In this episode, we feature two of Oregon’s most accomplished writers, Omar El Akkad and Karen Russell from a conversation that took place at the 2025 Portland Book Festival. They were joined onstage by Willamette Week’s arts and culture editor Rachel Saslow for a conversation about the ongoing American reckoning of its violent past and present.

Russell’s novel “The Antidote” is set in the Great Depression Dust Bowl in a fictional town in Nebraska and examines the history of the American colonialism and the violence it enacted. It is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities.

At the center of El Akkad’s book “One Day Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This” is the present-day destruction and violence in Palestine, and the realization how much of the West’s moral promises are lies. The book is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.

At the time of the live event, both El Akkad and Russell were finalists for the National Book Awards in nonfiction and fiction respectively. El Akkad would go on to be given the award for nonfiction just a few weeks later, joining just a small handful of Oregonians ever to receive a national Book Award -- including Ursula K Le Guin, William Stafford, Barry Lopez and Mary Szybist.

A note to the listener this episode contains mature themes and discussions of violence that may not be suitable for all listeners.

Bio:

Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager, and now lives in the United States. He is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and the Oregon Book Award for fiction. His books have been translated into thirteen languages. His debut novel, “American War,” was named by the BBC as one of one hundred novels that shaped our world. His latest book is titled “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.”

Karen Russell is the author of six works of fiction, including the New York Times best sellers “Swamplandia!” and “Vampires in the Lemon Grove.” She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has received two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award, and was selected for the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” prize and The New Yorker‘s “20 under 40” list (She is now decisively over 40). She has taught literature and creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of California-Irvine, Williams College, Columbia University, and Bryn Mawr College, and was the Endowed Chair of Texas State’s MFA program. She serves on the board of Street Books, a mobile-library for people living outdoors. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, son, and daughter. Russell’s new book is titled “The Antidote.“

Rachel Saslow is the arts and culture reporter at Willamette Week. She began her journalism career at the Washington City Paper in Washington, D.C., followed by a staff writer position at the Washington Post, where she wrote the Arts Beat column for the Style section. She now lives in her hometown of Portland, Ore., with her husband and their three children.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/01/06/the-archive-project-omar-el-akkad-and-karen-russel/