Queer Literature at #PDXBookFest 2020

Stories featuring queer characters, queer desire, and queer joy.

Be sure to register at PDXBookFest.org to catch these FREE live-streamed events, and RSVP at the event pages below.

Boys of Alabama is a love song to outsiders of all kinds, a queer love story about the ways we find to heal ourselves and each other, and proof that there can be magic amid the burdens of masculinity.

Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me

This stunning debut novel from Thomas is detailed, heart-rending, and immensely romantic. I was bawling by the end of it, but not from sadness: I just felt so incredibly happy that this queer Latinx adventure will get to be read by other kids. Cemetery Boys is necessary: for trans kids, for queer kids, for those in the Latinx community who need to see themselves on the page.

Mark Oshiro, author of Anger is a Gift

Memorial dares to insist on the mundane, thoroughly lived life as a site of perennial hope, joy, and abundance. It casts a fresh take on the American family that becomes truer because of its disparate origins, the queerness of its genesis, and the buoyed wonder it finds in surviving grief and loss towards the rare and forgiving ground of difficult, hard-won love. All of this done in sentences clean and clear as cut glass. This book, in what feels like a new vision for the 21st century novel, made me happy.

Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

POSTCOLONIAL LOVE POEM: NATALIE DIAZ & LIVE WIRE RADIO

Mon, November 16 at 2:00 pm PST

Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds.

Diaz’s collection is no doubt one of the most important poetry releases in years, one to applaud for its considerable demonstration of skill, its resistance to dominant perspectives and its light wrought of desire.

The New York Times Book Review

Arvin Ahmadi’s finest hour is here with How It All Blew Up. The compelling cast, heart-in-your-throat tension, eye-opening joy, and epic discoveries count down to a dramatic ticking time-bomb of a finale that will leave readers astonished.

Adam Silvera, New York Times bestselling author of They Both Die at the End

ALL BOOKS PURCHASED THROUGH FESTIVAL EVENTS, FROM ANNIE BLOOM’S BOOKS, BROADWAY BOOKS, GREEN BEAN BOOKS, OR POWELL’S BOOKS SUPPORT THE AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS WHO SHARE THEIR WORK AT THE FESTIVAL AND THE BOOKSELLERS WHO HAVE WORKED HARD TO KEEP THEIR BUSINESSES OPEN DURING THESE DIFFICULT TIMES. BY PURCHASING BOOKS FROM THESE BOOKSTORES YOU ARE SUPPORTING THE SUSTAINABILITY OF THE FESTIVAL.