Titles range from "Liz Cheney's Horse" and "A Reexamination of Exodus 7:3 in the Trumpist Fever" to the tender, philosophical "Love Like This" and "Alcazar."
Following his first volume (2016), McNally presents a challenging composite of contradictory experiences, viewed through a stance of courage and erudition — a playful but serious, honest, and necessary work for our era of civil fracture.
Chris McNally was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1960. He studied history at UC Berkeley, with additional study at the Université du Benin in Togo and in Bordeaux, France, and later earned an MFA from New York University. An avid historian, in 2012 he completed the essay Principles for a Profound Leadership: The Self-Worth of a Nation, and in 2016 published Fragments of an America, Volume I, all while helping raise two sons and running a construction project management firm for fine homes. He lives outside Hudson, New York with his wife Tamara.
Films on the Green in Portland - Persepolis
On Saturday, September 26, Films on the Green in Portland, OR, will make its debut with a screening of Persepolis.
This event is organized by L’école buissonnière.
Persepolis
Directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud
Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics
Starring Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux
In French with English Subtitles.
2007, PG-13, 1h35, France
A coming-of-age story told through the eyes of Marjane, a young Iranian girl growing up in Tehran and Vienna. She avidly follows the events that lead to the Iranian revolution and the downfall of the Shah’s regime. With the establishment of the Islamic Republic, Marjane comes to see herself as a revolutionary…
Based on the graphic novel Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, L’Association, 2000, France.
Free and open to the public (no ticket needed).
Albertine Foundation is an American nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting French American relations through innovative cultural and educational programs. In close partnership with Villa Albertine, the French Institute for Culture and Education, Albertine Foundation administers grant programs across diverse creative disciplines including visual and performing arts; cinema; and literature, while also supporting exploratory residencies for creative professionals and thinkers across the United States. Albertine Foundation also contributes to promoting French language learning in the United States and funds new opportunities for students, professors, and researchers in the spheres of secondary and higher education. Albertine Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation by Internal Revenue Service determination. Contributions from corporate, foundation, and individuals are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.
L’école buissonnière is a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating the conditions for art, literature, music, and subversive play to thrive. Its mission is to build, hold, and promote spaces for art, literature, literary translation, and scholarship, with the goal of increasing expression, connection (spiritually, emotionally, communally), and other forms of relational action, and to encourage the development of new writers, artists, photographers, scholars, translators, and, most crucially, readers.
BOOK LAUNCH & READING | "Of Women" by Naoko Fujimoto with guest Charity E. Yoro
Of Women is a collection of translations of Japanese waka-poems from the seventh century to the twelfth century, featuring twenty female poets from this period, when Japanese women’s literature flourished. This book includes poems by famous writers from the era, such as Sei Shonagon (The Pillow Book) and Murasaki Shikibu (The Tale of Genji), and introduces some lesser-known female poets as well.
Waka compacts much information in a short form: words with double meanings, unfamiliar phrases, habits foreign to non-Japanese speakers, and hidden historical backgrounds. Direct translations would fail to capture the author’s full intent, so Of Women takes several approaches to capture the original sensory images, including text collage and haibun, as well as short essays that provide historical context and introduce the author before each waka.
Naoko’s work has already garnered impressive praise from established voices:
Of women gathers the poems of twenty Japanese women, many unnamed, from the 7th to 12th centuries, who wove longing, politics, beauty, and defiance into the compact form of waka. Fujimoto makes brilliant use of a “thick” approach, contextualizing her elegant translations with haibun-style reflections and visual art that both honor and explode the forms of the originals. In these pages, forgotten voices are reclaimed and reimagined, speaking with clarity and grace to our time.
–Geoffrey Brock
Of Women: 20 Japanese Female Poets / 20 Waka Poems translated by Naoko Fujimoto is an astonishing collection that steals us into the most intimate chambers of the heart, its diamond-like facets illuminated by women poets of the Heian era, each as brilliant and original as Fujimoto’s remarkable renderings. Her haibun approach carefully nestles these Waka poems in striking historical and social contexts while providing both visual and phonetic interpretations that reveal not only the breath of each poem but the forbidden heat of each poet’s afterlight with sensorial pleasure. These poems transcend what one might know of translation, operating as layered maps through emotionally fraught labyrinths that swell with color and surprise, breathless when whispering: “So show me / your tears, / your crimson / forlorn.” Humid with longing or haunted by desires smoldering in the thick of personal and political entanglements, Fujimoto parts the clouds of anonymity so that each poet emerges majestic and full like the moon, gifting us monuments of spiritual fortitude and literary mastery that accompany us in the heavens through the long and pulsing night.
—Monica Ong
Here’s more information about the translator and her achievements:
Naoko Fujimoto was born and raised in Nagoya, Japan. She is a poet and translator. Her poetry collections are "We Face The Tremendous Meat On The Teppan", winner of C&R Press Summer Tide Pool Chapbook Award by C&R Press (2022), "Where I Was Born", winner of the editor's choice by Willow Books (2019), "Glyph:Graphic Poetry=Trans. Sensory" by Tupelo Press (2021), and four chapbooks.
She is a RHINO associate & translation editor and Tupelo Quarterly translation editor. She is a Bread Loaf Translation full scholarship recipient and the 2023 Visiting Teaching Artist at the Poetry Foundation. Her first translation chapbook is available from Toad Press in the fall of 2024.
Charity E. Yoro (she/her) is a poet whose writing has appeared on The Rumpus, poets.org, Tupelo Press Quarterly, West Trestle Review, PRISM International, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere, and has received Pushcart Prize and Orison Anthology nominations. Her debut poetry collection ten-cent flower & other territories (First Matter Press) was named the 2025 Oregon Book Award winner for the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry. Born, raised, and educated on the east side of O‘ahu, she currently lives west of Denver with her wild, loving family.
READING | Shitholes of the World, Unite!
Join us for a reading that features some of our most recognized translator-poets reading poetry in English translation from shithole countries—those named and unnamed. It serves as a way to resist the imperialist, racist, sexist, and anti-LGBTQ+ ideologies which divide us and to recognize how English language poetry in translation plays a prominent role in making works of poetry available and creates international networks for political and social solidarity and change.
The event is free to attend.
Presented in conjunction with the with ALTA49, the American Literary Translators Association's 49th annual conference.
EVENT | ALTA49 AFTER PARTY — OPEN MIC & LIT IN TRANSLATION
Saturday, October 24
6:00 pm and onward
ALTA afterparty at Mother Foucault’s Bookshop! Stop by the shop for a translation open mic and family style dinner, followed by readings by four Zephyr Press translators: J. Kates (Russian), Dan Rosenberg (Slovene), Karen Kovacik (Polish), and AKaiser (Catalan). Refreshments and the reading are free, $20 for the optional family-style dinner.
J. Kates, a minor poet and a literary translator, has published two books and three chapbooks of his own poems, and more than a dozen translations of Russian and French poetry. He has edited two anthologies of Russian translations and is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association. He was expelled from the board of directors of the New Hampshire Poetry Society for allegedly threatening another member, whom he has never met, with decapitation.
Dan Rosenberg co-translated Slovenian poet Miklavž Komelj’s Hippodrome, and his translation of Komelj’s new and selected poems, Night Is More Abstract, was just released by Zephyr Press in 2026. Rosenberg’s own poetry collections include Bassinet, cadabra, The Crushing Organ, and three chapbooks. His work has won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize and the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest. A former Tompkins County Poet Laureate, Rosenberg currently co-hosts the Yetzirah Reading Series, serves as poetry editor for Pinyon, and teaches writing, literature, and translation theory at Colorado Mesa University.
Karen Kovacik, a poet and translator of contemporary Polish poetry, is the recipient of a Fulbright Research Grant to Poland and two translation fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her translation of Jacek Dehnel’s Aperture (Zephyr Press, 2018) was a finalist for the 2019 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. With Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Mira Rosenthal, she translated Krystyna Dąbrowska’s Tideline (Zephyr, 2022). Kovacik is also the editor of Scattering the Dark, an anthology of Polish women poets (White Pine, 2016), and the author of three collections of poetry. Her poems and translations have appeared in American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Granta, World Literature Today, and others. A former Indiana Poet Laureate (2012-2014), she is Professor Emerita of English at Indiana University Indianapolis.
AKaiser is the Pushcart Prize-nominated author of <glint> (Milk & Cake Press) and an NEA-awarded translator of Catalan, French & Spanish. AK’s doctorate is in Translation & Intercultural Studies, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, under tutelage of Poet & Translator, Francesc Parcerisas. Poems, translations, photos and academic work have appeared in, among others, Allium, l’Avenç, Amsterdam Quarterly, Feral, Four Way Review, Ginosko, Harvard Review, MPT, with podcast, Pen + Brush: In Print, POETRY, Poetry International, and The Rumpus. "Astronaut, or Blues Singer" (<glint>) breathes in song thanks to Mel.lif.lu.ous. Translation of <Unnameable>, poems by Anna Gual (Zephyr Press, 2025). https://akaiser.org & @ak.approximations
BOOK LAUNCH | Blue Selvage by Preeti Parikh
Blue Selvage reminds us that a revolutionary message often requires new forms of discourse.
The poems in Blue Selvage weave lyric, essay, documentary fragments, and historical reckoning into an exploration of skin, cloth, color, and form as living archives—where the gendered, racialized, and colonial histories inscribed on the body are continually exposed, resisted, and re-stitched through memory, touch, and language itself.
Preeti Parikh’s debut poetry collection is a mapping of boundaries, a (re)framing of fractured interiority, a text(ile) unfurling across shifting homelands. In this deeply embodied, formally daring meditation, the corpus is both archive and threshold, a site where “what’s felt becomes the body, what’s draped becomes form.” Here, passion for indigo, a medical-science informed perspective, fascination with the materiality of cloth and skin, and a journeying towards reclamation interlace with feminist inquiries and cultural examination to conceptualize the poems’ multivalent inhabitances.
Expansive in its rhetorical modes and landscapes, Blue Selvage is unified by a remarkable singularity of voice and vision through which Parikh skillfully invokes form as metaphor, performance, dramatization, and content. Throughout the book, recurrent vocabularies and silences—integument, selvage, gaze—operate as warp and weft, binding personal experience to collective striving, devotion, and survival. Meanwhile, on the page, multilingual textures and typographic openness resist closure, offering apertures for looking within and without. What emerges is a capacious field of attention, where intimacy and history press against one another, and where writing itself becomes an act of unstitching and re-making—an ethical, sensuous practice of staying with what the body remembers and what culture would prefer to erase.
Preeti Parikh is a poet and essayist with a past educational background in medicine and a recent MFA from The Rainier Writing Workshop. A Kundiman Fellow and National Poetry Series finalist, she is the recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant award and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence award. Parikh’s poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Margins, Zócalo Public Square, and elsewhere. Her writing is anthologized in Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World, the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, and The Last Milkweed, the last of which was also published by Tupelo. Parikh has been a Millay Arts resident and an AWP Writer to Writer Program mentee and has received staff scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Born and raised in India, she lives with her family in Ohio.
CANCELED Lake Laconic (Astoria), Ray Wolff & Ellie Baird
❌ SHOW CANCELED ❌
Join us for an evening of folk singer songwriters.
With ~
Ray Wolff - Seattle, WA local Ray Wolff is an alternative folk singer-songwriter from Austin, TX. Through open tunings & intricate fingerstyle, theyweave imagery with sharp precision. Wolff scaffolds a playful soundscape that explores what lurks beneath the surface. With Indie Rock influence, their wit & gutsy lyricism makes for sweetly satirical storytelling. Wolff released an intimate LP "Just Words" in Autumn of 2025, recorded solo live on a nylon string guitar. Wolff's band will debut their first studio record "Leaning on Elsewhere" Fall of 2026, produced by Jordan Cunningham at Sage Arts Studio.
Lake Laconic has been chipping away at his music in the town of Astoria, OR finding different directions to go while living in a place where foundation can be built. A strange background, playing jazz for over a decade and then heavily going into songwriting and finding his gold there, Lake continues to create music that takes him somewhere new. He’s been all over the map doing things like opening for Blind Pilot, playing the Allman Brothers’ music with original drummer, Jaimoe, in The Big Band of Brothers, and collaborating with his brother Evan in a band they call Innocent Alex. Lake put his first album out in 2024, Lake Laconic, which Music Millennium called “11 tracks of pop genius” and now releases a new album, Cut the String, that he’s been cooking up out by the Columbia River Gorge with Mark Robertson. Lake calls it “9 tracks of trying to piece something together with intention
https://lakelaconic.bandcamp.com/
Ellie (Not Lenny)
Not Lenny is the musical project of Ellie Baird; raised in Illinois and based in Portland, Oregon. Her songs are written from a need to feel everything full-on; good, bad, and (most often) in-between. Always with tongue in cheek and a fierce desire to see beauty in the world. Not Lenny’s debut EP, Desire, came out June 20th on the new Washington based label, Tarboo Tapes.
Donation - $10 (cash / venmo at doors)
RSVP Online - Cash or venmo tickets collected at doors
Doors @ 6:30 pm
Music at 7 ish pm
715 SE Grand
CONCERT – TREVA – Seth Levine
TREVA is a Portland indie rock and roll band. Playing their first show; for fans of The Pixies, The Beatles and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
Catchy and intense, Treva’s writing has caught the attention of a range of listeners from NME magazine to Walt Curtis.
- In Portuguese, the word treva translates to "darkness" or "gloom" in English. It is more commonly used in its plural form, trevas, which means "total darkness" .
Seth Levine
“Seth Levine is a Portland, Oregon singer-songwriter creating lyric-driven indie folk shaped by atmospheric guitars and evocative melodies. His songs unfold like half-remembered scenes, drawing listeners into a blur of memory, longing, and imagery. With his debut album nearing completion, he is bringing a long-held collection of songs into the world.”
Christopher Yuda — Other than an Exhibition (Not Institutional Critique and yet realism in art, that is the hardest thing). — Artist Talk
Friday, July 17, 2026,
7:00pm
Other than an Exhibition (Not Institutional Critique and yet realism in art, that is the hardest thing).
WOM (Word of Mouth) is pleased to present a salon style talk and discussion with the artist Christopher Yuda.
During the talk, the artist will attempt to make clear how these decisions have informed the title: Other than an Exhibition (Not Institutional Critique and yet realism in art, that is the hardest thing).
Christopher Yuda (b. 1994) is a visual artist originally from North Carolina, who has lived in both New Mexico and New York. In the years following their graduation from Bard College in 2023, the artist focused their attention on writing, despite entering the program as a painter. This coincided with a relocation to Paris, France, where they are currently based.
WOM (Word of Mouth) is a series of experimental lectures that happen in the garden, in the library, in the living room, in the bookstore, in the kitchen, and on the street. Each presenter is asked to share work that feels new, experimental or prescient to them in some way. Sometimes this takes the form of a performance, sometimes a more traditional lecture. The audience are invited through word of mouth to attend each experimental lecture. They will pass along the time, location, and presenter to each other, person to person through a direct link of communication.
After the lecture people will have time to converse.
CONCERT ILLEGAL SON
Portland-based trombonist and composer Denzel Mendoza has forged a singular artistic voice shaped by lived experience, cultural memory, and collective struggle. Drawing from jazz, free improvisation, folk traditions, and the spirit of protest music, Mendoza creates deeply resonant soundscapes that blur the line between composition and testimony. His work carries both intimacy and defiance — honoring ancestry, community, and the transformative power of sound. From national tours to Grammy-winning collaborations, his artistry continues to challenge, heal, and inspire through music that feels both timeless and urgently present.
Illegal Son is Denzel Mendoza’s meditation on life as an undocumented immigrant, translated through sound rather than language. It is an act of radical vulnerability—a body of work born from the tension between fear and hope, between invisibility and existence. When tomorrow is never guaranteed, the present becomes both refuge and reckoning.
To live undocumented is to live in a perpetual state of improvisation. Every decision is made within the uncertainty of what comes next, where stability is fleeting and survival often depends on instinct. That condition is not simply reflected in Illegal Son—it is its very architecture. Every note, every silence, every unfolding moment is improvised, embodying a life shaped by precarity yet refusing surrender.
The music is restless because the life it emerges from is restless. It is fragile because the circumstances demand it. And yet, beneath its instability lies an unwavering belief in the possibility of tomorrow. Illegal Son is not only a document of survival; it is a testament to the resilience required to imagine a future while living without the promise of one.
Author Talk — Robert K. Brigham | "This Is a True War Story"
Join us on Monday, July 13 at 6:00pm for an author talk withRobert K. Brigham.
Robert K. Brigham has had a substantial career as a historian of the Vietnam War, with a hand in nine books, a documentary, public history projects, and more. While many a historian has felt compelled at some point to write about a subject close to them personally, Brigham did not think he was doing that. But, at age fifty-eight, Brigham, who had long known he was adopted, discovered that he'd improbably and unknowingly been studying and talking about his biological father for decades. That man, Bruce Atwell, was a Marine Corps photographer who took some of that war's most indelible and widely reproduced pictures. Brigham had used those images over and over again in decades' worth of classes and public lectures, never knowing the truth.
Both Brigham and Atwell were products of the American foster care and adoption system, and both were defined professionally by Vietnam. In a story shot through with echoes and shadows, Brigham not only reveals his own history as an adoptee but opens a startlingly fresh vantage on the fragility of American families; the power of social norms and taboos to shape lives; and the forces that inequitably disrupt families, not least of them war. The result is an accessible and moving book that is at once both a powerful personal story and an illuminating social critique.
Free and open to all.
POP-UP | Handmade Palestine
Join us Saturday, July 4th for a pop-up with Morgan Cooper Totah of Handmade Palestine at Mother Foucault's from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM
Handmade Palestine is a fairtrade handicraft marketplace that supports and empowers female Palestinian artisans to sustain their livelihoods under military occupation. The social enterprise is run by a team of volunteers who work with many artisans and women’s cooperatives across the country.
It was founded by American, Morgan Cooper Totah, in 2013 with a small display in the corner of a local Ramallah cafe. From 2015 to 2021, Handmade Palestine built its first online community through Etsy, connecting artisans in Palestine with customers around the world. In February 2021, the brand launched its independent website, creating a permanent home for the growing network of makers and their stories.
What started with five artisan groups has grown into partnerships with more than 30 artisan groups and women’s cooperatives, alongside dozens of small businesses across Palestine. The artisans include generational silversmiths, olive wood carvers, brass artisans, micro-mosaic artists, ceramists, weavers, embroiderers, soap makers, designers, writers, and visual artists. Many are women sustaining their families and preserving cultural heritage through skilled handwork passed down across generations.
Handmade Palestine works closely with its partners to support fair income, international market access, and skills development. Each piece shipped abroad represents not only craftsmanship, but resilience, continuity, and dignity.
All profits from Handmade Palestine are reinvested into Mashjar Juthour, a regenerative land and arboretum project in Ramallah dedicated to protecting indigenous Palestinian trees, restoring biodiversity, and creating educational space for future generations. In this way, every purchase supports both artisan livelihoods and long-term stewardship of the land.
Handmade Palestine is more than a marketplace — it is a bridge between heritage and modern life, connecting global customers to the depth, skill, and resilience of Palestinian artisans.
Morgan Cooper Totah, is an urban farmer, designer, and the founder of Handmade Palestine. She is also the creator of Little Olea, a natural teething and nursing brand inspired by motherhood and olive wood craftsmanship.
In 2010, Morgan left academia to move to Palestine and build an arboretum with her husband on Ramallah Heritage Land. Since then, her work has centered on land stewardship, craft preservation, and building sustainable livelihoods for artisan communities.
She lives in Ramallah with her husband, Saleh Totah, and their two young children, in the home his father built. When she’s not working alongside artisan partners, she can be found fermenting vegetables, learning more about Palestinian heritage, and baking with her five-year-old on their urban farm.
handmadepalestine.com
https://www.instagram.com/handmadepalestine/
juthour.org
Other People's Poems (OPP)
Other People's Poems (OPP)
Memorize someone else’s poem and come recite it (or just listen).
Friday, July 3
7 PM sharp
715 SE Grand Ave
AUTHOR TALK | BACKGROUND ARTIST: THE LIFE AND WORK OF TYRUS WONG by Karen Fang in conversation with Jay Ponteri
Join us on Monday, June 29 at 6:30 pm for an author talk with Karen Fang, in conversation with Jay Ponteri.
You might not know the name Tyrus Wong, but you probably know many of the images he shaped, including scenes from the beloved Disney classic Bambi. Yet when he came to this country as a child, Tyrus was an illegal immigrant locked up in an offshore detention center. How did he go on to a long and prosperous career drawing animation cels, storyboards, and greeting cards that shaped the American imagination?
Background Artist is a kaleidoscopic story about the immigrant origins of some of America's best loved visual imagery. Sharing the inspiring story of Tyrus Wong's remarkable 106-year life, this biography showcases the artist's wide array of creative work, from the paintings and fine art prints he made working for Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration to the unique handmade kites he designed in his retirement to fly on the Santa Monica Beach. It tells how Tyrus came to the United States as a 10-year-old boy in 1920, at a time when the Chinese Exclusion Act barred him from legal citizenship. Yet it also shows how Tyrus found American communities that welcomed him and nurtured his artistic talent. Covering everything from his work as a studio sketch artist for Warner Bros. to the best-selling Christmas cards he designed for Hallmark and other greeting card companies, this book celebrates a multi-talented Asian-American artist and pioneer.
"The definitive new biography." —Smithsonian Magazine
Karen Fang is a film scholar and visual culture critic who writes and speaks for museums and film festivals around the world. Known for previous books about Hong Kong cinema and nineteenth-century British interest in exotic objects, Karen often writes about the intersection of eastern and western aesthetics.
Listen to this episode of Biographers in Conversation — film scholar Karen Fang joins Dr. Gabriella Kelly-Davies to discuss her biography of Tyrus Wong.
Jay Ponteri directs the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing program at PNCA. Somone Told Me was published by Widow+Orphan House in fall 2020. His memoir, Wedlocked, was published by Hawthorne Books, April 2013, and it received the 2014 Oregon Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. His chapbook of short prose, Darkmouth Strikes Again, was published by Future Tense Books, summer 2014. His essay “Listen to this” was mentioned as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2010, and more recently, “On Navel Gazing” was mentioned as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2015. He has published prose in Knee-Jerk, Essay Daily, Ghost Proposal, Seattle Review, Salamander, and Forklift, Ohio, among others.
BOOK LAUNCH | Midwestern Death Trip by Meaghan Garvey
Propelled by her mother’s death into a half-life of drug-dealing boyfriends and shivery mornings, Meaghan Garvey finds salvation in dingy dive bars—and in being the stranger who is always moving on to somewhere else. When chance gifts her with a Cadillac with a blood-red paint-job and matching leather seats, Garvey sets out on an amphetamine-fueled road-trip through her native Midwest in the hopes of resolving the mysteries of her itinerant personal life through encounters with the places and characters that define her imagination: Water demons, lake camps; haunted houses; ship-wrecks; Truckers on speed; roadside waitresses; wise-cracking barflies and Jeffrey Epstein's personal exterminator. Part coming-of-age memoir and part 1940s film noir jail-break, Midwestern Death Trip combines the thrill of the open road amid a haunted landscape of back-woods diners and small-town bar tops. A speed demon’s encounter with the depths of American loneliness from the Hunter Thompson of the 2020s.
Meaghan Garvey
Meaghan Garvey is a writer from Chicago. Midwestern Death Trip is her first book
Poetry & Strings | A fundraiser for L’école buissonnière
On Friday, June 26, from 5-9 pm, please join us for a fundraiser to support ongoing payments on and improvements to the Historic Nathaniel West Building No. 1, home to Mother Foucault’s Bookshop and l'école buissonnière, a nonprofit dedicated to creating the conditions for art, literature, music, and subversive play to thrive. This fundraiser, a rare evening combining poetry and strings, will also support l’école buissonnière’s ongoing and upcoming programs and services.
The fundraiser will be held at Mother Foucault’s Bookshop, located on the border of Portland’s inner-southeast industrial district. Founded in 2009, Mother Foucault’s Bookshop specializes in books in translation, foreign language books, poetry, and philosophy. The bookshop offers a perfectly cozy, unique space to enjoy poetry and string music.
Tickets: Sliding Scale - $10-15. Please RSVP here and pay at the door (Cash or Venmo).
Doors at 5 pm.
Fundraising/Mingling 5-6 pm.
Event at 6 pm.
With Poetry Readings from
Maudie Ainsworth, Ed Skoog, Shawn Levy, Joshua Pollock, Kayla Kennett, Grace, Pablo Murillo-Edwards
Musicians
Hannah Morton - Kitchen Congregation (solo project of Hannah Morton) crawls under your skin and performs in your heart. She writes sincerely from memory and experience using vivid, surreal, dreamlike imagery. She gently sweeps us from the tender to the epic. Every song contrasting, and complimenting the wide array of complicated feelings we all share. There is an obvious attempt at honest self expression, and innovation within her chosen discipline. Her dedication to her practice is apparent in her confident poise. Hannah is an artist that makes those intangible ubiquitous feelings tangible with great effect.
Alexis Mahler - Michigan-made, and classically trained, Mahler has made a musical home for herself in Portland, Oregon. Quieting rooms with her intimate blend of classical, jazz, and folk - she has endeared herself to audiences across the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Her music contains thoughtful, elegant strings layered with memorable, and sweetly delivered vocal melodies. In her own words: “Music should be connective, accessible, expressive, expansive, often imperfect, healing - a release”.
The beauty and power that Alexis Mahler creates with her voice and cello is simply mesmerizing. With patient and confident phrasing, a soothing resonance of vulnerability and strength, Mahler has delivered a poignant and intimate EP titled Away that draws us directly into her being. Songs of heartbreak, taking space, rebuilding a life, self care, or maybe — self survival. These are pertinent emotions in a world that is pleading to wake up tomorrow more empathetic than it did today.” — Glide Magazine
Yucky Star - You may know Kate Koller as the player of dreamy cello lines that make you drool, yucky star is all the magic you’ve always known to come from kate & then some. What was once in danger of becoming a collection of unfinished songs is finally making its way to the ears of listeners in portland & soon beyond, and the world is all the better for it. Their stream of consciousness lyrics flow like honey. With distinctive guitar parts in sticky nonstandard tunings you might be tempted to steal.
Emma Smith - Emma Smith is a cellist, guitar player and singer / songwriter based in Portland, OR.
Joe Kye - Joe Kye is a musician and storyteller based in Portland, Oregon. Joe’s music is a tapestry of his many influences as a Korean American immigrant. His latest project explores his roots, melding Korean traditional sounds with everything from jazz to electronic music. Tenderhearted and peaceful, Joe’s work fosters a sense of deep internal reflection, healing, and spirituality. Joe’s recorded a Tedx Talk, been featured on NPR’s The World, and was a 2023 Oregon Arts Commission Fellow.
“You’re a different kind of doctor. A soul doctor.” - A Filipino Mom
Andrew Jones - PDX Bassist, improviser, songwriter, arranger and recording / mixing engineer
Autumn Bradford - Cellist, collaborator and member of the post metal band - Larkspur - Autumn has performed on several pdx stages and become engrained into the PDX string scene since relocating to Oregon.
Twin Bridges - Twin Bridges (Zachery G) is a cellist & songwriter from New Mexico, currently in Portland, OR. Twin Bridges creates live loops on cello and the project features a band of friends playing woodwinds, brass, bass and drums. Twin Bridges songs can be described as pensive, dark and melodic. Twin Bridges will be releasing their second full band album this winter on AudioSport Records.
BOOK LAUNCH | The Return of the 90s A Cultural History of the Present
BOOK LAUNCH: THE RETURN OF THE '90s
Wednesday, June 24 · 6:30 PM
Join us for the launch of The Return of the '90s: A Cultural History of the Present, edited by Madeline Lane-McKinley and Sean O'Brien.
This anthology dives into the contemporary fascination with the '90s. Plotting a playful course between sociology and cultural studies on the one hand, and giddy nostalgia on the other, the book charts decisive developments of the decade to fully apprehend its resonances today. Covering everything from 'girl power,' Star Trek and hip-hop, to queer cinema, anarchist counterculture and the erotic thriller, The Return of the '90s excavates key moments in '90s culture and uncovers its multiple reckonings in the present.
Madeline Lane-McKinley is a writer, editor, and cultural critic based in Portland, Oregon. Her books include Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times, Solidarity with Children: An Essay Against Adult Supremacy, and Fag/Hag. She is also an editor for Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry, a contributor to the Museum of Capitalism.
BOOK LAUNCH | Civil Rights and Structural Attacks: Conversations with Jesse Strauss and Walter Riley - Hosted by Mic Crenshaw
Join us to celebrate the launch of Civil Rights and Structural Attacks: Conversations with Walter Riley (Legacy Left / AK Press) with Jesse Strauss and Walter Riley in person, hosted by Mic Crenshaw.
Eighty years of lessons from the Black freedom struggle, labor movements, and internationalism.
This text is a multi-generational conversation between legendary Civil Rights organizer Walter Riley and longtime friend and Oakland organizer, Jesse Strauss. Together, they reflect on the importance of political action as the primary venue for learning and reflection. Walter Riley has a never-ending commitment to building a better world and he'll challenge readers to avoid the paralysis of analysis that slows movements down and to avoid getting caught in the missives of ego. Includes a foreword by Walter Riley's son, Boots Riley.
Jesse Strauss is an anti-imperialist and abolitionist cultural worker, community organizer, musician, and journalist born and raised in Oakland and Berkeley (unceded Ohlone/Chochenyo land). He is an anti-zionist descendent of Jewish survivors of the Nazi genocide and was raised by parents engaged in radical queer healthcare and immigration asylum access work in the Bay Area. As a journalist, Jesse has a long working relationship with KPFA Radio, where he co-created the first-ever daily abolitionist radio show, Law & Disorder. He was a producer for Al Jazeera during the so-called "Arab Spring" and "Occupy" movements.
Walter Riley grew up as a civil rights activist in the Jim Crow South, chaired Durham, North Carolina's Young Adult NAACP, organized voter registration, sit-ins, job campaigns, and was a Field Secretary for CORE in the Southeast Region. He became a San Francisco State University activist for ethnic studies, and was a member of the Black Student Union and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Riley has worked as a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer since the 1980s. He is a loving father and grandfather.
Civil Rights and Structural Attacks: Conversations with Walter Riley will be published on June 23 on AK Press
BOOK LAUNCH | Between Two Worlds: My Fifty Years in the Gurdjieff Work by James Opie
Between Two Worlds: My Fifty Years in the Gurdjieff Work James Opie | Foreword by Jeff Zaleski
Published by Monkfish in 2026
James Opie is a well-known figure in Portland, having been a successful rug dealer here for several decades, before retiring to upstate New York in 2021.
He is also an accomplished author, having written well-regarded books on tribal rugs from Afghanistan, Iran, and surrounding regions. He has now written a memoir, Between Two Worlds: My Fifty Years in the Gurdjieff Work. It is an engaging and candid account of a full and interesting life.
The book effortlessly combines bildungsroman, travelogue, and personal accounts of the trials of building a successful business, and of spiritual search. It starts with several chapters on Opie’s early life, including his involvement with the counterculture in California, and the threat of conscription for the Vietnam War. Well-chosen stories provide intimations of future developments that seemed unlikely at the time.
As the title indicates, the central theme of the book is the author’s long engagement with the teaching of the Greek-Armenian spiritual master G.I. Gurdjieff, commonly referred to as ‘the Work’. Opie writes of the challenges faced by any spiritually centered community, alongside the opportunities for self-knowledge that an intentional community can provide. One highlight of the book describes how the business and spiritual worlds came together in Afghanistan, through an unlikely chain of events.
An online review observes: "In the end, this memoir-with-Gurdjieff reveals how inner efforts and fortuitous help incrementally make a man more mature and serious, though still remaining a beginner."
“A worthy memoir steeped in an underdiscussed philosophical and spiritual tradition.”-- Kirkus Reviews
BOOK LAUNCH | THE WISDOM OF FEELING by Genny Rumancik
We can name our triggers, set boundaries, and explain our attachment styles—so why are we still stuck in the same patterns?
From TikTok therapy language to bestselling books on trauma and emotional health, a generation of readers is more self-aware than ever before. But awareness alone hasn't translated into change.
In THE WISDOM OF FEELING, educator and EQ School founder Genny Rumancik delivers what's been missing: a practical, real-world guide to what to do next. Blending emotional intelligence with tools drawn from therapy, nervous system science, and relational psychology, Rumancik shows readers how to move from insight to actual transformation.
Genny Rumancik is a mental health advocate, educator, and founder of The EQ School, which offers courses and online resources to improve self-awareness, emotional self-management, and relational health. Her work has reached a growing audience of more than 300K followers across social channels, alongside a thriving community of students and participants in her programs. Known for her grounded, compassionate teaching style, she helps people develop the emotional intelligence needed to build healthier relationships and more authentic lives.
BOOK LAUNCH | TEARS ARE EVERYWHERE by Kira Lynn Cain
Join us on Saturday, June 13, at 4pm for the launch of TEARS ARE EVERYWHERE, the debut book from artist and author Kira Lynn Cain.
Existing within its own teary universe, Tears Are Everywhere offers the concision of a children's book, the visual and tactile pleasures of an art monograph, and the interpretative contemplation of abstract art, all in one hardcover volume written and illustrated by artist and author Kira Lynn Cain. Immersive and minimal at once, Tears is a textural story, an invitation to a curious world, and an art book for all ages. Cain uses distinct mark-making and poetic language to share a new concept of what tears might be. This book, while informed by philosophy and contemporary art, takes its own idiosyncratic approach to tears, proving their ubiquity and tender power.
Tears Are Everywhere is published by Portland's own Buckman Publishing.
Free and open to all.
Monika Herceg |“Closed Season” Reading and conversation with Alicia Jo Rabins
Join us for an evening with award-winning Croatian poet, playwright, and novelist Monika Herceg, in conversation with Portland writer and musician Alicia Jo Rabins, celebrating her newest English-language collection, Closed Season.
Monika Herceg is an award-winning Croatian poet, playwright, and novelist, widely recognized as one of the most compelling contemporary literary voices from Southeast Europe. Her first poetry collection to appear in English, Initial Coordinates, was praised by the Los Angeles Review of Books as the work of "a major Croatian poet." Her newest English-language collection, Closed Season, transforms the idea of the "closed season", the brief period when hunted animals are protected into a devastating metaphor for women's lives under patriarchal violence. Fierce, formally inventive, these poems fuse the precision of physics with political urgency, exploring the body, power, motherhood, vulnerability, rage, and survival. Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk has described Herceg's poetry as "like a wound through which the world shines," praising its truth, anger, and hope for new stories
🎾 Portland Tennis Courterly: Big Issue Release Party
Portland Tennis Courterly: Big Issue Release Party
https://tenniscourterly.com/
Saturday, June 6, 2026
7:00 PM
Other People's Poems (OPP)
Other People's Poems (OPP)
Memorize someone else’s poem and come recite it (or just listen).
Friday, June 5
7 PM sharp
715 SE Grand Ave
Allen Ginsberg Centennial Reading hosted by Dan Raphael and Christopher Luna
Allen Ginsberg Centennial Reading
Hosted by Dan Raphael and Christopher Luna
Featuring Casey Bush, Darren Daniel, Katherine Factor, Benjamin Fisher, Mimi German, Leanne Grabel, Christopher Luna, Morgan Paige, dan raphael, Brian Rohr, Willa Schneberg, Alex Vigue, and Joe Wheeler reading poems by Allen Ginsberg on his 100th Birthday.
7-9pm
Learn more about Allen Ginsberg including information regarding other centennial readings planned across the country at the Allen Ginsberg Project: https://allenginsberg.org/
Nazis at the Watercooler | War Criminals in Postwar German Government Agencies
Mother Foucault's Bookshop is pleased to welcome Terrence C. Petty and Jacob Boas for a reading and conversation on Thursday, May 28 at 6:30 PM.
Germany has long been praised for the way it has confronted the Nazi past. But the accolades are only partly deserved, as meticulously documented by Portland author Terrence Petty in his book Nazis at the Watercooler: War Criminals in Postwar German Government Agencies.
Petty exposes a truth that German and American officials kept buried well into the 21st century: after West Germany’s creation in 1949, thousands of ex‑Nazis were hired into government jobs — including men involved in mass murder, in drafting antisemitic laws, in persecuting Hitler’s opponents, and in other depravities.
Petty documents how former Nazis who had established an early foothold in postwar government agencies helped each other get government work by writing letters of recommendation called Persilscheine. These “Persil Certificates,” named after a popular detergent, made an ex-Nazi’s recorded past just as clean as fresh laundry, Petty writes. Ex-Nazis were given preference for government jobs even over victims of Nazi policies and anti-Hitler resisters. They swapped Nazi uniforms for suits, Hitler salutes for handshakes.
Very few of these civil servants were ever investigated for potential war crimes, Petty shows. They worked until retirement, collecting generous government pensions, and many received plaques thanking them for their public service.
Based on six years of research, including Petty’s examination of declassified CIA and German government files, Nazis at the Watercooler reveals the depth and breadth of this long‑hidden injustice — and the reckoning Germany delayed for decades.
"A sharp-eyed look at a troubling past that still reverberates in modern Germany."—Kirkus Reviews"Nazis at the Watercooler has both intellectual and emotional resonance and stands as a meaningful contribution to the expanding body of scholarship on the enduring legacies of the Third Reich.”—Mikkel Dack, H-Diplo
Terrence C. Petty
Terrence C. Petty is a writer and retired journalist. He worked for the Associated Press for thirty-five years. Based in Bonn, Germany, from 1987 to 1997, he covered German and European affairs, the pro-democracy movement that toppled the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, neo-Nazi violence, and the fiftieth-anniversary ceremonies at Dachau, Buchenwald, and other former concentration camps. From 1999 to 2017 he managed the AP’s news operation in Oregon. He is also the author of Enemy of the People: The Munich Post and the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler. Petty, his wife Christina, their son Tristan, and two cats — Atticus and Helen — make their home in Northeast Portland, where they've lived for 26 years. A ninth-generation Vermonter, Petty has a bachelor of arts in history from the University of Vermont. He worked as a photographer, reporter and editor for newspapers in Vermont and upstate New York before joining The AP.
Jacob Boas was born in Transit Camp Westerbork (1943), the concentration camp in northeastern Holland from which the bulk of Dutch Jewry was sent to the killing centers in the East. Liberated in 1945, Boas grew up in Amsterdam and Montreal before moving on to California, where he earned a Ph.D. in history. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Patricia. His books include Boulevard des Misères: The Story of Transit Camp Westerbork (1985); We Are Witnesses: Five Diaries of Teenagers Who Died in the Holocaust (1995); Mr. Holocaust (I Presume) (2005); Writers' Block: The Paris Antifascist Congress of 1935 (2016); Until Further Notice ... Theresienstadt on My Mind (2024), and Burden of Proof: Fragments of a Surviving Remnant (2026).
www.jacobboas.com
Howard A. Rodman in conversation with Shawn Levy
Howard A. Rodman is the author of the novels Destiny Express and The Great Eastern. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Black Clock, and elsewhere. As a screenwriter his films include Joe Gould’s Secret; August with Josh Hartnett, Rip Torn, and David Bowie; and Savage Grace with Julianne Moore and Eddie Redmayne.
On television, he’s written for Fallen Angels and staffed on HBO Max’s The Idol. He’s a vice president of the Academy for Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a past president of the Writers Guild of America West. Rodman is one of seventeen members of the Screenwriters Hall of Fame, and was knighted by the Republic of France as an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
As an academic, Rodman is professor and former chair of the division of screenwriting at USC; as a journalist, he’s published hundreds of articles beginning with his tenure as editor-in-chief of the Cornell Daily Sun. In 2011 Rodman organized the nationwide Fantômas centennial, and remains on the steering committee of NOIRCON. Those who lived through the post-punk era in lower Manhattan may have seen him play guitar with the bands Arsenal and MADE IN USA. A proud son of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Rodman currently lives in Los Angeles.
About Destiny Express:
Hailed as “caviar for the art-film buff” by Kirkus Reviews, the novel Destiny Express captures the glamour and the terror of an era, dramatizing the perilous moment when art, politics, and destiny converged on the tracks out of Berlin.
Berlin, the last day of February, 1933. The Reichstag lies in smoldering ruins, a new world about to spring from its ashes. And now for German filmmakers the choices are stark: stay and collaborate with a government that believes in cinema’s power to shape reality, or leave everything behind. Destiny Express is the story of Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, husband and wife, director and screenwriter—together, they made some of the greatest films of all time: M., Metropolis, Doctor Mabuse. As each day is torn from the calendar they watch as one by one Bertolt Brecht, Max Ophuls, Billy Wilder, take the next train out. Destiny Express follows Lang, von Harbou, and a host of real and fictional others––novelist-turned-minister-of-culture Joseph Goebbels, American café Surrealist Sam Harrison, Mercedes racing champ Otto Merz, film star Rudolf Klein-Rogge, a pair of not-so-secret police—as their paths converge, intertwine, and separate across the grid of Berlin, from the artificial daylight of the UFA soundstage to the artificial night of Berlin's most exclusive and decadent nightclubs.
Harsh lights, long shadows: the perfect setting for a deeply researched, deftly imagined tale, as one character puts it, of “crime, gambling, cocaine, jazz, stock exchange maneuvers, smuggling, hypnosis, counterfeiting, violence, Expressionism.” Destiny Express is the story of a marriage at the end of its passion, at the edge of history—all at the end of an era when film was to mean more than it ever would again.
About The Great Eastern:
From the shipyards of London to the ports of New York, from the undersea abyss to the halls of empire, The Great Eastern is a sweeping tale of invention, rebellion, and the war between creation and destruction.
A vast iron ship. Two legendary captains. A battle for the soul of an age.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the world stood on the brink of transformation. Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the audacious engineer, dares to build the largest vessel ever conceived—the Great Eastern, a ship so immense it might stitch continents together with telegraphic wire. But beneath the waves lurks Captain Nemo, haunted genius of the submarine Nautilus, sworn enemy of empire and progress alike. When Nemo discovers Brunel’s plans, he vows to destroy both the ship and the world it represents.
Into this collision of titans steps another ghost of literature and legend: Captain Ahab, dragged from his watery grave, driven by obsession and vengeance, and drawn inexorably into the struggle between Brunel’s vision and Nemo’s rage.
At once a thrilling sea adventure and a subversive reimagining of classic myth, Howard A. Rodman’s audacious novel resurrects larger-than-life characters to tell a story that is as strange and wondrous as the century that gave birth to them. As Ricky Jay put it, “The Great Eastern is a nook of confabulations, real and imagined. Surprises on every page. A splendid and notable achievement.”
Howard A. Rodman will be in conversation with Shawn Levy.
Shawn Levy is the author of a dozen books, including the bestsellers The Castle on Sunset, Paul Newman: A Life, and Rat Pack Confidential and the prize-winning Dolce Vita Confidential. The former film critic for The Oregonian and KGW-TV, he lives and works and raises heck in Portland, Oregon.
CONCERT : Bryan John Appleby and Margaret Wehr
An evening of folk singer songwriters - Bryan John Appleby and Margaret Wehr at Mother Foucaults
Bryan John Appleby is a singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist based in Seattle. His folk-centric body of work meanders between mid-century pop, cinematic psych, and 70s crooner country.
With a body of work spanning two decades, he’s toured with Deep Sea Diver, The Head and the Heart, and Tomo Nakayama, and shared stages with Damien Jurado, Y La Bamba, Shaina Shepherd, Dean Johnson, Sera Cahoone, and many others. These days, the goal is to find more connective “human-scale” rooms to perform in, building regional DIY tours (preferably with routes near swimmable water).
His latest full-length, Underwater Easy Breathing, exemplifies his distinct production palette. Lush, coastal, and synth-laced, the album is a natural next step in his wandering, often densely layered repertoire. Previous works include The Narrow Valley (2015), a cinematic, maximalist concept album drenched in dreamy, orchestral layers and experimental sounds, and Fire on the Vine (2011), a darker collection with more conventional folk structures and organic instrumentation.
Margaret Wehr is a Portland-based singer-songwriter, violinist, vocalist, and member of queer folk group, Lo Pony.
Known for her intuitive harmonies and ability to seamlessly blend with any vocal texture, Margaret has recorded and performed with more than 80 bands over the past two decades. She has had the honor of collaborating with Sleater-Kinney, Y La Bamba, Chris Pureka, Anna Tivel, Jacob Miller, Alexis Mahler, MAITA, Moorea Masa & The Mood, EL VY, Haley Johnsen, and many others, happily making her mark on the Portland music scene from side stage.
Rooted in an eclectic blend of country, classical, and pop influences, Margaret grew up listening to The Chicks and Christina Aguilera, Martina McBride and Sara Bareilles, orchestral film scores and whatever radio show host “Delilah” was playing. You know the one. These days, she draws inspiration from her favorite musical storytellers: Madison Cunningham, Anna Tivel, Adrianne Lenker, and Angie McMahon.
As a songwriter, Margaret pairs vulnerable, honest storytelling with rhythmic acoustic guitar and intricate fingerpicking, creating songs that feel both intimate and expansive. She approaches the voice not just as a vehicle for lyrics, but as a fully expressive instrument, weaving delicate, ethereal melodies with a quiet precision and grounded clarity that elevate and transform the emotional core of her music.
You can follow her musical adventures and upcoming shows at margaretwehr.com and on Instagram @margaretwehr.
Translation Tuesday at Mother Foucault's
Translation Tuesday at Mother Foucault's
Tuesday, May 19, 2026
7:00 p.m.
Translation Tuesday double feature with Jeremy Klemin reading translations of fiction and non-fiction by Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes, and Jen Mendez reading excerpts from their translation of German author Hans Peter Richter's YA historical novel. The reading will be followed by a short Q&A.
Refreshments will be provided!
Jeremy Klemin’s writing and literary translations appear in AGNI, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. His work has received support from the Fulbright Program, Disquiet International, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from Oregon State University, and was named a 2026 Literary Arts Oregon Literary Fellow to support his in-progress essay collection about skateboarding, disability, and public space.
António Lobo Antunes, who has been called “one of Portugal’s preeminent writers” by The New York Times, was born in Lisbon in 1942. The son of a physician, he too became a doctor and then spent four years in the Portuguese army during the Angolan War. His book on that war, South of Nowhere, was internationally praised and followed by other widely translated and much-honored novels, including Act of the Damned, Explanation of the Birds, and The Natural Order of Things. He passed away in March 2026.
Jen Mendez is a German to English translator with a focus on literary translation. Originally from Seattle, they now reside in the Portland area, where they graduated with a BA in German Language and Literature from Portland State University. At the beginning of 2026, Jen stepped into the position of Vice President of the Northwest Translators and Interpreters Society (NOTIS), a regional chapter of the American Translators Association, and they frequently commute to Seattle to attend events with the organization’s NW Literary Translation Division. Jen is currently hard at work on a secret translation project that is set to be released in 2027.
Hans Peter Richter is an award-winning German author and academic from Cologne. Having come of age during WWII, Richter served as a lieutenant between 1942 and 1945, where his experiences inspired the trilogy of semi-autobiographical young adult novels for which he is best known: Friedrich, I Was There, and The Time of the Young Soldiers. The book Friedrich was awarded the prize for best young adult novel from the Sebaldus-Verlag in 1961. More than just an author, Richter studied psychology and sociology after his time in the war, and from 1973 on, he taught scientific methodology and sociology at the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences.
THE FAMILY BAND PRESENTS
Readers:
Vanessa Veselka
Leni Zumas
Paul Susi
Musicians:
Andres Avila JR
Marcus Gibbon
THE FAMILY BAND
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To organize a reading or book launch, call (503) 236-2665.