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!

Poetry Through Divination

Online N/A, Portland

In this online three-part workshop, participants will explore various methods of using the Tarot and other simple forms of divination as prompts for poems. We will allow ourselves to be guided intuitively in our creations, suppressing the urge to control the process intellectually. Session One will be purely generative, focusing on starting and progressing new poems. In Session Two participants will work with the poems they started from prompts, developing them into cohesive pieces. Partly this will be through introducing a rational/intellectual component to raw materials that were derived from intuitive processes, but further divinatory and chance methods will also be part of our revision practices. In Session Three, students will share and discuss their polished work. Materials: any Tarot deck, your favorite book, pen…

$155

Livestream Reading: Rachel King: Bratwurst Haven

Online N/A, Portland

Annie Bloom's welcomes back Portland author Rachel King for the online launch of her new linked story collection, Bratwurst Haven. Rachel will be in conversation with Rajia Hassib, author of the novel A Pure Heart. Watch the video recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76hd2ncvG2M Signed and personalized copies of Bratwurst Haven are available for order! Please, please, please include the name for personalization in the order notes; or indicate "signed only." About Bratwurst Haven: Linked stories trace the vocational and emotional bargains made by workers at a Colorado sausage factory. It’s almost a decade after the Great Recession, and in Colorado, St. Anthony Sausage has not recovered. Neither have its employees: a laid-off railway engineer, an exiled computer whiz, a young woman estranged from her infant daughter, an…

Free

Bill Siverly and Penelope Scambly Schott

Broadway Books 1714 NE Broadway, Portland

We are delighted to welcome to poetry powerhouses back to Broadway Books: Bill Siverly and Penelope Scambly Schott. Penelope will be reading from her new collection Waving Fly Swatters at Angels. The poems in this book embrace silliness, sensuality, and sublimity -- an entire world in their wry lines. Penelope has become an enthusiastic and devoted Oregonian. She received four arts grants in New Jersey before moving to Oregon, where she joined a hiking group and received an Oregon Book Award for Poetry. She now lives in the small wheat-growing town of Dufur (pop: 635), where for several years she has led an annual poetry workshop. She and her husband host the White Dog Poetry Salon in Portland. Recent books include On Dufur Hill (2020)…

Free

Delve Readers Seminar: An Intensive Study of Totality: Jorge Luis Borges

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland

The Argentine genius Jorge Luis Borges explored every facet of the word during his lifetime of writing. From sonnets about dream tigers to stories about detectives in Buenos Aires to essays on the collapse of time, Borges oeuvre reads as if limitless, always imbuing the reader with a sense of total expansion. This seminar will draw from his Collected Fictions, Selected Poems, Selected Non-fiction in an attempt to construct (& deconstruct) the scope of one of the most boundless authors of the 20th century. Texts: Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges Selected Poems by Jorge Luis Borges Selected Non-fictions by Jorge Luis Borges Access Program We want our classes to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure…

$245

Katherine Dunn Tribute Event with Naomi Huffman & Lydia Kiesling

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

Toad (MCD) is a previously unpublished novel of the reflections of a deeply scarred and reclusive woman, from cult icon Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love. Sally Gunnar has been in love, has been mad, has been an agent of destruction, has been spurned; and now she has retreated from the world. She lives in isolation in her small house, where her only companions are a vase of goldfish, a garden toad, and the door-to-door salesman who sells her cleaning supplies once a month. From her comfortable perch, she broods over her deepest regrets: her wayward, weed-hazy college days; her blighted romance with a scornful poet; a tragically comic accident involving a paper cutter; a suicide attempt; and her decision to ultimately relinquish a conventional…

Free

Alison Cochrun in Conversation With Anita Kelly

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

Alison Cochrun, author of the “swoon-worthy debut” (Harper’s Bazaar), The Charm Offensive, returns with a festive romantic comedy about a woman who fakes an engagement with her landlord… only to fall for his sister. One year ago, recent Portland transplant Ellie Oliver had her dream job in animation and a Christmas Eve meet-cute with a woman at a bookstore that led her to fall in love over the course of a single night. But after a betrayal the next morning and the loss of her job soon after, she finds herself adrift, alone, and desperate for money. Finding work at a local coffee shop, she’s just getting through the days — until Andrew, the shop’s landlord, proposes a shocking, drunken plan: a marriage of convenience…

Free

Omar El Akkad on Writing the Codacene: Literature in an Age of Endings | 57th Annual Nina Mae Kellogg Lecture

PSU - Smith Memorial Student Union 1825 SW Broadway, Portland

Vanport Room (SMSU 338) The English Department presents the 57th Annual Nina Mae Kellogg Lecture, "Writing the Codacene: Literature in an Age of Endings," with Omar El Akkad. What does it mean to tell stories in a moment where it seems so much of what the world once was, it is unlikely to ever be again? Every generation must grapple with its own conception of apocalypse, and literature is no stranger to the end of the world. In this talk, journalist and author Omar El Akkad discusses some of the reporting assignments, novels and works of non-fiction that have influenced his writing, and the uncertain space many contemporary authors must inhabit when writing about a world mid-calamity. Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born…

Free