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!

Submission Deadline: HOCUS: October 21st Reading with Theme: “Spirits”

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The HOCUS submission period for an October 21st reading at Rose City Book Pub, with a central theme of "Spirits," is coming to a close. HOCUS is looking for prose and poems of up to 2,000 words related to hauntings, liquor, or states of mind! Submissions must be received by the end of today.

Free

Write Around Portland: Bi-Monthly BIPOC Online Writing Workshop

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

I love being witnessed, and I absolutely love witnessing the words of everyone else in the group. It’s our own kind of magic.” —BIPOC Online Workshop Participant 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. Workshops are held via Zoom. Pre-registration is required. Registration opens the 1st of the month every month and closes when filled or at 12noon the day before the workshop. Pre-register for our 2nd Friday workshop here. Pre-register for our 4th Friday workshop here.  Click here for more workshop details. 

Free

Margaret Killjoy in Conversation With Robert Evans

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

Spaceships, man-eating mermaids, swords, demons, ghouls, thieves, hitchhikers, and life in the margins. Margaret Killjoy’s stories have appeared for years in science fiction and fantasy magazines both major and indie. We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow and Other Stories (AK Press) collects the best previously published work along with brand new material. Ranging in theme and tone, these imaginative tales bring the reader on a wild and moving ride where they’ll encounter a hacker who programs drones to troll CEOs into quitting; a group of LARPers who decide to live as orcs in the burned forests of Oregon; queer, teen love in a death cult; the terraforming of a climate-changed Earth; polyamorous love on an anarchist tea farm during the apocalypse; and much more. Killjoy writes…

Free

Randall Munroe & Sarah Andersen

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

The millions of people around the world who read and loved What If? still have questions, and those questions are getting stranger. Thank goodness xkcd creator Randall Munroe is here to help. Planning to ride a fire pole from the moon back to Earth? The hardest part is sticking the landing. Hoping to cool the atmosphere by opening everyone’s freezer door at the same time? Maybe it’s time for a brief introduction to thermodynamics. Want to know what would happen if you rode a helicopter blade, built a billion-story building, made a lava lamp out of lava, or jumped on a geyser as it erupted? Okay, if you insist. Before you go on a cosmic road trip, feed the residents of New York City to…

Free

The Break with Kaveh Akbar

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In partnership with Alano Club of Portland, “The Break is a monthly virtual gathering of writers and artists lead by Kaveh Akbar, celebrating amongness, collaboration, and interdisciplinary creative experimentation. Though many of the activities and discussions orbit or are inflected by recovery themes (Akbar has been in active recovery for eight years), participants are not required to self-identify as being in recovery to participate.” Register at: https://www.portlandalano.org/the-break Kaveh Akbar Kaveh Akbar is a poet, teacher and the poetry editor for The Nation. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, Paris Review, Poetry, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. His newest book, Pilgrim Bell, was published by Graywolf in 2021; he is also the author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James,…

Free

Amy Fusselman in Conversation With Kevin Sampsell

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

The Means (Mariner) is the debut novel from “wholly original” (Vogue) memoirist Amy Fusselman, a tragicomic family saga that skewers contemporary issues of money, motherhood, and class through a well-to-do woman’s quest to buy a Hamptons beach house. Shelly Means, a wealthy, stay-at-home mom and disgraced former PTA president, is poised to get the one thing in life she really wants: a beach house in the Hamptons. Who would have guessed that Shelly, the product of frugal Midwesterners, or her husband George, an unrepentant thrift shopper, would ever be living among such swells? But Shelly believes it’s possible. It might be a very small house, and it might be in the least-fancy part of the Hamptons, but Shelly has a vision board, an architect, and…

Free

Drink and Write Tuesdays

Rose City Book Pub 1329 NE Fremont, Portland, OR, United States

Jeanne Faulkner hosts this drop-in writing workshop on the last Tuesday of every month. Jeanne provides the prompts, tips, and coaching. You bring your computer and notebook.

Free

Two Rivers Book Club – September: Ruth Ozeki

Two Rivers Bookstore 8836 N Lombard Street, Portland, OR, United States

Returning to In-Person Meetings This Month! We'll be meeting at 6:30 in the courtyard behind our shop. The entrance is on N Chicago Ave, between Lombard and Ivanhoe. To get your name added to the email list for the book club, email christine@tworiversbooks.com --------------------------- September: The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki From the publisher: With its blend of sympathetic characters, riveting plot, and vibrant engagement with everything from jazz, to climate change, to our attachment to material possessions, The Book of Form and Emptiness is classic Ruth Ozeki—bold, wise, poignant, playful, humane and heartbreaking. Check your email for the Zoom link or email Christine@tworiversbooks.com to be added. October pick: This House is Haunted - Preorder now for September 27 release! Event date:…

Free

Hiron Ennes in Conversation With Sara A. Mueller

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

Hiron Ennes surreal and horrifying debut, Leech (Tordotcom) combines parasitic body horror with gothic family drama in a post-post-apocalyptic masterpiece — defying our understanding of identity, heredity, and bodily autonomy. In an isolated chateau, as far north as north goes, the baron’s doctor has died. The doctor’s replacement has a mystery to solve: discovering how the Institute lost track of one of its many bodies. For hundreds of years the Interprovincial Medical Institute has grown by taking root in young minds and shaping them into doctors, replacing every human practitioner of medicine. The Institute is here to help humanity, to cure and to cut, to cradle and protect the species from the apocalyptic horrors their ancestors unleashed. In the frozen north, the Institute's body will…

Free