Join us for a night of readings with Ashley Yang-Thompson & Kiik A.K.

The product of a Chinese immigrant and a white polygamist from Fort Scott, Kansas, Ashley Yang-Thompson has been a performance artist since the day she was ruthlessly shoved out of the safety of her mother’s womb. Her art has been exhibited at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, the Museum of Moving Image, and the Essex Peabody Museum, as well as numerous national and international spaces. She is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Equity Fellowship and Mass MoCA’s Assets for Artists Grant. She is the author of How to be the worst laziest fattest most incontinent piece-of-shit in the world EVER and Still Worm, both published by Bateau Press.

Kiik A.K. does not perform often. But when he does it is an awful performance. We would like him to get out more or even leave his bedroom. But his bedroom is where pornography is. Especially a naked cowboy riding a green tractor. Pricing is customized to your needs. Under normal circumstances something happens that obligates him to give your money back. Contact Kiik for weddings, baptisms, funerals, circumcisions. But please never in that order. His limits may surprise you. As you watch a man die his foreskin turns to rust. The dust convulsing off a moth’s bulb paints the spirit in a thin gold film.

Join us for a night of music with Brooklyn-based bassist & composer James Ilgenfritz, guitarist & composer Daniel Reyes Llinas, percussionist Matt Hannafin, multi-instrumentalist Mike Gamble, and Dustin Krcatovich (Golden Feelings).

The concept of hypernormalization offers a framework for understanding how contemporary life continues to feel stable despite the presence of multiple, overlapping crises. Denial, distraction, and systemic complexity flatten our perception of urgency, allowing familiar routines to persist even as environmental, social, and political pressures intensify. What falters is not awareness, but our capacity to fully register the scale of what surrounds us.

Anderson’s paintings operate within this tension. Their tactile, layered surfaces are marked by technical and pictorial discrepancies, embodying the effort to sustain coherence amid instability, particularly but not exclusively related to the climate crisis. The traditional easel format is borrowed from the visual language of domestic space, reinforcing the normalization of crisis: an acknowledgment that disruption has become an ambient condition rather than an exception.

Through her work, Anderson offers recognition rather than resolution. The paintings engage an existential unease that is widely felt but rarely named, inviting viewers to reflect on shared anxieties and the challenge of living attentively in a time of ongoing crisis.

Artist Bio

Caroline Anderson is a New England based painter whose work is exhibited and collected nationally and internationally. She has an MFA in painting and printmaking from Ohio University and has held faculty positions at Trinity College, Washington, DC; Cleveland State University; and Illinois Institute of Art Chicago. Notable exhibitions include the Cleveland and Columbus Museums of Art, Fargo’s Plains Art Museum, Cincinnati’s Arnoff Center for the Arts, the Newport Art Museum, and Chicago’s Judy Saslow, ARC, and WomanMade galleries. Recent Providence, Rhode Island exhibitions include solo presentations at The Gallery at Central and Angell Street Galleries. International collaborations include TransCultural Exchange’s Tile Project, consisting of 22 permanent public worldwide venues, including UNESCO Paris.

Anderson is a founding member of "Climate Artists,” a climate crisis-focused collective of five artists from across the United States. In 2026 Climate Artists were in Katchemak Bay, Alaska for a two-week residency that features workshops and exhibitions at Kenai Peninsula College and a raku firing with a collaborative ceramics installation at Pratt Museum. Grants for this residency include National Endowment for the Arts and Alaska State Council on the Arts.

Index Letters:

Chapbook Release Reading

A BOOK OF "FOUND POETRY" PERFORMED BY NADIA NIVA & JUDY THORN

Opening June 11th, BUMP is a trio of original short plays about deception, control, and the miracle of life. Written and directed by Portland author Riley Michael Parker, and staged by the newly-formed company MILLIONS & MILLIONS at Word Virus in downtown PDX, this limited-run production will stick with you long after the show is over. Find tickets at partycomic dot com.

Four shows: June 11, June 12, June 17, and June 26

Join us for night three of three nights of reading by PNCA MFA faculty and visiting artists.

Night three with: Diamond Sharp and Lana Lin

Join us for night two of three nights of reading by PNCA MFA faculty and visiting artists.

Night two: Sara Jaffe, Diana Oropeza, Jay Ponteri, & Sara Vetiver

Legendary, free improvisational musician and conceptual artist, Ben Bennett will be visiting Portland to present some new material. He will be joined by a full cast of local musicians with a background of free improvisation. Such artists include: Caspar Sonnet, Maxx Katz, Joel Nelson, Anthony Stillabower, Stephanie Lavon Trotter, Patrick Barber and Daniel Surprenant! An unforgettable night of sound making and listening. Please join us! 

Join us for night one of three nights of reading by PNCA faculty & visiting artists.

 Night one: Stephanie Adams-Santos, Megan Milks, Emilly Prado

By Way of Inertia was written and produced between 2023 & 2024. Staged and recorded at Open Signal in Portland OR. The piece is a time capsule that starts in the 1990's at the SW 10th and Oak building where Word Virus Books currently calls home. The piece burbles through time connecting Ryuichi Sakamoto, Bernoulli”s principle for fluid dynamics, and Zine making all in a coming of age via Robert Ashley Opera kind of telling.

It is with great pleasure that we debut this video work in thee very building much of the piece takes place in.    

The Phull Collums Ensemble features artists Christopher Adams, Amanda Berlind, Julia Barbee, Biz Miller, Vanessa Johnson, and guest Rose Lewis.

This video art piece will be accompanied by live short form readings and performances by local artists, authors & Poets

Renee Goodenow
Rose Lewis
Biz Miller
Harper Quinn

with
Live BGM
By Jon Grothman

through the evening.

Join us for an evening of reading by poets Monika Herceg & Sadia Pineda Hameed.

“Monika Herceg’s poetry is like a wound through which the world shines—painful, true, saturated with memory and anger, but also with hope for new stories. Her poems, arising from the experience of war, exile, and violence, transcend the boundaries of time and geography to stand up for those who never had a voice. This is poetry that is not afraid to speak of responsibility—for Europe, for women, for those excluded by systems and ideologies. Herceg writes about a history that no longer belongs to the victors, and about beauty that cannot fit into the confines we previously knew.”—Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel laureate

Sadia Pineda Hameed is a Filipina Pakistani artist and writer whose work explores latent ways to speak about collective and intergenerational trauma through anticolonial strategies of dreaming, telepathic communion and secrets. Using 16mm film and hi8 video, sculptural installation, text and performance, her work imagines what future tools for resistance, value and communication springing from these strategies might look like – often through the ‘handheld’.
Her practice is led by a process of cross-disciplinary semiotic, gestural and associative journeying in resistance to western processes of historicisation and displacement. Mythmaking, melodrama and decoy become playful devices to speak through a ‘delirious discourse’ where personal archives and collective experiences converge.
She often works collaboratively, and co-created print, radio and curatorial project LUMIN (2018 - 2024).

Opening June 11th, BUMP is a trio of original short plays about deception, control, and the miracle of life. Written and directed by Portland author Riley Michael Parker, and staged by the newly-formed company MILLIONS & MILLIONS at Word Virus in downtown PDX, this limited-run production will stick with you long after the show is over. Find tickets at partycomic dot com.

Four shows: June 11, June 12, June 17, and June 26

Join us for an evening of readings with Joe Safdie, Sam Lohmann, and Rodney Koeneke.

Sam Lohmann is a parent, poet, academic librarian, and occasional translator living in Vancouver, Washington. He is a co-organizer of Portland's long-running Spare Room reading series and co-publisher (with David Abel) of Airfoil Chapbooks. He is the author of several books and chapbooks, most recently Poems for Shy Communists (Airfoil, 2025).

Rodney Koeneke is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Body & Glass and Etruria, both from Wave Books. His work has appeared in Chicago Review, Granta, Harper's, Jacket2, Poetry and elsewhere. Since 2007 he's worked as a history professor in Portland, OR.

Joe Safdie’s most recent books are Greek To Me (Chax Press), a selected poems featuring Greek mythology, and Poetry and Heresy (MadHat), a collection of literary essays. For the last two years he’s been attending a William Blake study group and assembling a manuscript of poems about Blake called Organized Innocence. He’s been living in SW Portland since 2019.

This month’s book is Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies.

Opening June 11th, BUMP is a trio of original short plays about deception, control, and the miracle of life. Written and directed by Portland author Riley Michael Parker, and staged by the newly-formed company MILLIONS & MILLIONS at Word Virus in downtown PDX, this limited-run production will stick with you long after the show is over. Find tickets at partycomic dot com.

Four shows: June 11, June 12, June 17, and June 26

Opening June 11th, BUMP is a trio of original short plays about deception, control, and the miracle of life. Written and directed by Portland author Riley Michael Parker, and staged by the newly-formed company MILLIONS & MILLIONS at Word Virus in downtown PDX, this limited-run production will stick with you long after the show is over. Find tickets at partycomic dot com.

Four shows: June 11, June 12, June 17, and June 26

Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring (1949)

One of the most powerful of Yasujiro Ozu’s family portraits, Late Spring (Banshun) tells the story of a widowed father who feels compelled to marry off his beloved only daughter. Eminent Ozu players Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara command this poignant tale of love and loss in postwar Japan, which remains as potent today as ever—and a strong justification for its maker’s inclusion in the pantheon of cinema’s greatest directors. (Criterion)

Join us Tuesday, June 2nd for a discussion of In Search Of Lost Time vol. 3 pt. 1.

KLUBKine May 21, 2026. Krazy soir. Jacquesrates turns 60. Johnny Smak gets zine published. & radically unclassifiable media essay ART FAG gets big screened. 7pm Free

ECHIDNA is a generative workshop series led by Graft Union where we will feature two generative writing prompts.

We will provide materials and there will be time at the end to share our new creations!

For more information & details, head over to social-media platform Instagram:  @graftunionreadingseries for more details.

We continue the Search for Lost Time with a discussion of the second half of the second volume.

DISPLACED

A reading and talk with Luca Dipierro (author of Sewer and Stage) and Gabriel Urza (author of The Silver State)

What place does one write or make art from? In the case of Luca Dipierro and Gabriel Urza, it's a place where they don't fully belong, that they inhabit as strangers, each in their own particular way.

Gabriel Urza is the author of the novels Silver State (Algonquin Books, 2025) and All That Followed (Henry Holt & Co./MacMillan 2015), as well as the novellas The Last Supper (2021) and The White Death: An Illusion (2019), which was an Oregon Book Award finalist. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, Guernica, Politico, Salon, Slate, and elsewhere. Urza is a professor of creative writing in the Portland State University Master of Fine Arts program. He is also a former public defender and a licensed attorney who practices criminal defense in Nevada. His story collection, An Incomplete History of the American West, will be published in August. 

 Luca Dipierro is an animator, writer and translator born in Italy and living in the USA. His cut-out animations, filmed in stop motion with marionettes made out of paper and old book cloth, have been called “a perfect balance between creepy and charming” (The Huffington Post), and "weirdly charming and unerringly unsettling" (The Quietus). His work has been shown in theaters, galleries, and film festivals worldwide. Dipierro is the author of the collections of short prose Biscotti neri (2011), Nei paesi infimi (2024), Sewer and Stage (2026), and numerous zines. Dipierro is also founder and publisher of the micro press Garganta Press. Other Tongues, an anthology of his writings and drawings from 1996 to 2026, will come out at the end of the year.

Join us for an evening of readings by Donna Stonecipher, Jeanne Heuving & Consuelo Wise

Donna Stonecipher is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Ruins of Nostalgia, which was named a best book of 2023 by NPR, and Transaction Histories, which was listed by The New York Times as one of the 10 best poetry books of 2018. She has also published one book of criticism, Prose Poetry and the City. Her poems have been translated into seven languages. She translates from German, and her translation of Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker’s trilogy études, cahier, and fleurs, for which she received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, is being published by Seagull Books.

Poet and scholar, Jeanne Heuving has lived most of her life in Seattle, with forays into Palo Alto, New Haven and Cambridge. She is engaged by the tensions between prose and poetry and seeks to amplify these in her work.  Indigo Angel (Black Square Editions, 2023), made up of three books—Mood Indigo, Brilliant Corners and Air Time—takes its lead from different jazz modalities as these ray out into other arts, the natural world and human history. Heuving’s scholarly work includes Inciting Poetics: Thinking and Writing Poetry, co-edited with Tyrone Williams (Recencies Series, University of New Mexico Press, 2019) and The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Series, University of Alabama Press, 2016).

Consuelo Wise is a Guatemalan-American poet, writer, and visiting scholar at Portland State University. Her first book, b o y, was published in 2024.