The Alano Club of Portland's Artists in Recovery series and Literary Arts are thrilled to welcome Hanif Abdurraqib, Kaveh Akbar and Leslie Jamison to Portland for a reading and conversation about the intersections of mental health and substance use recovery, creativity, and building community. This event is free and open to the public but space is limited so reserving a ticket is recommended.

Hanif Abdurraqib is an American poet, essayist, and cultural critic. He is the author of 2016 poetry collection The Crown Ain't Worth Much, published by Button Poetry; the 2017 essay collection They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, published by Two Dollar Radio; the 2019 non-fiction book, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes on A Tribe Called Quest on the American hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest, published by University of Texas Press; the 2019 poetry collection A Fortune for Your Disaster, published by Tin House; and the 2021 essay collection A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, published by Penguin Random House, which received the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. Go Ahead in the Rain was on the long list for the 2019 National Book Award.

Kaveh Akbar is an Iranian-American poet and scholar, and the author of Pilgrim Bell, published by Graywolf Press; Calling a Wolf a Wolf, published by Alice James Books in the US and Penguin Books in the UK; and the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic, published by Sibling Rivalry Press. In 2014, he founded the poetry interview website Divedapper. In 2020, he was named Poetry Editor of The Nation, a position previously held by Langston Hughes, Anne Sexton, and William Butler Yeats.

Leslie Jamison is an American novelist and essayist and the author of The Gin Closet, published by Free Press in 2010; The Empathy Exams, an essay collection published by Graywolf Press in 2014; The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, published by Little Brown in 2018; and Make It Scream, Make It Burn, published by Little, Brown in 2019. Jamison also directs the non-fiction concentration in writing at Columbia University's School of the Arts.

This event is sponsored by Third Eye Books, Tin House, and the Willamette University/PNCA Low Residency Creative Writing MFA Program.