Literary Arts is a community-based nonprofit whose mission is to engage readers, support writers, and inspire the next generation with great literature. Literary Arts began in 1984 as Portland Arts & Lectures and has since grown to be home to the Oregon Book Awards and Fellowships program, Writers in the Schools and other youth programs, Portland Book Festival, writing classes and readers seminars, as well as the radio show and podcast The Archive Project.
Now in our 40th anniversary year, Literary Arts is celebrating 10 years presenting the Portland Book Festival and 40 years since the first Portland Arts & Lectures event. In June, we also publicly launched our first capital campaign, The Campaign for Literary Arts. This $22.5 million project will cover the purchase, renovation, and expanded staff and programming in a new headquarters and permanent home in the Central Eastside Industrial District which will include expanded community space, classrooms, and a bookstore and café, as well as transform the Northwest Portland home where beloved and revolutionary writer Ursula K. Le Guin lived and wrote for over 50 years into a writers residency.
In 2017, acknowledging its part in the long history of arts institutions that have “contributed to and benefitted from racist systems,” Literary Arts began efforts to publicly and explicitly center racial equity across all our programming efforts, citing it as “crucial to both our own growth and that of the Portland arts and culture ecosystem,” with the hope that “by addressing racial inequity in our community, we will create a space in which readers, writers, and youth of any and all identities feel welcome.”
These efforts have continued and evolved in the years since, and in our recently released 23/24 Annual Report, we were excited to share key indicators of progress towards our ongoing commitment to equity work in all aspects of our programming, including at Portland Book Festival, where this past year 50% of presenters identified as BIPOC. Another highlight of the Festival in 2023 was featuring a bilingual story time with Adventures in Spanish, and a bilingual pop-up event with Cross-Stitch author Jazmina Barrera.
Looking ahead, we are honored to bring such a packed roster of diverse voices to Portland audiences this Fall, including a now sold-out 40th anniversary season of Portland Arts & Lectures kicking off with bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club Amy Tan, along with stand-alone events with trailblazing news anchor and icon Connie Chung on September 25, and award-winning author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates on October 22.
Overall, we continue to strive to engage with humility and in collaboration with our community, and to recognize that this is a long term and ongoing endeavor. We are grateful to our generous partners in this work.
Read Literary Arts’ public commitment to equity on their website here.
