Seeking Salvation: Chelsea Bieker & Kelli Jo Ford
Thu, November 5 from 2:00 pm - 2:45 pm PST
Livestream at PDXBookFest.org
#PDXBookFest
Free
Two novels about generations of women trying to survive in inhospitable places, examining what we inherit and what we must leave behind.
A fourteen-year-old girl and her mother navigate drought, desperation, and the pull of a religious cult in the California Central Valley in Godshot by Chelsea Bieker. And in Kelli Jo Ford’s Crooked Hallelujah, three generations of Cherokee women navigate the violences of unreliable men and near-Biblical natural forces as they search for home. Moderated by Kesha Ajose Fisher, author of No God Like the Mother, winner of the 2020 Oregon Book Award in Fiction.
PURCHASE GODSHOT | CROOKED HALLELUJAH | NO GOD LIKE THE MOTHER
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. Please buy early and often and know that by purchasing books you are supporting the sustainability of the festival.
Chelsea Bieker
Chelsea Bieker is from California’s Central Valley. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award and her fiction and essays have been published in Granta, McSweeney’s, Catapult magazine, Electric Literature, and Joyland, among others. She has been awarded a MacDowell Colony fellowship, and holds an MFA in creative writing from Portland State University. Godshot is her first novel.
Read more
Purchase Godshot from Broadway Books, one of our Portland-based, independent bookstore partners HERE.
Kelli Jo Ford
Kelli Jo Ford is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize, the Everett Southwest Literary Award, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Award at Bread Loaf, a National Artist Fellowship by the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and a Dobie Paisano Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, and the anthology Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, among other places. Crooked Hallelujah is her first book.
Read more
Purchase Crooked Hallelujah from Broadway Books, one of our Portland-based, independent bookstore partners HERE.
Kesha Ajose Fisher
Kesha Ajose Fisher was born in Chicago and raised in Lagos, Nigeria. She now lives in Oregon with her family. Kesha’s debut collection of fictional stories, No God Like the Mother, focuses on the lives and realities of women who have been tasked with holding up the sky, all while the world whispers “you’re doing it wrong”. Fisher has won the 2020 Oregon Book Award for Fiction and The Phoenix Literary Magazine’s Editor’s Choice Award for Short Fiction in both 2011 and 2012. Her writing has been published in several online and print collections, and in such publications as Multicultural Familia Magazine, the Alchemy Literary Magazine, and twice in Beyond Black & White Magazine. Kesha is committed to fighting for social justice, and her dedication to this cause can be seen in everything she does. She works in social services, is a vocal advocate for immigrants and refugees, and she champions equality and education while opposing the poverty that plagues humanity.
Read more
