Alexander Chee on His First Police Riot

“The police in my hometown growing up were pretty small town kind of cops, but I had never been pulled over by the Portland cops. I was always aware that I could get in trouble, quote unquote, but I wasn’t ever treated like that until this police riot. The thing that I would say about it afterwards is that I’d just felt like I wasn’t sure why live in the US.”

Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, all from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and an editor at large at VQR. His essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, T Magazine, Tin House, Slate, and Guernica, among others.

Photo credit: Robert Gill