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!

PNCA Graduate Symposium 2021: Speculative Futures

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Hallie Ford School of Graduate studies (HFSGS) at PNCA is pleased to announce the 2021 Graduate Symposium theme: “Speculative Features.” This symposium will consider how contemporary artists render algorithmic harms visible and imagine speculative futures optimized for just outcomes. The two-day event will facilitate conversations on the ethical, environmental, political, social, and economic impacts of artificial intelligence and machine learning for artists, designers, makers, writers, researchers, and cultural workers. Featuring the work of Amelia Winger-Bearskin, an artist who innovates with technology to make a positive impact on her community and the environment, and Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, a scholar and curator exploring the intersections of algorithmic justice and visual art, Speculative Futures explores how artificial intelligence shapes political imaginaries of what is yet to come. SCHEDULE:…

Free

On The Metaphysics of Deep Gossip: Bagley Wright Lecture Series

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In this memoir and craft talk, Lisa Jarnot reflects on her entanglement in the New York poetry scene over twenty-five years. Beginning with the proposition that deep gossip and urban mindfulness are sacred practices, she explores the places where the New York School’s feminine, marvelous, and tough irreverence opens into a deeper mystery that is passed down as a liturgy of ecstatic connectedness. The Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry supports contemporary poets as they explore in-depth their own thinking on poetry and poetics, and give a series of lectures resulting from these investigations. Lectures are delivered publicly in partnership with institutions and organizations nationwide. Find out more about past, present, and future lecturers, and explore the archive at www.bagleywrightlectures.org. Charlie Wright, Publisher of Wave…

Free

Solve for X: How X-Men Comics Got a New Identity

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The X-Men comic books of the past three years—the "Krakoan era"—have reinvented the long-running, impossibly rococo superhero franchise, devising ingenious solutions to its longstanding narrative and design problems. Douglas Wolk will present a whistle-stop tour of six decades' worth of Marvel's mutant comics, and discuss how "Head of X" Jonathan Hickman, designer Tom Muller, artists Pepe Larraz and R.B. Silva, colorist Marte Gracia and their collaborators overhauled the X-Men line in 2019. Douglas Wolk is the author of All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told, and teaches comics history at Portland State University. He’s written about comics and music for magazines, newspapers and web sites including Time, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, The Believer, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice,…

Free

Colonial Domesticity

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

This lecture considers the centrality of forms of domesticity, such as family, kinship, and schooling, to the social reproduction of colonialism and racial capitalism in the United States. Colonial and capitalist social relations are materially reproduced through feminized household, care work, and biological labor. While homes and households are primary sites for the invisible and mostly unwaged labors of colonized, racialized, and immigrant women that reproduce human being, social reproduction takes place on plantations, in schools, factories, on assembly lines, in hospitals and prisons and in other institutions, at both intimate and global scales. Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University, Director of Graduate Studies, and an affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. An interdisciplinary scholar whose work is…

Free

Modern Tarot

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

Tarot, the ancient card system, is having a 21st century renaissance. With more and more artists improving upon the medieval straight, white, thin and able-bodied imagery, today everyone can find a deck that speaks to them. Whether you are a curious newcomer to tarot, an burgeoning beginner or a pro, this lecture-style workshop will walk you through the structure and meaning of the 78-cards, pausing to answer participant questions as well as offer tips for spreads and ritual as well as fascinating trivia attached to the iconic images. Access Program We want our writing classes and Delves to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure can present obstacles for some people. Our Access Program offers writing class…

$80

Schoenfeldt Distinguished Writers Series: Naomi Shihab Nye

University of Portland 5000 N. Willamette Blvd., Portland, OR, United States

The Schoenfeldt Distinguished Writers Series was founded in 1988 by Rev. Arthur Schoenfeldt, C.S.C., of the University's Holy Cross community, and his sister, University regent Suzanne Schoenfeldt Fields, in honor of their late parents. The series was permanently endowed by Suzanne Schoenfeldt Fields and her husband Fred Fields with a gift to the University's Defining Moment Campaign. Twice each year (usually in February and October), Schoenfeldt guest writers offer a public reading and also visit students and faculty during their time on The Bluff, especially those in literature, science, and journalism classes. Originally focused on fine writing in and of the American West, the Schoenfeldt Distinguished Visiting Writers Series is designed to honor and celebrate the best of American literature by bringing some of the…

Free

Consider This: Black Political Power in Oregon

Alberta Rose Theatre 3000 NE Alberta St, Portland, OR, United States

Join Oregon Humanities on Wednesday, September 14, for a conversation on the state of Black political power in Oregon with Joy Alise Davis, executive director at Imagine Black; Keith Jenkins, director of Southern Oregon Black Leaders, Activists, & Community Coalition; and Marcus LeGrand, vice-chair of Bend-La Pine Schools. Journalist Bruce Poinsette will facilitate the conversation. The event will take place in-person at the Alberta Rose Theatre, 3000 NE Alberta St., in Portland. Doors will open at 6:00 p.m, and the event will begin at 7:00 p.m. Tickets are $15, and no-cost tickets are available by request. Joy Alise Davis is a Cincinnati native who graduated from Miami University with a bachelor of arts in political science and from Parsons School of Design with a master…

Free – $15

Portland Arts & Lectures 2022/23: Abdulrazak Gurnah

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

This event is part of our 39th season of Portland Arts & Lectures. Subscriptions for the five-part lecture series are on sale now. All lectures will be held in person at The Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in downtown Portland, OR. For more information on the season, please see our FAQs or reach out to us at la@literary-arts.org. Abdulrazak Gurnah Abdulrazak Gurnah is celebrated novelist, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021. The Nobel Prize committee cited his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents” for his win. Gurnah’s novels include Memory of Departure, Pilgrims Way, Dottie, Paradise, which was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize, Admiring Silence, By the Sea, Desertion, The Last Gift, Gravel Heart,…

$90 – $355

Modernist Design & Literature with Melanie Nead

Lewis & Clark College 0615 SW Palatine Hill Road, Portland, OR, United States

Melanie Nead (LC ’03) of Lonesome Pictopia is a muralist and wallpaper/ textile designer. Melanie will discuss the Arts & Crafts Movement and its relationship to modernist design and literature. Hosted by Professor Rishona Zimring and her ENG 450-02 Senior Seminar class. Free Miller Hall, Room 102

Free

Visiting Writers Series: Lesley Nneka Arimah

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

Lesley Nneka Arimah was born in the UK and grew up in Nigeria and wherever else her father was stationed for work. Her stories have been honored with a National Magazine Award, an O. Henry Award and the Caine Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, GRANTA and has received support from MacDowell and the United States Artists Fellowship. She was selected for the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 and her debut collection WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY won the 2017 Kirkus Prize, the 2017 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and was selected for the New York Times/PBS book club among other honors. Arimah lives in Minneapolis and is working on a…

Free