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!

Visiting Writers Series: Janice Lee

Reed College - Eliot Hall Chapel 3203 SE Woodstock, Portland, OR, United States

Janice Lee is a Korean-American writer, artist, and editor. She writes about the filmic long take, slowness, interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma, and the concept of han in Korean culture, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy? She is the author of KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), a multidisciplinary exploration of cyborgs, brains, and the stakes of consciousness, Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), an experimental novel, Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), a book-length meditation and ekphrasis on the films of Hungarian director Béla Tarr, Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015), a lyrical essay reflecting on the death of Lee’s mother, and most recently, The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016), a collection of travel essays inspired…

Free

Charles Finch

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

London, 1855. A young and eager Charles Lenox faces his toughest case yet: a murder without a single clue. Slumped in a third-class car at Paddington Station is the body of a handsome young gentleman. He has no luggage, empty pockets, and no sign of identification on his person. Written in Charles Finch’s unmistakably witty and graceful voice, The Last Passenger (Minotaur) is a cunning, thrilling, and deeply satisfying conclusion to this trilogy of prequels to his Charles Lenox series.

Free

Ander Monson

Powell's Books on Hawthorne 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, OR, United States

Ander Monson’s new story collection, The Gnome Stories (Graywolf), focuses on characters who are loners in the truest sense – who are in the process of recovering from mental, physical, or emotional trauma, and who find solace – or at least a sense of purpose – in peculiar jobs and pursuits. Personal and idiosyncratic, Monson’s new collection of essays, I Will Take the Answer (Graywolf), showcases his deep thinking and broad-ranging interests, his sly wit, his soft spot for heavy metal, and his ability to tunnel deeply into the odd and revealing, sometimes subterranean, worlds of American life.

Free

William T. Vollmann

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

National Book Award-winning author William T. Vollmann returns to his original fictional territory – the lives of the dispossessed in San Francisco – with a parable about the limitations of desire and life at the margins of society. The Lucky Star (Viking) aches with compassion as it explores celebrity culture, gender identity, incest, Christian sacrifice, and, most of all, the quotidian and sometimes faltering heroism of marginalized people who in the face of humiliation and outright violence seek to love in their own way, and stand up for who they are.

Free

Elana K. Arnold & Anna-Marie McLemore

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

In Red Hood (Balzer + Bray), Michael L. Printz Award honoree and National Book Award finalist Elana K. Arnold returns with a darkly violent, furiously feminist tale of terror about generational trauma, female friendship, and coming into one’s own power. Straddling five centuries, Anna-Marie McLemore's breathtaking new YA novel centers on a young woman uncovering her family's history while fighting her attraction to the wrong boy. Dark and Deepest Red (Feiwel & Friends) pairs the forbidding magic of a fairy tale with a modern story of passion and betrayal.

Free

E. Latimer in Conversation With Cat Winters

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

In E. Latimer’s Witches of Ash and Ruin (Little, Brown), modern witchcraft blends with ancient Celtic mythology in an epic clash of witches and gods – perfect for fans of V. E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic trilogy. With razor-sharp prose and achingly real characters, Latimer crafts a sweeping, mesmerizing story of dark magic and brutal mythology that’s impossible to put down. Latimer will be joined in conversation by Cat Winters, author of In the Shadow of Blackbirds and The Raven’s Tale.

Free

Phil & Kaja Foglio

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

In Phil and Kaja Foglio’s Agatha H. and the Siege of Mechanicsburg (Night Shade), Agatha Heterodyne has returned to her family’s hereditary town with the might of the Wulfenbach Empire hot on her heels. Now she must race to repair the mechanisms that once allowed the Castle to defend Mechanicsburg, before the rest of Europa shows up to take all the revenge the mad Heterodynes of the past so richly earned. From the Hugo Award–winning Girl Genius online comics comes this fourth book in the Agatha H. series – engaging you in a world of adventure, romance, and mad science!

Free

Emily Strelow in Conversation With Rebecca Clarren

Powell's Books on Hawthorne 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, OR, United States

Emily Strelow's mesmerizing debut stitches together a sprawling saga of the feral Northwest across farmlands and deserts and generations: an American mosaic alive with birdsong and gunsmoke, held together by a silver box of eggshells – a long-ago gift from a mother to her daughter. Written with grace, grit, and an acute knowledge of how the past insists upon itself, The Wild Birds (Rare Bird) is a radiant and human story about the shelters we find and make along our crooked paths home. Strelow will be joined in conversation by Rebecca Clarren, author of Kickdown.

Free

Everybody Reads 2020: Tommy Orange

Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall 1037 SW Broadway, Portland, OR, United States

Celebrate the power of books to create a stronger community by attending the 2020 Everybody Reads author event with Tommy Orange. Literary Arts is proud to host an evening with award-winning author Tommy Orange as the culminating event of Multnomah County Library’s Everybody Reads program. This year’s programming will center on Orange’s debut novel, There There. Tickets start at $15, available at Portland5.com With the selection of There There, Everybody Reads 2020 centers around the experience of urban Native Americans in Oakland, California. Through a shared reading experience, we will explore a multitude of themes in the book, from identity and ownership to the urban-rural divide. About There There: Orange’s shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow,…

$15

Historical Fiction Book Club

Books Around the Corner 40 NW 2nd Street, Gresham, OR, United States

The Books Around the Corner Historical Fiction Book Club will be community led and meets monthly on the first Friday of every month at 4PM. We would like to extend an invitation to all of our historical fiction loving customers (RSVP is not required). 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 March 6th for our Historical Fiction Book Club. We will discuss Meet Me in Monaco by Hazel Gaynor. About the book: Set in the 1950s against the backdrop of Grace Kelly's whirlwind romance and glamourous wedding…

Free