Meet the 2024 Portland Book Festival Guest Artists

The last book I consumed was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Notes on Grief, which recounts Adichie’s experience loosing her father during the first waves of isolation in the COVID-19 pandemic. 

No one chooses to read about grief without having experienced it in their life in some shape or form and coming up against the onslaught of emotions that follow loss. The same goes for me. Truly, in answering these questions, I will admit that the biggest shift and change in my life has been the loss of my only sibling in April of 2023. Although I wanted to avoid acknowledging it while writing these responses grief always has a remarkable way of becoming present, more than any other emotion I’ve felt. It has tinged my work, my outlook on life, and my daily experiences both as an artist and as a human. In many ways I have found a deep gratitude for the beautiful gift of being alive, and in other ways life is a heavy burden, full of pain. The experience of living while swinging between these two disparate mental spaces is heavy—it’s also a portal to a level of understanding and empathy for other people that I had never considered. I feel curiosity about how this new experience will change and shift my work.