2026 Authors on the Map Breakfast
Monday, September 28 - 7:45 am – 9:00 am
Mount St. Helens Ballroom
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Sponsored by: |
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Tickets required |
An event showcasing ten newer authors from the PNW region interested in connecting with and visiting your store.
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In late 2019, award-winning Portland author Alex Behr reunited with Chris Hartman, a lost love, after thirty years. Chris soon moved to Portland to start a new life with her. Tragically and suddenly, he was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive prion illness and died just months after the move. Tender, erotic, and damned, the nineteen stories in Animal Kingdom are inspired by Behr’s grief. With piercing humor, Animal Kingdom explores a couple bonding over alien visitations, the brutal accommodations in a marriage between musicians, sexuality during menopause, and a teen girl’s bruising path to feminism via her Fender guitar.
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Lance Garland is a veteran, firefighter, nature adventurer, and writer. After he was discharged from the Navy, Garland discovered time in nature as a way to heal from the experiences of his youth. While sailing, backpacking ,and climbing in the Pacific Northwest, he navigates the challenges of becoming a first-generation college student, equal rights activist, and the first openly gay fireman in the Seattle fire department. Out There is a memoir of a man out in the wilderness, both physically and socially, on a journey to find a place to call his own. It is for anyone who has felt like an outsider or hasn’t found their place yet. He lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington.
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In Migration, Portland author Elizabeth Grey weaves a luminous memoir of heartbreak, healing, and transformation. After the sudden end of her marriage, she embarks on a journey across the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest, finding unexpected guidance in the lives of birds. Through intimate observations of the natural world, Grey explores grief, solitude, resilience, and the slow process of becoming someone new. Richly illustrated and beautifully written, Migration is both a meditation on the restorative power of nature and a celebration of the beauty that can emerge when we learn to let go and begin again.
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Evan Leikam is also the author of Anji Kills a King. He grew up among the forests of central Oregon reading fantasy and science fiction from a young age. While touring the United States and Europe with an independent rock band, he began tinkering with his own stories to pass time in vans and music venues. Anji in Shadow is the gripping continuation of Leikum's debut. Anji has survived a dozen different deaths. The king is dead, her family is dead, the fabled mercenaries of the Menagerie are dead--and she's still here, the price that was on her head now jingling as coins in her own pocket. Leikum lives in Portland, Oregon.
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Author of the collection The Prisoner Pear: Stories from the Lake, Elissa Minor explores shame, desire, and acceptance in Another Eve, an intimate memoir about walking away from the Mormon church and a twenty-five-year marriage to embrace her identity as a queer woman. Poignant and powerful, Another Eve re-examines past truths and celebrates honoring oneself and living authentically. For Minor, the end of her transformation is only the beginning. She lives on the north Oregon coast with her wife and their two dogs.
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Rebeca Lee Morales writes fiction that explores human resilience and the quiet moral reckonings that shape everyday lives. Born in Cape Charles, Virginia and raised in Michigan, she is the daughter of a missionary mother who served in the Yucatán and a pastor father. In her adult life, she lived in Minnesota for a decade, and later in the Southwest. She relocated to Eugene, Oregon in 2004, where she now resides. Winter Song is her debut novel.
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Romance author Raveena Raju is obsessed with happily ever afters. Because there are no happy endings on a dead planet, Raveena writes love stories set in solarpunk ("the antithesis to dystopia") realities where we take care of each other, our communities, and our earth. Raveena Raju's Brighter than the Sun may be the world's first solarpunk romcom—a whimsical rivals-to-lovers workplace romance set in a speculative San Francisco, where sustainable design offers real hope in a warming world. Raju lives in Duwamish Territory.
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Inez Ray's futurist stories are populated by characters that aren’t always heroes, often reckoning with systems of power and control, with echoes and reverberations into, our own world. After working as a doula and midwife assistant for over a decade and witnessing the horrific state perinatal healthcare in America she was pulled further into advocacy and then back to writing. Buzzard contains echoes of Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler. Its 2086. Corporations are monitoring fertility. Abortion is illegal. And the last person alive who can perform the procedure is in hiding. Ray was born in California and now calls Puget Sound home.
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A lover of all things fantastical, Erynne Rivers brings new vision to timeless themes, crafting characters and worlds that feel both magical and authentic. As a biracial Black author passionate about mental health advocacy, most of her stories feature characters tackling hardships both inside and out. In Wench Rivers reimagines the story of Maid Marian, whose cowardly father has betrothed her to the most reviled man in the land: the Sheriff of Nottingham. Devastated, she’s sent on the quickest path to meet her husband, through the fae-infested Sherwood Forest. But everything changes when her carriage is attacked by the most feared fae of all: the Merry Men, followers of the infamous Robin Hood. Rivers lives in the Pacific Northwest with her partner and dog.
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Author photo: Aaron Clamage
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Stephanie Vance credits her 30-year career in D.C.'s legislative scene with inspiring her fiction. In Soul Proprietor, Tiffani Lutatio, a sales fiend at the SE Portland, Oregon branch of Hell’s Soul Exchange, rents souls to bereft humans. When she mistakenly rents out a porn star's recalled soul, she must grant three favors before Hell’s authorities discover her error. Racing against a powerful demon, Tiffani teams up with a band of misfit celestials and delinquent mortal teenagers—only to stumble onto the afterlife's most classified secret. Vance lives with her husband and dog in Portland, OR.
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