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The Edge of Water: Olufunke Grace Bankole
Free
Olufunke Grace Bankole reads and discusses her debut novel The Edge of Water, in conversation with Margaret Malone.
Join us as we celebrate the debut novel from Portland author and Oregon Literary Fellowship recipient Olufunke Grace Bankole, published by our friends at Portland’s own Tin House.
Set between Nigeria and New Orleans, The Edge of Water tells the story of a young woman who dreams of life in America, as the collision of traditional prophecy and individual longing tests the bonds of a family during a devastating storm.
This event is free and open to the public at our new headquarters and bookstore at 716 SE Grand Avenue, Portland, OR.
Olufunke Grace Bankole
Olufunke Grace Bankole is a Nigerian American writer. The Edge of Water (Tin House), her debut novel, has been praised by Oprah Daily, Goodreads, Ms. Magazine, Book Riot, Electric Literature, The Root, Debutiful, and more; named a Best Book of 2025 by Apple; and is currently a Finalist for the Westport Prize for Literature and a Finalist for the New American Voices Award. A graduate of Harvard Law School, and a recipient of a Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship, her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Ploughshares, Glimmer Train Stories, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, The Antioch Review, and Poets & Writers. She won the first-place prize in the Glimmer Train Short-Story Award for New Writers, and was the Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has been awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship in Fiction, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, a residency-fellowship from the Anderson Center at Tower View, and other honors.
Margaret Malone
Margaret Malone is the host of the literary radio show Bust the Canon on xray.fm, and author of the story collection People Like You, a Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction & Winner of the Balcones Fiction Prize, and selected as one of the Northwest’s “25 Books to Read Before You Die” by Powell’s Books.
