Suzette Smith

The Portland Mercury is calling this Oregon Book Awards the year of the graphic novel with nominations for Breena Bard's Wildfire Speechless by past Oregon Book Award winner Aron Nels Steinke, and the highly lauded Big Jim and the White Boy by David F. Walker. In the fiction category, it's no surprise to see Lidia Yuknavitch's Reading the Waves face off with A Field Guide to the Subterranean: Reclaiming the Deep Earth and Our Deepest Selves by Justin Hocking. Both writers are previous book award winners. In the nonfiction category, journalist Leah Sottile's Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets and the Fever Dream of the American New Age brings strong competition for High Desert, Higher Costs: Bend and the Housing Crisis in the American Wes t by the Oregonian 's Jonathan Bach. Attend the award ceremony to honor all the nominees, hosted by Kimberly King Parsons.

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If you appreciate the Mercury‘s interesting and useful news & culture reporting, consider making a small monthly contributionto support our editorial team. Your donation is tax-deductible. You can also subscribe and have our papers delivered! Good Morning, Portland! It’s supposed to be 80 degrees today. 1) THAT IS UPSETTING. 2) GO TO THE RIVER. 3) DON’T actually go […]

Good Morning, Portland! GRASS POLLEN IS VERY HIGH, even as the area's weather forecast remains cloudy and cool for the next few days.

Trying to categorize Mattress, the long-running music project of “the man in the gold suit” Rex Marshall, has always been a little tricky. It's funny, but is it comedy? There are beats, but should you dance? Marshall's memoirella All the Work I Never Wanted may be the easiest concept he's ever floated: It's a “fantastic, enthralling, hardly-embellished” collection of stories about all the minimum wage jobs he held between 1987-2002. Within the 100ish page volume—published by local press Banana Pitch—you'll find tales of the McDonald's grill, quality control at Columbia Sportswear, and a gig that started out with an old man on SE Hawthorne waving his arms at him and asking: “Hey! Hey you! You need a job?” Marshall will be joined in conversation by Michelle Kicherer, founder of Banana Pitch and author of Sexy Life, Hello

What's this? A weekly downtown ceramics market in a calendar of hot things to do? Do This, Do That contains multitude, and we think the readers want

Good Morning, Portland! Today is gonna be a beaut . Meteorologically. High of 73, sun and clouds, by the time you're reading this, the day's rain should be done.

For the fifth year, Race Talks presents an evening that explores Black drag in Portland.

Pride can be so booty shorts and body beats. And we love that… most of the time. But what about when we're in our quiet queer era?

If you believe Portland benefits from smart, local journalism and arts coverage, please consider making a small monthly contribution to the Mercury, because without you, there is no us. Thanks for your support! Good Morning, Portland! Is your phone screaming at you about a heat advisory? That’s because metro area temperatures are expected to soar into the 90s […]