Stacey Abrams, Jess Walter, Susan Orlean, Rebecca Yarros, and many more • Oregon ArtsWatch

Stacey Abrams, Jess Walter, Susan Orlean. If any of those names float your literary boat, you’ll want to set sail for the 2025 Portland Book Festival.

Those writers are among the more than 80 authors and presenters scheduled to appear at the Nov. 8 festival, to be held in venues in and around downtown Portland’s South Park Blocks, Literary Arts, the nonprofit that presents the festival, announced Tuesday.

Political leader and civic strategist Abrams is the author of books for children, for would-be leaders, and for fans of romantic suspense and political thrillers. She is also one of two festival headliners (along with Rebecca Yarros, see below), and will appear in conversation with Dave Miller of OPB’s Think Out Loud. Her newest novel, Coded Justice, falls under the thriller category and is the third featuring former Supreme Court law clerk Avery Keene. The plot revolves around a tech company that has created an AI system “poised to revolutionize the medical industry.” What could go wrong?

Walter, Spokane-based author of Beautiful Ruins and The Cold Millions (a National Endowment for the Arts Big Read selection), returns to the festival following publication of his new novel, So Far Gone. The Los Angeles Times described it as “A gleeful, kooky and tender homage to Charles Portis’s True Grit with echoes of Tom Robbins and yes, Elinor Lipman too.”

Orlean, a staff writer for The New Yorker whose early career included a stint at Portland’s Willamette Week newspaper, has written books on subjects ranging from orchid fanatics, to Rin Tin Tin, to the wonder of libraries. Her new book, Joyride, is a memoir. “The story of my life is the story of my stories,” Orlean writes.

HERE BE DRAGONS

The second headliner at this year’s festival is Rebecca Yarros, New York Times bestselling author of more than 20 novels, including the The Empyrean series of romantasy novels. The latest and third in the series, Onyx Storm, was published in January. On her website, Yarros writes: “I’ve never done an event in Portland before and I’m SO excited to get to see some of you Pacific Northwesterners!” Speaking with Yarros will be Portland’s Laini Taylor, author of the young adult fantasy series Daughter of Smoke & Bone and a 2009 finalist for the National Book Award in Young People’s Literature.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

Nonfiction standouts with resonance for our times include Portland writer Omar El Akkad, two-time Oregon Book Award winner for fiction, whose first nonfiction book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, tackles the destruction of Gaza in what the publisher calls “a heartsick breakup letter with the West.”  Jill Lepore, a Harvard history professor and staff writer at The New Yorker, explains why amending the U.S. Constitution is so hard — intentionally so, on the part of the Founding Fathers — in We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution. “One of the Constitution’s founding purposes was to prevent change,” she writes. “Another was to allow for change without violence.”

Cookbook readers can salivate over two Portland-area writers whose new releases are focused on the important food groups of ice cream and pasta. Joshua McFadden, chef and owner of restaurants including Ava Gene’s and Tusk, has written a cookbook titled Six Seasons of Pasta, and Tyler Malek, co-founder of Salt & Straw, offers 75 ice cream recipes in America’s Most Iconic Ice Creams.

MacArthur genius fellow Reginald Dwayne Betts leads the festival’s poetry contingent. Betts is the founder of Freedom Reads, dedicated to bringing books to incarcerated people via Freedom Libraries. His new collection, Doggerel, concerns fatherhood, friendship, love, and dogs. Irish poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama, host of the Poetry Unbound podcast, is among the festival writers with two books published this year: 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (anthology) and Kitchen Hymns.

The book festival continues its commitment to young readers (who are admitted free of charge) with a strong showing of young adult, middle grade, and picture book authors, including Marissa Meyer, Donna Barba Higuera, Renée Watson, Derrick Barnes, and Tae Keller.

Other scheduled Northwest authors include Kristen Arnett, Olufunke Grace Bankole, Emma Pattee, Jon Raymond, Karen Russell, Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., Daniel H. Wilson, Leni Zumas, Craig Thompson, and Lidia Yuknavitch. With the festival more than two months away, organizers caution that the list of participants is subject to change. Check the festival website for the full list of participants.

THE DETAILS

The festival, originally called Wordstock, was started in 2005 by Oregon writer Larry Colton and acquired by Literary Arts in 2014, receiving its new name three years later. Besides author talks and panels, the festival includes pop-up readings, drop-in writing workshops, book sellers, exhibitor booths ranging from small publishers to college programs to literary-themed clothing, and food carts.

Tickets start at $18 in advance, $25 day of the festival, with $5 Arts for All passes available to SNAP/Oregon Trail Card holders. Admission is free to veterans, people with an active military ID, and youth 17 and younger and those with an active high school ID. Admission to appearances by Abrams and Yarros, in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, cost an additional $5 (or $35 with book).