PORTLAND BOOK FESTIVAL
Being a literary citizen means showing up—for writers, independent presses, bookstores, and the readers who turn a room into a community. Join Unsolicited Press at Portland Book Festival to meet our authors and find your next book, then keep the conversation going at readings around town, including evenings at Bold Coffee & Books, Leikam Brewing, Breakside Brewery, and Migration Brewing. At our table, the $40 festival pass lets you choose any three books in person during festival weekend: buy the pass online, then come celebrate the people and pages that make a reading life.
PEOPLE ATTENDING
Authors will be signing at the table on Friday and Saturday. A schedule will be made available the week of the festival.
Portland Book Festival Pass
Books bring us together: a writer makes the work, a reader shows up, and a conversation begins. Celebrate literary citizenship with Unsolicited Press at Portland Book Festival. Our $40 pass lets you choose three books from the designated Loot Collection at our table. Bring your order confirmation and choose your books in person during festival weekend.
At the Table
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At the Table *
Books & Breweries:
The Portland Reading Crawl
Four readings across Portland Book Festival weekend, with independent books and local beer at every stop. We open at BOLD Coffee & Books , then continue the crawl with our brewery partners at Leikam, Breakside, and Migration. Each event has its own readers, vibe, room, and reason to stop in; together, they make one Portland reading weekend.
The Body Has Teeth: A Reading & Conversation
Saturday, November 7 · 6:30–8:30 p.m. · BOLD Coffee & Books, 1755 SW Jefferson Street, Portland
Four writers enter the dark from different doors. Anthony DiPietro’s poems move through gay love, sex, and the strange repetitions of desire. Amy Baskin gives Lilith—the first woman, cast as demon—her fierce voice. Summer Stewart’s poems and essays expose the scripts written onto women’s bodies and lives. In David Loring Nash’s Northwoods, witchcraft, revenge, and human folly wait just beyond the treeline. Join them for a reading and conversation. It’s bound to get sharp.
The Night Shift at Leikam Brewing
Saturday, November 7 · 7PM · EAST BURNSIDE
The festival floor closes; the reading goes on. Continue the crawl at Leikam Brewing with short readings from Unsolicited Press authors, a good pour, and the kind of talk that keeps going after the last page. Drop in for this stop, or make it the first round of a full weekend of books and breweries.
The Big Pour: An Independent Press Gathering at Breakside
Sunday, November 8 · 2:00 p.m. start · Breakside, Milwaukie
The biggest brewery gathering of the weekend: Unsolicited Press authors and publisher still in town, independent presses from around Portland, and readers, writers, editors, booksellers, and anyone else who loves books. Join us for readings, local beer, and a Sunday afternoon with the people making the literary scene.
Last Call for Books at Migration Brewing
Sunday, November 8 · 7:00–8:30 p.m. · Migration Brewing · SE GLISAN
One last round before the weekend slips away. Close the crawl at Migration Brewing with readings from Unsolicited Press authors, a pint, and one more chance to get into the books and the conversation. Come for the final stop—or make this your only stop.
Can't make it to Portland?
Fine. We brought the table to you.
MURDERER is a searing poetry collection that confronts personal and American trauma through memory, labor, faith, and loss. Andy Smart examines the “murder of reality” in poems shaped by a father’s suicide, working-class survival, and fractured national mythologies. Fierce, irreverent, and unflinching, the collection sings for those still searching for truth in the wreckage.
The Burntwood Anthology is a collection of six stories of dark fiction from Minnesota Book Award Finalist David Loring Nash (In Wells’ Time, Unsolicited Press, 2024). It is a braided narrative of Northwoods horror, eerie introspection, subtle witchcraft, and self-proclaimed kings getting what they deserve. The collection explores topics ranging from hubris and revenge to commentaries on the fluidity of sexuality and dating in the digital age.
Raised in the shadow of the Pacific Northwest’s most notorious predators, Jill grew up knowing how easily girls could disappear. Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer—these names were part of the landscape, as were the near-misses: first a close call for Jill’s sister, and years later, one for Jill herself.
A chilling phone call from a stranger becomes the fracture point in Jill’s marriage—and the spark that leads her to a martial arts dojo. Training becomes a lifeline. So when a second predator targets her, it’s her instructor who steps between her and danger. Their bond deepens, they open a dojo together, and they fall in love. But as Liam’s mental health unravels, the man who once protected her becomes the one she must learn to survive.
Told through six sections—Run, Block, Fake, Parry, Strike, Accept—Learning to Spar mirrors the techniques Jill must master both on the mat and in life. With unflinching honesty, she navigates escalating threats, profound grief, and the deaths of three family members, including her father. Alongside the systemic forces of patriarchy she has battled her entire life, Jill also confronts the intimate, complicated relationship with her father as she reckons with a painful incident from childhood.
Both heart-pounding and deeply introspective, Learning to Spar exposes how our culture romanticizes predators and abandons the women they hunt. In the end, Jill’s story—of earning her black belt, reclaiming her agency, and refusing to be prey—becomes a testament to resilience, autonomy, and the power of fighting back.
Eve is a 27-year-old sex worker living in Portland, Oregon. She dabbles in escorting, prostitution, stripping, and any avenue she can think of for exploiting men. She has an eating disorder and daily existential crises, but is otherwise an altogether well-adjusted adult, thanks to her rather aloof mindset about her vocation and the fact that she regularly finds herself beneath strangers’ bodies. She’s moderately content with her compartmentalized, albeit unorthodox, life as she has her two good friends and regular coffee shop haunts and tiny studio apartment and is convinced she’ll be perpetually single.
But then she goes and falls in love with the new handyman at her apartment complex. Joseph is considerably younger and poorer than her usual client. But he isn’t a client, and that’s precisely why he’s so dangerous, especially considering Eve has sworn off love forever. When her feelings go unrequited, she proceeds to get stuck in a cycle of self-destructive behaviors and eventually winds up in a sadomasochistic arrangement with a controlling rich man named Lance. With the help of her friends and being forced to confront her own inner demons, Eve finally claws her way out of the mire she’s made for herself and perhaps even learns a thing or two. Or perhaps not.
Kirkus Reviews calls PEOPLE RUIN RVERYTHING “A profound rendering of life’s foibles conveyed in sharp, personal fragments.”
People Ruin Everything is a literary short story collection exploring love, loss, and the quiet wreckage of human relationships. Through moments both realistic and faintly magical, Anne Leigh Parrish examines broken marriages, missed chances, and truths revealed too late. These stories linger in the space where desire, regret, and compassion collide.
Exploring the relationship between death and decay, life and rebirth, Matter’s Edge examines the spaces in between. Through meditations on political and social unrest, environmental change, personal heartbreak and loss, the collection asks readers to consider physical, spiritual, and existential limits. However, at despair’s edge, the book wonders: can one discover and embrace beauty, hope, and love?
SAD MAN HAPPY HOUR is a four-part poetry collection rooted in the Pacific Northwest that resists regional mythmaking in favor of lived experience. With wry humor and earned wisdom, SAD MAN HAPPY HOUR aims to deconstruct queer alienation and our ever-changing relationship with the natural world. Determined to be more celebration than elegy, the book suggests “if you thought that life would end when the world did / then you don’t know anything about life.” Drawing on county fairs, 90’s true crime TV, and the COVID-19 pandemic, SAD MAN HAPPY HOUR locates meaning in memory in unexpected places, while situating itself in the tradition of Northwest writers who treat the land not as backdrop, but as an active force–and in doing so, offers a portrait of the Pacific Northwest as it is: fractured, funny, enduring, and alive.
The White Field is a fast-paced journey of a man Tom, fresh out of prison and trying desperately to rebuild his life. But he is caught by mysterious, unseen forces beyond his knowledge or control.
After his release from prison, he is dropped back into the world in the wastelands of the city. In the menial work afforded the underclass, he begins his new life among characters at the edges of society - dwellers of the netherworld - such as Raphael, a former cop from Mexicali-singing Spanish areas in the mists of the industrial night among drug addicts and crooked cops; Tony, a stoner scholar with an encyclopedic knowledge of history based solely on the intricate study of rock and roll; and Larry, the bloated, abusive manager trapped as much as his workers in a world of tedium and repetition and machines
Think, The Three Stooges on acid.
Unable to reconnect with what’s left of his family, Tom embarks on a criminal path more harrowing than the one that led him to prison in the first place. Lured in by the nefarious Thane, he slips into a plan that will leave him with no way back. And with no place left in this world to go but prison, he makes one last run for freedom. Will he escape?
On the morning of December 26, 2004, an undersea earthquake off the coast of Sumatra unleashed a tsunami that tore across the Indian Ocean. In a matter of hours, entire coastlines were transformed and more than 230,000 lives were lost across fourteen countries, from Indonesia and Sri Lanka to India, Thailand, the Maldives, and East Africa. Those who survived carry vivid memories of where they were when the water came. Countless others were never able to tell their stories. Tsunami is one woman’s account of that day and the long, uneven aftermath that followed.
A Slice of Orange: loving and leaving the Osho/Rajneesh cult is a tale of spiritual discovery that goes horribly wrong. In search of bliss and belonging, Nicola Ranson travels from her Canadian convent school to India, and then to the cult headquarters in Oregon where she was on security duty when the FBI uncovered the source of the largest domestic bioterrorism attack in modern U.S. history. Forty years later, she shares her deeply personal experiences of the free-love utopia that devolved into conspiracy, poisonings, and attempted murder.
My Monstrous Family Cookbook is a hybrid memoir that uses the structure of a cookbook to explore family trauma, memory, and survival. Each recipe functions as an essay, transforming food into a language for what cannot be spoken. Darkly funny and emotionally incisive, the book interrogates masculinity, inheritance, and the costs of silence.
In a series of 112 vignettes, Without Your Father chronicles the year following the sudden death of Jessica Lynne Henkle’s father. Written in the second person and with searing honesty, the book depicts the oddities and absurdities of navigating sudden loss, along with the utter devastation of it: the daily, sometimes hourly trudging forward in a life that has become unrecognizable now that one person is no longer in it. Without Your Father seeks to mimic the grieving process itself and allows readers to enter its pages and move through their own losses, in their own ways. It is, at its core, an offering—from one grieving soul to another.
Lilith was the first woman. Adam was her husband before Eve was fashioned into his wife. Lilith knew herself to be Adam's equal and refused his demands of submission. She has been cast as a demon who left Adam for a new lover, the fallen angel Samael. "Night Hag," one of Lilith's many epithets, has been ostracized as a thief in the night, a baby stealer, a demon of abortion, a sex glutton-- a woman guilty of the crime of choosing when and if she becomes a mother.
NIGHT HAG speaks of femininity through the eternal voice of Lilith, the first woman. NIGHT HAG is an exploration of yin strength and autonomy of body, heart, and mind. NIGHT HAG invites readers to consider the distinctions between selfishness and self-care.
The bright red fish are gone from a sports fishing destination lake in Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains, and the Nez Perce Tribe and the government want to know why. Biologist Jess MacKinnon tears into the mountains on her motorcycle to solve the mystery. She takes the place of a government scientist, Ben Fletcher, who drowned in that very same lake. Jess knew Ben, and not just professionally—but that’s a secret.
There are a lot of secrets in the tiny mountain town of Still Lake, including one that puts Jess in danger: Ben’s death was no accident. With help from a quirky private investigator who describes herself as “not neurotypical,” Jess solves the mystery of Ben’s death and the mystery of the fish. She comes to terms with her own past, too, including her connection to Ben Fletcher, his privileged parents, and the biases of social class that destroyed their relationship.
Based on a real-world environmental disaster, THIRSTY CREEK is a murder mystery and ecological mystery combined, a story about human arrogance, greed, and unintended consequences.
Fifty percent of proceeds from THIRSTY CREEK support the Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland, a place-based nonprofit in Wallowa, Oregon.
Cleah Lucky was a handful in life. In death, she is even worse. When her three estranged children gather for the reading of her will, they expect complications. They do not expect a master list of demands. Holiday gatherings. Approved menus. Required outfits. Designated games. A theme song. And a rotating custody schedule for her urn. Thanks to a legally airtight trust, they cannot collect a cent unless they cooperate. As the siblings attempt to honor their mother’s absurd instructions, resentment builds, alliances shift, and their grip on patience stretches paper thin.
A sharp and heartfelt story about what we owe the people who raised us and the price of getting what we think we deserve.
MOTHER! by Summer Stewart is a genre-defying collection of poetry and essays that interrogates what it means to be made—and remade—as a woman. Moving through girlhood, the body, labor, relationships, and motherhood, the book dismantles the idea that identity is self-determined, revealing instead how it is shaped through expectation, silence, and survival.
Blending intimate narrative with sharp cultural analysis, Stewart explores pregnancy, loss, sexuality, and care as lived realities rather than abstract concepts. Her work exposes the invisible systems women sustain—within families, partnerships, and institutions—while examining the psychological and physical costs of carrying what is never fully named.
At once deeply personal and structurally aware, MOTHER! reframes motherhood not as a role, but as a condition that illuminates broader truths about autonomy, power, and inheritance. In doing so, Stewart offers not resolution, but recognition and a path toward self-definition that does not rely on disappearance.
After a car accident leaves her bedridden and facing permanent reproductive consequences, Marley begins hearing a voice from her bathroom drain inviting her to leave her body behind. Dani, a plus-sized influencer whose illness threatens both her health and her livelihood, hears a similar voice from her kitchen sink promising relief and understanding. As their stories converge, The Girl in the Pipes becomes a visceral, feminist exploration of what happens when escape feels more humane than survival.
DREAM POP ORIGAMI: A PERMUTATIONAL MEMOIR ABOUT HAPA IDENTITY is a beautiful, ambitious, interactive, and engrossing lyrical memoir about mixed-race identity, love, travel, AAPI masculinities, and personal metamorphosis. This experimental work of creative nonfiction examines, celebrates, and complicates what it means to be Asian & white, Nisei & hapa, Midwestern & Californian, Buddhist & American at the same time. In this stunning collection of choose-your-own-essays and autobiographical lists, multiracial identity is a counterpoint of memory, language, reflection, and imagination intersecting and interweaving into a coherent tapestry of text, emotion, and voice.
Longlisted for the 2025 Massachusetts Book Awards, KISS & RELEASE, a meditation in a rush, is driven by the intense voice of an observant, insistent & emotional “I.” He’s an urban gay man who admits he’s here with a date, but you never know how the night will end. He has several loves, at least a few fuckboys, and many
most spells are made with words & broken by a kiss, why not the other way around?
what is more intimate than a whisper?
how long will yr wife be gone?
Have you ever noticed it? asks “Love Is Finished Again,” a poem cycle revealed in seven movements. The sequence muses on how we end up in the same place over & over in sex & love & everything. The only real change is through decay that makes ruins, noseless busts, caves of Pompeii, brothel rooms. Even language & communication decay, as a number of mashup and collaborative poems explore.
Are you ready for the beats? This book is a party and a romance. It’s a lucid dream.
This poetry accuses, brags, confesses, obsesses, panics & promises. It discos, raves & swings. It falls in love during a hookup but gets bored at a four-way. It woos the Zodiac; tries to get its virginity back; invents sex as a religion, mythologizes masculinity & succumbs to its devils; kills a snake to resurrect a lover; gives a blowjob at a dirty book store; goes to see bad performance art; looks for love & finds it everywhere/wherever.
CORMORANT is a work of contrition. The poems are political and personal. A response to the federal government’s plan to kill thousands of cormorants in the name of salmon recovery and a tribute to the person who died from heartbreak because of it.
To support wildlife, we are donating the profits of this book to The Wildlife Center of the North Coast.
In “Ice,” two men contemplate their future in a bleak, post-apocalyptic landscape: “The point is, there is no point. You just keep going. Even if there’s no point.” In Dumaguete, a young boy must become his mother’s protector: it nearly tears him apart. In the title story, a ship captain discovers a city on the ocean floor and finds himself grappling with the notion of moral responsibility. Clear-eyed and lacerating, Marianne Villanueva’s RESIDENTS OF THE DEEP imagines human nature at moments of extremity. Vulnerable and challenged as most of these characters are, there is no denying their tenacity or capacity to endure.
KIRKUS totes THE GEOGRAPHY OF SAYING GOODBYE as "A fleet-footed romp of a book with some sneakily perceptive insights into larger human questions."
On her deathbed, Paul Canton’s mother declares she’s bound for the Alboran Sea. The nurses dismiss it as nonsense, but the next morning she vanishes, along with her son’s credit card. Paul, who finds leaving his comfort zone “more terrifying than the Third Battle of Nanking,” sets off across continents in a quixotic pursuit, desperate for one last chance to say goodbye. Only, the farther he travels, the less he understands the woman who raised him, and the more he realizes how little he’s actually lived.
Wry and tender in equal measure, THE GEOGRAPHY OF SAYING GOODBYE blends humor with lyrical observation in a story about family and mortality, yes, but also about learning how to live.
IndieReader Award Winner, True Crime
Recited to her like a fairy tale, Patricia’s “adoptive” mother loved to tell the story about the snowy January day in 1970 that she and her husband pulled up along a Houston, Texas hospital curb and drove away with their brand new baby. Yet Patricia would grow up celebrating a made-up birthday, haunted by nightmares of "The Dark Man." At 12, when her parents confess they never received her birth certificate, questions mount about alleged extortion and the impossible choice they say they faced: go to the police and report the shady attorney that acquired the infant or stay silent and meet his demands. Did they really dole out $30K to keep their paperless child? Such revelations compel young Patricia to wonder how she came into this family—no judge, no paperwork, no questions asked—and lead her on a quest to discover "Who In the World Am I?"
Navigating her bipolar mother's alcoholism and caring for her disabled 600-pound father, Patricia spends her teen years trying to save her saviors—unaware of the lifelong threat haunting them: at any moment, someone could come back for their child.
At eighteen, pregnant and standing in her birth mother's shoes, Patricia discovers a shattering secret that launches a lifetime search for answers. But it takes decades—and her adoptive mother's death—before Patricia realizes those holding the truth won't live forever. Guided by her mother's ghost, she races to unlock a labyrinth of lies designed to erase her true identity.
A tumble down the rabbit hole of America's baby trade, part detective story, part searing family portrait, Wonderland exposes what happens when adoption's house of cards finally falls—when missing documents and dark family secrets can no longer withstand the weight of one woman's relentless search for truth. A haunting reckoning with Baby Scoop Era exploitation that asks: are we ready for Baby Scoop 2.0?
Also a finalist for the 2026 Eric Hoffer Award, the 2026 Indies Today Award and the 2026 Next Generation Indie Book Award.
Award-winning author Liz Kellebrew debuts a short story collection of Mobius strip plots and shapeshifting points of view, where isolation amplifies connection and Ouroboros rules a reality stranger than dreams. With crackling, sensual, cinematic prose, Cloistered is a surreal journey through self-destruction and into self-transcendence. Kellebrew’s stories are a series of gentle detonations that will break open your expectations, dissolve the limits of your perception, and leave you deliciously perturbed.