Dessa with the Oregon Symphony

Dessa joins the Oregon Symphony at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Saturday, November 7, 2026. The evening brings together ballads, pop and rap, with new monologues woven in between. It's presented in collaboration with Literary Arts as an extension of the Portland Book Festival.

Dessa is a singer, rapper and writer from Minneapolis who built her following bucking genres and defying expectations. She got her start in the city's Doomtree hip-hop collective and began touring as a solo act after her 2010 release A Badly Broken Code, followed by five more full-length albums. Her résumé runs from Lollapalooza and Glastonbury to co-composing for a 100-voice choir and recording a live album with the Grammy-winning Minnesota Orchestra. Her album Parts of Speech landed in the Billboard top 200, and she contributed to the #1 album The Hamilton Mixtape, with her track "Congratulations" drawing over 5 million streams.

As a writer, she's been published by The New York Times and National Geographic Traveler, hosted two seasons of a BBC podcast, and published several poetry collections alongside the memoir-in-essays My Own Devices (Penguin Random House). That literary side is a big part of this particular show: the new monologues she's bringing to the stage sit right alongside the music, and the collaboration with Literary Arts ties it back to the Portland Book Festival.

On the night, Sarah Hicks conducts the Oregon Symphony, with Dessa on vocals. The show starts at 7:30 PM at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway.