In 2015, Coates won a MacArthur fellowship and the National Book Award, the latter for Between the World and Me, a book-length letter addressed to his teenage son that articulated the Black experience in America. The cover quote is from Toni Morrison; she called Coates’s book “required reading.” Coates, who spent a decade as a national correspondent for The Atlantic, leaned further into his journalism roots with The Message, published October 1. In three extended essays, he travels to Dakar, Senegal; Columbia, South Carolina; and Palestine, three places loaded with historical symbolism and mythos, attempting to disambiguate stories from material conditions.  

Spun off from the regular series she hosts at the Hollywood Theatre, Teets’s Isn’t She Great is an anthology of essays written by women about women-led comedies, 9–5 to Booksmart, as the subtitle reads. LA comic Aubrey Jacobowitz takes on Miss Congeniality in an essay titled “Satan’s Panties.” London-based writer Meg Walters delves into the Nora Ephron universe. And Anthony Hudson, who cohosts the live series with Teets, contributes an afterward. At this event, Teets will chat with Portlander Shawn Levy, author of In On the Joke.

Retired Marylhurst and Lewis & Clark writing professor Martha Gies’s linked essay collection, Broken Open, knits together anecdotes from her 80 years. There’s the time she met one of Oppenheimer’s colleagues, the time she worked as a budget magician’s traveling assistant, the time she spent studying fiction with Raymond Carver.

The singular book event of the year. Pulitzer-winning author of The Overstory Richard Powers and the activist and children’s author—who also happens to be a Grammy-winning singer-songwriter—Ani DiFranco are this year’s marquee names, but they’re just two of 100-plus authors and moderators billed. That list includes Chanel Miller, Mitchell S. Jackson, Rachel Kushner, Max Greenfield (the children's author you may know as Schmidt from New Girl), Carson Ellis, and Chelsea Bieker.

Barrington, a British expat who landed in Portland in 1976, is known as much for teaching memoir as she is for her poetry and her own memoirs. Her 1997 book Writing the Memoir is a foundational text of the genre. Now, at age 80, Barrington is publishing a new memoir of collected essays, Virginia’s Apple, combing 14 episodes of early affairs, being an out lesbian woman, her friendship with Adrienne Rich in what Oregon Arts Watch’s Amy Leona Havin calls “a lightly erotic and wind-tousled book.”

Always with a controlled slant of self-deprecation, Sedaris’s autobiographical essays pluck the details from life that make compelling stories, turning the banal into the profound—and hilarious. Onstage, his show is essentially just a live reading. But Sedaris reading Sedaris feels as necessary as Taylor Swift singing Taylor Swift. His latest books are 2022’s Happy-Go-Lucky, a set of personal essays, and the second installment of his diaries, covering 2003–2020, A Carnival of Snackery.

Picked by Maggie Nelson as the winner of Portland small press Fonograf Editions’ essay contest, Johnson’s debut memoir, Low, is a study of trash—as both social class and artistic perspective. Early in life, Johnson saw education as the way to rectify her inherited “white trash” status. Graduate degrees led her away and then back to her “low” socioeconomic position: She returned to study and reclaim her abject, trash identity in art and life, and find where the two meet.

There is a lot to mourn in Portlander Diana Oropeza’s slippery, form-shifting debut, An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance, including the book itself. “As you read,” the jacket copy promises, it “disappears in your hands.” Weaving fragmentary essays and flash fiction, Disappearance, the latest release from local small press Future Tense, jumps between Raphael, Sophie Calle, D. B. Cooper, and unresolved disappearances near and far to investigate the nature of unexplained and unresolved loss. Oropeza will chat with fellow Portland debut author Jaydra Johnson (see above) and this double book launch event. 

Per Vogue’s preview, Kim’s second novel, City of Night Birds, is alive with backstage sweat, vodka-soaked blisters, and enough “self-confidence and hauteur” to uphold the former prima ballerina at its center as she fights her way out of addiction and back to the St. Petersburg stage. Kim, a Portland Monthly contributor who now splits her time between here and London, will chat with the head of the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation, Theo Downes-Le Guin.