Local cookbook author Liz Crain and vegan chef Aaron Adams cataloged the plant-based recipes he cooks (and grows) at his Southeast Portland restaurant, Fermenter. The book leans accessible (see our excerpted kombucha recipe). Crain and Adams will sit on an all-star panel with Kann chef and owner Gregory Gourdet, who penned his own James Beard Award–winning cookbook, Everyone’s Table, back in 2021, and regular New York Times Cooking contributor Hetty Lui McKinnon, who is bringing her latest book, Tenderheart, which Nigella Lawson calls “almost a memoir in recipes.” 

In Kiesling’s second novel, Mobility, Bunny cultivates an increasing interest in petropolitics as a teenager when her father, a US foreign service officer, is stationed in Azerbaijan in the late ’90s. As an adult, she finds herself working for an energy company in Texas, seemingly forced into the very industry she resents. The LA Times called Mobility “an emotionally and geopolitically savvy coming-of-age story about … America’s evolving reliance on oil.” At the festival, Kiesling, who recently moved to Portland from LA, will chat with Portland novelist Patrick deWitt.  

Known for his breakout, dark-hued western, The Sisters Brothers, which was adapted into a movie of the same name starring Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly, deWitt has since moved toward more nuanced character studies, and away from the action-packed plot of his big break. The new book is set in Portland, in 2005, around the life of a septuagenarian retired librarian. Bob, the titular librarian, lives an introvert’s life, scarred by his wife’s running off with his best friend decades ago. deWitt will chat with fellow Portland novelist Lydia Kiesling. 

Berry’s buzzy debut book (read our full review) contrasts her own coming of age with the much-publicized journey of OR-7, the first wolf to return to Oregon after the species’ local extinction 50 years prior. More than a science-focused book, Wolfish is a memoiristic investigation—citing tweets, fairy tales, political speeches, and classic literature—into what wolves symbolically mean to society. It juxtaposes the nuance of justifiable fears against the historical tendency to scapegoat irreconcilable traumas onto available proxies: blame it on the wolves. Berry will discuss her book with the New York–based science writer Sabrina Imbler and writer and Live Wire host Elena Passarello. 

Though technically an Arizona resident these days, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer and Portland native will always be a local to us. Fly: The Big Book of NBA Fashion, is a “coffee table book” with a powerful message. Through the league’s nearly eight decades—from Wilt Chamberlain to Jordan to Lebron—Jackson traces how players’ off-court outfits have directly related to public affairs, namely with clothes as indicators of where Black people are in their struggle for civil rights. Jackson will chat with OPB’s Paul Marshall.

You can read our profile of Mojgani, Oregon’s current poet laureate, who published his sixth collection of poetry, The Tigers, They Let Me, this summer. Though he’s known for his immensely engaging performances (he came up in slam poetry), Mojgani manages to capture that same energy on the page. And the poems collected in this latest book continue his themes of human connection, oftentimes through narratives. Mojgani will discuss his book with acclaimed poet Charif Shanahan; later in the day, he will moderate a discussion between Pulitzer-winner Paul Harding (This Other Eden) and Utah poet laureate Paisley Rekdal (West: A Translation).