Portland's identity as a major literary city is well-established, at least to anyone paying attention. Still, it’s nice to see it in writing. The Portland Book Festival lineup, out today, serves as a snapshot of the national literary scene. As usual, the more than 80 authors it includes are responsible for the most celebrated books published within the past 18 months. Authors come from all over for the gathering. But this year in particular, a nice chunk of those big names happen to live here. 

Saturday, November 2, the day-long, all-ages festival will take over six venues across the Park Blocks, filling the streets between the Portland Art Museum and Portland’5 venues with food carts and tents for pop-up readings. This year marks a decade of the nonprofit Literary Arts organizing the event, after taking over and transforming the Portland Art Museum’s smaller event, Wordstock.

The list of buzzy local novels in this year’s programming includes Portlander Chelsea Bieker’s Madwoman (“breathlessly confessional,” per a rave New York Times review.), Kimberly King Parsons’s We Were the Universe, about the nuance and taboo of grief-stricken young motherhood, and Willy Vlautin’s The Horse, a forlorn western—but never humorless!

Two celebrated local children’s book authors, Renée Watson and Carson Ellis, are bringing their first books written for adults, skin & bones and One Week in January, respectively. Nonfiction Oregonian titles include Ferris Jabr’s acclaimed Becoming Earth, (a “thought-provoking study of how everything from microbes to mammoths transformed our world into a living organism,” per the Guardian), and Umi Organic founder Lola Milholland’s Group Living and Other Recipes, a debut memoir that challenges the societal pressure to live in a single-family home.  

Of course, plenty of exciting authors come to Portland for the festival, too. This isn’t the type of event with a headliner, per se, though two events at the Schnitz each year do require separate tickets (usually about five bucks). Grammy-winning singer, author, and political activist Ani DiFranco will share her latest picture book, Show Up and Vote. And the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory, Richard Powers, will read from his hotly anticipated new novel, Playground—though it hasn’t yet been published, it’s already long-listed for the Booker Prize. 

The Schnitzer events are far from the only ones with illustrious out-of-towners. Elsewhere (the festival’s detailed schedule is still under works), Rachel Kushner, who’s also on that Booker Prize list, will read from Creation Lake, a spy novel NPR calls “her coolest book yet.” Canadian comics artist Walter Scott will share the fourth installment of his art-world-skewering Wendy comics series, The Wendy Award. National Book Critics Circle Award–winning poet Morgan Parker is bringing her artful essay collection exploring the history of being a Black woman in America, You Get What You Pay For. And Minneapolis poet Danez Smith will share the collection of poems they wrote in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Bluff, which the Brooklyn Rail called “the reckoning we’ve been looking for.”

See the Portland Book Festival’s website for the full lineup.