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!

Lectures

  1. Events
  2. Lectures

Events Search and Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

Today

The History of African Storytelling

Central Library - U.S. Bank Room 801 SW 10th Avenue, Portland, OR, United States

Explore the history of traditional African storytelling and explore the moral lessons behind the stories. Come together with other African American children, families. and elders to share the history of your families. This event will include an open mic for families to share their stories, history, songs and poetry and a kids craft table. Participants are encouraged to bring a photo of their family and those who identify as part of the African diaspora are encouraged to wear African attire.

Free

Powell’s Books Presents NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF & SHERYL WUDUNN

Newmark Theatre 1111 SW Broadway Ave., Portland, OR, United States

Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, bestselling authors of Half the Sky, return with a deeply personal new book, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope. Looking with clear eyes at our nation’s governmental failures over the past half-century, Kristof and WuDunn examine the contemporary crisis in working-class America through the lens of the families Kristof grew up with in the rural, working-class town of Yamhill, Oregon. Yamhill prospered for much of the 20th century, but, like many working class towns, has been devastated as blue-collar jobs disappeared. About one-quarter of the kids Kristof grew up with have died in adulthood from drugs, alcohol, suicide, or reckless accidents. “We wanted to understand more deeply what had happened to Nick’s friends on the school bus,” they write, and “how our…

Continue readingPowell’s Books Presents NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF & SHERYL WUDUNN
$37.95

2019/2020 Portland Arts & Lectures: Susan Orlean (Sold Out)

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

Susan Orlean is an author and journalist, and has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992. She has written eight books, including, most recently, The Library Book, a New York Times best seller and a Washington Post Top 10 Book of the Year for 2018. Her other books include Rin Tin Tin, Saturday Night, and The Orchid Thief, which was made into the Academy Award–winning film Adaptation. Orlean has been called “a national treasure” by the Washington Post, and the New York Times has said that her work “has that elusive quality to it: exquisitely written, consistently entertaining and irreducible to anything so obvious and pedestrian as a theme.” The 35th season of Portland Arts & Lectures features some of the most engaging writers at work today. Our 2019/2020 season features George Packer, Amor Towles, Min Jin Lee, Susan Orlean, and Colson…

Continue reading2019/2020 Portland Arts & Lectures: Susan Orlean (Sold Out)
SOLD OUT

A Black History Month Tribute to Toni Morrison

Multnomah County Library - North Portland Meeting Room 512 N Killingsworth Street, Portland, OR, United States

A prolific writer of novels, essays and song lyrics who first came to prominence in the early 1970s, Morrison focused particularly on the experience of women within the black community. Her work earned her numerous awards, most notably the Nobel Prize for Literature, for which she broke new ground as the first African American winner. Join us for a celebration of the life and achievements of Toni Morrison.

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,…

Continue readingEverybody Reads 2020: Tommy Orange
$15

Planning and Writing Your Book with Kristen James

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

THIS MEETING IS ONLINE and FREE to all. (Details below the talk decription.) Planning and Writing Your Book: How to Apply Methods and Tips from Bestselling Writers Kristen Chaney James, author of Blockbuster Books, Broken Down and other writing books will share the methods and tips she’s picked up during her writing career to plan and write an engaging novel. You don’t have to choose to “write from the middle” or only use the “three legged outline” because you can use a combination of methods to ensure your story is solid and hits all the plot points readers look for. **You can join us on your phone or on your computer. You do not need to have video, but it is helpful if you can.…

Continue readingPlanning and Writing Your Book with Kristen James
Free

The Art of Marketing Your Book

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

This meeting will be ONLINE ONLY. We will post a link for you to watch on your computer as well as a phone number where you can call in to listen. We are determined to make the online experience as seamless as possible. “Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” Lao Tzu Dami will present steps for marketing your first book and guide you through the planning of a marketing journey that can start small and lead to great and unexpected places. She will share the lessons learned from her mistakes and share the unexpected successes and new worlds that have opened up…

Continue readingThe Art of Marketing Your Book
Free

Southern Oregon Online: Writing and Marketing Short Pieces with Sheila Bender

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Get Flashy - Writing and Marketing Short Pieces with Sheila Bender Flash nonfiction, flash fiction and flash series have gained traction in the publishing and literary worlds over the last years with iStories, New York Times Tiny Love Stories, Brevity, A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, and anthologies such as Flash Fiction Funny, Flash Nonfiction Funny and You Have Time for This. The form, you may recognize, has been around for decades, even centuries, though not named flash. If you've been wondering about short pieces and how to get them published and marketed, join us at our online chapter meeting with author Sheila Bender. Sheila will discuss some of her favorite work from many sources and exercises for developing one's own flash pieces, sometimes by…

Continue readingSouthern Oregon Online: Writing and Marketing Short Pieces with Sheila Bender
Free

World-Building for the Real World: Strategies for Fictionalizing

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

World Building in the Real World: Strategies for Fictionalizing the World We Live In with Bill Cameron ** World building isn't just for science-fiction and fantasy. It's just as important for fiction set in our everyday world. I'll discuss strategies and potential pitfalls when using the settings we know (or want to know) in our fiction. ** When he’s not tending his chickens, W.H. Cameron shapes unruly words into captivating people caught in harrowing situations. As Bill Cameron, he’s the author of the critically-acclaimed Skin Kadash mysteries, and his YA mystery PROPERTY OF THE STATE was named one of Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2016: Teen. His latest, CROSSROAD, introduces prickly apprentice mortician Melisende Dulac as she navigates a new landscape that’s both alluring and…

Continue readingWorld-Building for the Real World: Strategies for Fictionalizing
Free

2019/2020 Portland Arts & Lectures: Colson Whitehead (Sold Out)

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

Colson Whitehead is a novelist, essayist, and reviewer whose most recent works include 2019’s The Nickel Boys and 2016’s The Underground Railroad, a New York Times best seller which won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the National Book Award and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by theNew York Times Book Review. NPR hailed The Underground Railroad as “an American masterpiece, as much a searing document of a cruel history as a uniquely brilliant work of fiction.” Whitehead’s other books include The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and The Colossus of New York. He is a recipient of the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, a Whiting Writers Award, the Dos Passos Prize, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. The 35th season…

Continue reading2019/2020 Portland Arts & Lectures: Colson Whitehead (Sold Out)
SOLD OUT
Click a category label below to view the calendar with only events in that specific category.