Dear Friends —
I hope this finds you all healthy and safe. Today we are announcing that all of Literary Arts’ programming will be virtual through May 31, 2021. In addition to the upcoming Portland Book Festival, this includes the remaining Portland Arts & Lectures season for 2020-21, all @Literary Arts events, all workshops and seminars, the Oregon Book Awards ceremony, and all of our public Youth Programs events.
We’ve made this decision to protect the health and safety of all we serve. Since last March when the pandemic began, our staff, board, councils, instructors, and others have been hard at work adapting our programs to deliver the same rich content online and on the radio. It has spurred innovation and helped us really define what is essential about our work—to build community around rich and complex ideas, and to empower people to tell their stories, and by so doing define themselves.
Our commitment to you is to continue to evolve and adapt our work to be its most engaging and inspiring in these new formats. We will continue to search and experiment with formats, production techniques, and platforms to ensure you can access our programs easily and with minimal barriers. Our commitment to bring you the world’s most accomplished new and established writers continues, as does our deep investment in supporting new generations of writers. We will continue to offer a variety of online Delve seminars and writing classes, led by experienced teachers and scholars. And our values remain the same now as they did before COVID—access and equity are essential to us as our mission is to reach as many people, from all walks of life, as possible.
We are honored that thousands of people like you continue to attend our events, classes, workshops, and other programs. It demonstrates that our community is deeply invested in this conversation about who we are and who we we aspire to be. We look forward to continuing those conversations over the coming months, and to the day when we can once again throw open our doors and welcome you back in person.
Thank you, and take good care.
Andrew Proctor
Executive Director,
Literary Arts
