Beloved literary community member Steve Arndt died on February 6, 2026. Fond memories and deep appreciations abound. This piece is from a social media post by Nikki Darling of Eugene, OR. Steve Arndt coined the term “Spanbauerian” to describe all that he’d learned and loved at the hands of his friend and mentor Tom Spanbauer. …
From Miriam Gershow, the author of Closer: This week saw the culmination of a year’s work on the 100 Notable Small Press Books project I started last winter. Forty remarkable reviewers spent 2025 reading small press books, and Lit Hub published the final list on Monday. Click on the image to read the list. Sign up to …
From LitHub: Miriam Gershow Recommends Zoe Heller, Emily St. James, Jim Shepherd and More I am a writer living comfortably in middle age, embracing every gray hair, shopping the Eileen Fisher racks with glee, and yet I’m obsessed with high school. My new novel, Closer, takes place in and around a public high school in fictional Horace, …
Literary Arts announced the finalists for the 2025 Oregon Book Awards. Congratulations! The winners of each category will be announced live at the 2025 Oregon Book Awards Ceremony, hosted by Omar El Akkad, at Portland Center Stage at The Armory on Monday, April 28, 2025. Tickets are available here. SPECIAL AWARDS In addition to recognizing …
By: David Mura for JSTOR April 17, 2024 I Hear America Singing Japanese American poet Garrett Hongo is a guiding spirit to a glorious cacophony, an exuberant collective thrum made of different tongues and peoples. I’ve admired Garrett Hongo, the great Japanese American poet since I first read “Yellow Light” in The New Yorker in 1980. One arm …
Pedro Hoffmeister’s disaster thriller American Afterlife and Meredith Hambrock’s dark humored crime novel Other People’s Secrets were both released by Crooked Lane Books in recent months. The publishing house mates connected to talk about writing, process, and what’s next. PH: First, let’s each answer a few of the same rapid-fire questions. Then we’ll go deeper. …
From Amy Wang of The Oregonian/OregonLive, June 3, 2022: For Nanea Woods, books and community have always gone together, and now she’s launching her biggest effort yet to combine the two. Portland’s first Black literary festival, the Freadom Festival, is a tribute to freedom and reading that’s taking place in Portland’s Peninsula Park on Saturday, June …
From Literary Arts: Literary Arts is thrilled to announce this year’s Oregon Book Awards finalists. Thirty-five Oregonians across seven genre categories were chosen as finalists by panels of out-of-state judges, from a total of 202 submitted titles. Winners will be announced live at the 2022 Oregon Book Awards Ceremony at Portland Center Stage at The Armory on Monday, …
Remember Eugene author J. C. Geiger‘s road trip from Oregon to NYC for Book Expo in 2017? Over 100 booklovers supported his journey (and the American Library Association) so he could meet his fundraising goal. For Geiger’s new book, The Great Big One, readers can travel along, both virtually through a mixtape with clues and …
One silver lining from no travel and minimizing in-person contact is that event access is not geographically-dependent. This year, it means that the celebration of 2021 Pacific Northwest Book Award-winning the authors and books is online and open to all registered book lovers. The event will be presented as a Zoom webinar Wednesday, February 10 …
