- This event has passed.
Pop-up: YesYes Books with Nina Packebush and Shelley Wong
General Admission Pass required for entry
Nina Packebush and Shelley Wong pop-up in the Portland Art Museum galleries with their original works.
Packebush and Wong are paired with the artwork Open Country by Larry Poons; found in the Modern and Contemporary Art area, on the 2nd floor of the Portland Art Museum. Please reference the Portland Art Museum Map or the Portland Book Festival print program to find this location.
Nina Packebush
Three Queerdos and a Baby (expected December 13, 2022)
After discovering she’s pregnant weeks after the tragic death of her sweetheart, Banjo Logan finds herself caught in a downward spiral of despair, confusion, and denial. Now at seventeen, Banjo is a new mom and determined to create a life for herself and her baby. She finds help in the form of a multi-generational pack of queer misfits and grown-up teenage moms. Navigating normal teenage rites of passage like first dances, new love, and existential dread while also facing the ups and downs of new motherhood with its leaky breasts, hormonal mood swings, and baby’s first smile, Banjo begins to find her way. Equal parts heartbreaking and hilarious Three Queerdos and a Baby takes the reader on a wild ride through the often hidden world of queer youth and teenage parents as it offers a coming-of-age story for a new generation who sees gender as a kaleidoscope and the future as an impossibility.
Shelley Wong
As She Appears
Shelley Wong’s debut, As She Appears, foregrounds queer women of color in their being and becoming. Following the end of a relationship that was marked by silence, a woman crosses over and embodies the expanse of desire and self-love. Other speakers transform the natural world and themselves, using art and beauty as a means of sanctuary and subversion. With both praise and precision, Wong considers how women inhabit and remake their environment. The ecstatic joys of Pride dances and late-night Chinatown meals, conversations with Frida Kahlo, trees that “burst into glamour,” and layers of memory permeate these poems as they travel through suburban California, perfumed fashion runways, to a Fire Island summer. Wong writes in the space where so many do not appear as an invitation for queer women of color to arrive in love, exactly as they are.
Portland Book Festival General Admission Passes are required for entry into all events. Passes are $15 in advance and $25 day of Festival. Youth 17 & under, or with a valid high school ID get in FREE. All full-priced General Admission Passes include a $5 book fair voucher and entry into Portland Art Museum. Passes admit attendees to the Festival; individual events are first-come, first-served. More info here.
