Live Wire joins forces with the Portland Art Museum for an afternoon of roving performances ahead of an evening recording of the program. The event coincides with PAM’s monthly Free First Thursday and the Portland Book Festival’s expanded programming.
Performers will include poet and rapper Dessa, bestselling children’s author Mac Barnett, Pulitzer Prize Finalist Ed Park, and Portland comedian Mx. Dahlia Belle.
Live Wire Radio is an independently produced radio show that artfully blends unpredictable conversation, live music, and original comedy featuring all types of cultural talent and creative minds, from emerging artists to established acts. Join host Luke Burbank and announcer Elena Passarello for a live recording of this popular radio show, heard nationwide by thousands of listeners every weekend.
DESSA
Dessa is a singer, rapper, and writer who fell in love with language as a toddler—and just never got over it. Now, she works in fields that traffic in words: she’s recorded rap bangers as part of the fiercely independent Doomtree collective, released a live album with the Grammy-winning Minnesota Orchestra; contributed to The New York Times and National Geographic Traveler; delivered a TED Talk on the intersection of romance and neuroscience that’s notched more than 4 million views; hosted 2 seasons of behavioral science podcast Deeply Human (BBC/American Public Media); and published a memoir recounting most of the above called My Own Devices (Penguin Random House).
MAC BARNETT
Mac Barnett, the 2025–2026 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, is a New York Times bestselling author of stories for children. Mac’s books have won many prizes, including two Caldecott Honors, three New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Children’s Book Awards, three E. B. White Read Aloud Awards and the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, as well as several international prizes. He lives in Oakland, California. His latest book, illustrated by X. Fang, is Tom Nancy: The Sheep Who Swapped Brains with a Boy. From two of the most exciting picture book makers today comes a hilarious trickster tale and Freaky Friday switcheroo story: a sneaky, cheeky sheep named Tom Nancy has a brain swap proposal for an innocent farm boy named Felix that will change both of their lives forever. Laugh-out-loud, subversive, and totally unexpected.
ED PARK
Ed Park is the author of the novels Personal Days and Same Bed Different Dreams. He is a founding editor of The Believer, and has worked in newspapers, book publishing, and academia. His writing appears in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Profound, wily, and beautifully wrought, his new book Three Tenses: A Transmission from the Nineties is a meeting of memory and myth, confession and obfuscation, coalescing to offer a singular picture of creativity in action.
MX. DAHLIA BELLE
The princess of Portland comedy, best known for her breakout performance on the popular Netflix special Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agenda, Mx. Dahlia Belle has been compared to a Swiss Army knife—different tools to extract sharpness, softness, vulnerability, hope, and wicked wit. She’s been declared one of “11 Trans Comedians… Funnier Than Dave Chappelle” by Out Magazine, repeatedly featured on NPR, and has written for Cosmopolitan Magazine, The Guardian, The Stranger, and Portland Mercury. Her live performances have included NW Black Comedy Festival, Upper Left Comedy Festival, SF Sketchfest, and an awkward conversation with John Waters and Piers Morgan. In the upcoming live taping of her comedy special Affirmed at Polaris Hall on November 22nd, Mx. Dahlia Belle delivers 60 new minutes of stand-up to celebrate and affirm being human in the modern world through a combination of the wholesome and mundane, anecdotes about house cats, liscivious foibles of the LGBT community, and an unapologetic account of her personal journey with gender-affirming care, all delivered with her trademark free form wit.