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!

Margot Wood in Conversation With Gayle Forman

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Some students enter their freshman year of college knowing exactly what they want to do with their lives. Elliot McHugh is not one of those people. But picking a major is the last thing on Elliot's mind when she's too busy experiencing all that college has to offer — from dancing all night at off-campus parties, to testing her RA Rose's patience, to making new friends, to having the best sex one can have on a twin-sized dorm room bed. But she may not be ready for the fallout when reality hits. When the sex she's having isn't that great. When finals creep up and smack her right in the face. Or when her roommate's boyfriend turns out to be the biggest a-hole. Elliot may…

Free

Coffee Talk #25

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Come hear 5 phenomenal writers read their grief words and share their hearts. Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86968280280?pwd=TjI2YTBFOVBwczE4b3JTMHh4QjRNQT09 Meeting ID: 869 6828 0280 Passcode: 719116

Free

Kesha Ajose-Fisher Book Signing

Third Eye Books 2518 SE 33rd Ave, Portland, OR, United States

Fisher is signing copies of her award winning book, “No God Like The Mother” at @thirdeyebag this Saturday, August 7th, 11am. Wall’s latest work is part of the “Time Being” exhibition curated by Blake Shell at @oregoncontemporary, which is on view until Sunday, August 8th. Experience these exceptional talents in real life ~ know your local! -- From this Instagram post by Buckman Journal: From Buckmxn Journal 006: “A Way Back”, a new story by Kesha Ajose-Fisher (@kesha_ajose_fisher) who is a Ken Kesey Award for Fiction recipient; accompanied with art by Samantha Wall (@samanthawall), who created the cover for the new @sleater_kinney album, “Path of Wellness”. Fisher is signing copies of her award winning book, “No God Like The Mother” at @thirdeyebag this Saturday, August…

Free

Writing About Sex

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

From kissing to seduction—to the deed itself—writing about sex can be one of the hardest feats in storytelling. We’ll study the way writers like Lidia Yuknavitch, Melissa Febos, Zadie Smith, D. H. Lawrence, and others approach this facet of craft. Our conversations will explore how sex can be implied or explicit, while still being literary and classy. Class one is entirely devoted to writing the literary kiss, and future sessions will cover sex “implied” with its absence on the page, homosexual sex, and heterosexual sex. We’ll cover the do’s and don’t’s, address common “cliches,” and inspect different ways writers represent sex in their stories, so that we can better assess what might work best for ours. Each writer will have the opportunity to share a…

$195

Premise Course: What is feminist power? Who decides? Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Join us in a discussion of Aristophanes’ ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata and Spike Lee’s modern film adaptation of the book Chi-Raq. The class will focus on the Aristophanes comedy and will use Spike Lee’s film as a point of modern reference and comparison. About the book: “Aristophanes’ comic masterpiece of war and sex remains one of the greatest plays ever written. Led by the title character, the women of the warring city-states of Greece agree to withhold sexual favours with their husbands until they agree to cease fighting. The war of the sexes that ensues makes Lysistrata a bawdy comedy without peer in the history of theatre.” – Premise Goodreads page About the film: Spike Lee’s 2015 Chi-Raq is designed to provoke and make us…

$35

Fantasy Book Club (REMOTE)

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The Books Around the Corner Fantasy Book Club meets monthly on the second Tuesday of every month at 6:30PM. We would like to extend an invitation to all of our fantasy loving customers. Join us on Tuesday August 10th at 6:30pm for our Books Around the Corner Fantasy Book Club. We will discuss The Wolf and the Woodsman by Ava Reid. About the book: In the vein of Naomi Novik's New York Times bestseller Spinning Silver and Katherine Arden's national bestseller The Bear and the Nightingale, this unforgettable debut-- inspired by Hungarian history and Jewish mythology--follows a young pagan woman with hidden powers and a one-eyed captain of the Woodsmen as they form an unlikely alliance to thwart a tyrant. In her forest-veiled pagan village, Évike is the only woman without power, making her an outcast clearly abandoned…

$27.99

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh in Conversation With David Adjmi

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh has been hailed by Philip Gourevitch as "a masterful storyteller working from deep in the American grain." His new collection of stories — some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories — is set in a contemporary America full of the kind of emotionally bruised characters familiar to readers of Denis Johnson and George Saunders. These are people contending with internal struggles — a son’s fractured relationship with his father, the death of a mother, the loss of a job, drug addiction — even as they are battered by larger, often invisible, economic, political, and racial forces of American society. Searing, intimate, often slyly funny, and always marked by a deep imaginative sympathy,…

Free

Thea Prieto in Conversation With Leni Zumas

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Environmental catastrophe has driven four people inside the dark throat of a cave: Sky, a child coming of age; Tie, pregnant and grieving; Mark, a young man poised to assume primacy; and Teller, an elder, holder of stories. As the devastating heat of summer grows, so does the poison in Teller’s injured leg and the danger of Tie’s imminent labor, food and water dwindling while the future becomes increasingly dependent on the words Sky gleans from the dead, stories pieced together from recycled knowledge, fragmented histories, and half-buried creation myths. Thea Prieto’s From the Caves (Red Hen) presents the past, present, and future in tandem, reshaping ancient and modern ideas of death and motherhood, grief and hope, endings and beginnings. Prieto will be joined in…

Free

No Shelf Control Book Club (REMOTE)

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Join us for No Shelf Control Book Club. This book club features books from a wide range of genres including contemporary fiction, young adult, mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, and more. We will meet second Thursdays. Our August meeting of the No Shelf Control Book Club will be on August 12th at 6:30pm. We will discuss Gold Spun by Brandie June. About the Book: If Nor can't spin gold, she can always spin lies. When seventeen-year-old Nor rescues a captured faerie in the woods, he gifts her with a magical golden thread she can use to summon him for a favor. Instead, Nor uses it for a con-to convince villagers to buy straw that can be transformed into gold. Her trick works a little too well, attracting the suspicion of Prince Casper,…

$17.99

Write Around Portland: Bi-Monthly BIPOC Online Writing Workshop

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

For people who identify as Black, Indigenous or People of Color (BIPOC). 2nd & 4th Friday of every month from 4 to 5:30 pm (Pacific Time), Free. (No workshop 12/25.) Workshops are held via Zoom. Pre-registration is required. Registration opens the 1st of the month every month. Pre-register for our 2nd Friday workshop here. Pre-register for our 4th Friday workshop here. Click here for more workshop details.

Free