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!

True Crime Book Club

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

We will be reading The Trial of Lizzie Borden. Receive 15% off your copy by getting it at Books Around the Corner. The attending members have spoken and the June/July book will be The Trial of Lizzie Borden. The tale of Lizzie Borden and fucked up little song, is a case that fascinated my young murderino brain. I never read much about the trial, just mostly spent time on the internet reading about the crime scene and looking at the crime scene photos. Eeek! Needless to say I am excited to read about this trial and the media uproar it caused. Feel free to bring snacks or wine!

Free

Reading: Caroline Kurtz: A Road Called Down on Both Sides

Annie Bloom's Books 7834 SW Capitol Hwy, Portland, OR, United States

Annie Bloom's welcomes Portland author Caroline Kurtz to read from her memoir, A Road Called Down on Both Sides: Growing Up in Ethiopia and America. Caroline Kurtz grew up in the remote mountains of Maji, Ethiopia in the 1950s. Inside her mud adobe home with her missionary parents and three sisters, she enjoyed American family life. Outside, her world was shaped by drums and the joy cry; Jeep and mule treks into the countryside; ostriches on the air strip; and the crackle of several Ethiopian languages she barely understood but longed to learn. Caroline felt she'd been exiled to a foreign country when she went to Illinois for college. She returned to Ethiopia to teach, only to discover how complex working in another culture and language…

Free

Infinite Baseball: Notes From a Philosopher at the Ballpark

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

Baseball is a strange sport: it consists of long periods in which little seems to be happening, punctuated by high-energy outbursts of rapid fire activity. Because of this, despite ever greater profits, Major League Baseball is bent on finding ways to shorten games, and to tailor baseball to today's shorter attention spans. But for the true fan, baseball is always compelling to watch and intellectually fascinating. Its superficially slow pace is an opportunity to participate in the distinctive thinking practice that defines the game. If baseball is boring, it's boring the way philosophy is boring: not because there isn't a lot going on, but because the challenge baseball poses is making sense of it all. In Infinite Baseball (Oxford), philosopher and baseball fan Alva Noë…

Free

The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women Who Changed Soccer

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

The U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team has won three World Cups and four Olympic gold medals, set record TV ratings, drawn massive crowds, earned huge revenues for FIFA and U.S. Soccer, and helped to redefine the place of women in sports. But despite their dominance, and their rosters of superstar players, they’ve endured striking inequality: low pay, poor playing conditions, and limited opportunities to play in professional leagues. The National Team (Harry N. Abrams), from leading soccer journalist Caitlin Murray, tells the history of the USWNT in full, from their formation in the 1980s to the run-up to the 2019 World Cup, chronicling both their athletic triumphs and less visible challenges off the pitch. Murray also recounts the rise and fall of U.S. professional leagues,…

Free

Westside Writing Group

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

A group for anyone writing nonfiction or memoir who would like company, support, and, most of all, accountability. Whether you’ve never written a word or you’re a published author, join us!

Free

Protecting Pollinators: How to Save the Creatures That Feed Our World

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

We should thank a pollinator at every meal. These diminutive creatures fertilize a third of the crops we eat. Yet half of the 200,000 species of pollinators are threatened. Birds, bats, insects, and many other pollinators are disappearing, putting our entire food supply in jeopardy. In North America and Europe, bee populations have already plummeted by more than a third and the population of butterflies has declined 31 percent. Protecting Pollinators (Island) explores why the statistics have become so dire and how they can be reversed. Jodi Helmer breaks down the latest science on environmental threats and takes readers inside the most promising conservation initiatives. Efforts include famers reducing pesticides, cities creating butterfly highways, volunteers ripping up invasive plants, gardeners planting native flowers, and citizen…

Free

Art Books Sale

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

To celebrate Gresham Arts Festival we are offering 15% off all hobbies, arts, and crafts books! We will have books in all of these areas for children and adults to encourage creativity this summer and throughout the year.

Free

Book Talk and Signing: Jim Lommasson – What We Carried

Blue Sky Center for Photographic Arts 122 NW 8th Avenue, Portland, OR, United States

Jim Lommasson will discuss his new book, What We Carried: Fragments and Memories from the Cradle of Civilization a collaborative photography and writing storytelling project with Iraqi and Syrian refugees who have fled their homeland because of war. Jim will read participant’s stories, discuss the making of the book, and will sign copies of What We Carried. Jim began working on his What We Carried project in 2010 while completing his Exit Wounds: Soldiers’ Stories – Life After Iraq and Afghanistan traveling show and book about returning solders from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lommasson invites Iraqi and Syrian refugees who have fled to the U.S. to write their own personal stories directly on Lommasson’s photographs of objects that they carried with them on…

Free

Longreads Club: Behind the Lines: Part Two

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

READ THE ARTICLE: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/06/behind-the-lines-syria-part-two/ This blockbuster investigation from Mother Jones on the United States' involvement in Syria was released in two parts, each of which takes about an hour to read. We're going to continue our discussion from July 6th and read the second part part for this meeting. Join the Longreads Club where we explore a long-form article focused on global topics. No membership or registration required. Just read the article, show up, and join the discussion!

Free

Reading: Shawn Levy: The Castle on Sunset

Annie Bloom's Books 7834 SW Capitol Hwy, Portland, OR, United States

Annie Bloom's welcomes back Portland author Shawn Levy to read from his latest book, The Castle on Sunset: Life, Death, Love, Art, and Scandal at Hollywood's Chateau Marmont. This is the definitive history of Hollywood's most iconic, storied, and scandalous hotel. For ninety years, Hollywood's brightest stars have favored the Chateau Marmont as a home away from home. An apartment house-turned-hotel, it has been the backdrop for generations of gossip and folklore: 1930s bombshell Jean Harlow took lovers during her third honeymoon there; director Nicholas Ray slept with his sixteen-year-old Rebel Without a Cause star Natalie Wood; Anthony Perkins and Tab Hunter met poolside and began a secret affair; Jim Morrison swung from the balconies, once falling nearly to his death; John Belushi suffered a…

Free