LitPDX seeks to amplify marginalized voices, and welcomes all, their ideas, their events, and their words.

For details regarding specific events please contact the organizers or venues. If you are an organizer or venue and would like to reach out to us please feel free to contact us or submit an event using our submission form. We’d love to hear from you!

Green Bean Books 10th Anniversary Celebration!!!

Green Bean Books 1600 NE Alberta Street, Portland

Join us for a ecstatic celebration of 10 years of bringing books and events to our community! At 11am, we'll have a story time with popular therapy alpaca, Napoleon! Then, at 12pm, we'll have an unveiling of our new permanent outdoor diorama made by artist and children's book creator, Maggie Rudy! We'll offer 10% off everything in our store and we'll also be serving treats on the deck all day! Come and join our celebration and thank-you for supporting us for the past ten years!

Free

Tin House Summer Workshop Lectures: Mitchell S. Jackson, Laura van den Berg, and Maureen N. McLane

Reed College 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, Portland

2:30 pm-3:20 pm, Vollum Lecture Hall Voice as Comp, with Mitchell Jackson Writers with a distinctive literary voice have a greater chance to, as Susan Sontag says, “preserve the works of the mind against oblivion.” Voice consists of qualities that include diction, syntactical usage, sound, and visual logic. At its best, voice is as singular as one’s thumbprint. This craft lecture will present philosophies on voice and some of the rhetorical tools used to compose—yes, it’s an act of composition—a remarkable one. We will read passages from the work of master prose stylists—a list that includes John Edgar Wideman, Joan Didion, Grace Paley, and Denis Johnson—with an eye toward critiquing the elements that make their literary voice distinctive, compelling, enduring. 3:30 pm – 4:20 pm,…

$10

Teen Book Club

Books Around the Corner 40 NW 2nd Street, Gresham

The Books Around the Corner Teen Book Club is ran by the teens who attend. No adults allowed. The teens have chosen Two Can Keep a Secret by Karen McManus for the month of July. If you’re a teen interested in choosing the next book you are still more than welcome to attend! Echo Ridge is small-town America. Ellery’s never been there, but she’s heard all about it. Her aunt went missing there at age seventeen. And only five years ago, a homecoming queen put the town on the map when she was killed. Now Ellery has to move there to live with a grandmother she barely knows. The town is picture-perfect, but it’s hiding secrets. And before school even begins for Ellery, someone has…

Free

Sci-Fi/Fantasy Book Club

Books Around the Corner 40 NW 2nd Street, Gresham

The Books Around the Corner Science Fiction/Fantasy Book Club meets monthly on the second Tuesday of every month at 6PM. We would like to extend an invitation to all of our science fiction and fantasy loving customers (RSVP is not required). It will alternate monthly between Science Fiction and Fantasy. Our book discussions aim to bring people together to talk about books in a safe and inviting atmosphere. Our meetings are lovely and inclusive; we invite you to attend. Come and enjoy a lively discussion about the chosen book with other readers. Join us on July 9th for our FIRST Books Around the Corner Sci-Fi/Fantasy Book Club. We will discuss Semiosis by Sue Burke. About the book: Colonists from Earth wanted the perfect home, but…

Free

You + Me Book Club: Phantom Tollbooth

Maggie Mae's Kids Bookshop 43 NW 3rd St, Gresham

You + Me Book Club is a book club for kids and grown ups to read a book and discuss it together. After we discuss the book we participate in an activity that relates to the book. This month we will be reading and discussing the delightful classic, The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. Purchase the book at Maggie Mae's and get 10% off! About The Phantom Tollbooth: For Milo, everything’s a bore. When a tollbooth mysteriously appears in his room, he drives through only because he’s got nothing better to do. But on the other side, things seem different. Milo visits the Island of Conclusions (you get there by jumping), learns about time from a ticking watchdog named Tock, and even embarks on a…

Free

Collage Night

IPRC (Independent Publishing Resource Center) 318 SE Main Street #175, Portland

Join us for the return of Collage Night, on the second Tuesday of the month. Glue sticks, scissors and collage materials will be provided. Free and open to the public.

Free

Science Fiction Book Group

Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd, Beaverton

This month our group meets to discuss Saturn Run by John Sandford and Ctein. Join us!

Free

Jay Wexler, Our Non-Christian Nation

Rose City Book Pub 1329 NE Fremont, Portland

Join me as I talk about my new book, Our Non-Christian Nation. Free, open to all, and no RSVP required. I will sign books and also draw a picture of your favorite fruit or vegetable saying something idiotic, if you want. Less and less Christian demographically, America is now home to an ever-larger number of people who say they identify with no religion at all. These non-Christians have increasingly been demanding their full participation in public life, bringing their arguments all the way to the Supreme Court. The law is on their side, but that doesn't mean that their attempts are not met with suspicion or outright hostility. In Our Non-Christian Nation, Jay Wexler travels the country to engage the non-Christians who have called on…

Free

Anthony McCann in Conversation With Leah Sottile

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland

In 2016, a group of armed, divinely inspired right-wing protestors led by Ammon Bundy occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in the high desert of eastern Oregon. Encamped in the shadowlands of the republic, insisting that the federal government had no right to own public land, the occupiers were seen by a divided country as either dangerous extremists dressed up as cowboys, or as heroes insisting on restoring the rule of the Constitution. From the occupation’s beginnings, to the trials of the occupiers in federal court and their tumultuous aftermaths, Anthony McCann’s Shadowlands (Bloomsbury) is a clarifying, exhilarating story of a nation facing an uncertain future and a murky past in a time of great collective reckoning. Gathering into its vortex the realities of social…

Free

Tin House Summer Workshop Readings: Danielle Evans, Maureen N. McLane, and Kelly Link

Reed College 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, Portland

8:00 pm,  Cerf Amphitheater– Signing to Follow Danielle Evans, Maureen N. McLane, Kelly Link Danielle Evans is the author of the short-story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self,  a co-winner of the 2011 PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize for a first book, a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 selection for 2011, the winner of the 2011 Paterson Prize for Fiction and the 2011 Hurston-Wright award for fiction, and an honorable mention for the 2011  PEN/Hemingway award.  Her work has appeared in magazines including The Paris Review, A Public Space, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, The Sewanee Review, and Phoebe,  and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2008, 2010, 2017, and 2018, and in New Stories from the South. She…

Free