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!

Nonfiction

  1. Events
  2. Nonfiction

Events Search and Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

Today

Mallory Smith: A Reading from her Memoir by Diane Smith

Lewis & Clark - Frank Manor House 0615 SW Palatine Hill Road, Portland, OR, United States

Mallory Smith, who grew up in Los Angeles, was a freelance writer and editor specializing in environmental issues, social justice, and healthcare-related communications. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University and worked as a senior producer at Green Grid Radio, an environmental storytelling radio show and podcast. Her radio work was featured on KCRW, National Radio Project, and State of the Human. She was a fierce advocate for those who suffered from cystic fibrosis, launching the viral social media campaign Lunges4Lungs with friends and raising over $5 million with her parents for CF research through the annual Mallory’s Garden event. She died at the age of twenty-five on November 15, 2017, two months after receiving a double-lung transplant. Mallory’s Legacy Fund has been established…

Continue readingMallory Smith: A Reading from her Memoir by Diane Smith
Free

Emily Nagoski

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

Emily Nagoski’s groundbreaking new book, Burnout (Ballantine), explains why women experience burnout differently than men – and provides a simple, science-based plan to help women minimize stress, manage emotions, and live a more joyful life. Nagoski will also present The Come as You Are Workbook (Simon & Schuster), a new, practical workbook (and companion volume to her bestselling Come as You Are) that allows you to apply her earlier book’s research and understanding of why and how women’s sexuality works to everyday life.

Free

An Evening with Madeleine Albright

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

Madeleine K. Albright is Chair of Albright Stonebridge Group, a global strategy firm, and Chair of Albright Capital Management LLC, an investment advisory firm focused on emerging markets. She was the 64th Secretary of State of the United States. Dr. Albright received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, from President Obama on May 29, 2012. In 1997, Dr. Albright was named the first female Secretary of State and became, at that time, the highest ranking woman in the history of the U.S. government. As Secretary of State, Dr. Albright reinforced America’s alliances, advocated for democracy and human rights, and promoted American trade, business, labor, and environmental standards abroad. From 1993 to 1997, Dr. Albright served as the U.S. Permanent Representative to…

Continue readingAn Evening with Madeleine Albright
$40 – $85

From Chaos to Creativity Tour

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

It's time for a book tour! I have four dates in Portland/Seattle area. Spread the word and invite a friend who's been having trouble kickstarting that creative project they've been talking about for years. :) Come with your head full of chaos, leave with a plan. You've got this. Sept 10 at Two Rivers Bookstore is St. Johns Come hang!

Free

Dan Schilling

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

In the predawn hours of March 4, 2002, just below the 10,469-foot peak of a mountain in eastern Afghanistan, a fierce battle raged. Outnumbered by Al Qaeda fighters, Air Force Combat Controller John Chapman and a handful of Navy SEALs struggled to take the summit in a desperate bid to find a lost teammate. Dan Schilling’s Alone at Dawn (Grand Central) is the astonishing true account of Chapman, Medal of Honor recipient and Special Ops Combat Controller, and his heroic one-man stand during the Afghan War, as he sacrificed his life to save the lives of 23 comrades-in-arms.

Free

Pageturners Author Visit: Rudy Owens

Multnomah County Library - Belmont Meeting Room 1038 SE César E. Chávez Boulevard, Portland, OR, United States

Engage in stimulating conversation about books, exchange perspectives about characters and plot, and get to know your neighbors. Meet the author! Read You Don't Know How Lucky You Are: An Adoptee's Journey Through the American Adoption Experience by Rudy Owens. Nearly 50 years after he was relinquished for adoption, Rudy Owens learned how fortunate life can be. In 2014 in San Diego, Owens met his biological half-sister for the first time. That meeting inspired Owens to tell his adoption story set against the larger adoption narrative that has impacted millions of adoptees, their birth parents, and their collective biological and adoptive families. Pageturners is sponsored by Friends of the Library.

Free

Caroline Kurtz

Broadway Books 1714 NE Broadway, Portland, OR, United States

Caroline Kurtz joins us at 7 pm on Wednesday, September 11th, to read from her recently published memoir A Road Called Down on Both Sides: Growing Up in Ethiopia and America, published by Catalyst Press. From the age of five, Caroline Kurtz grew up in Ethiopia, the child of Presbyterian missionaries. The family lived in the church’s most remote mission station in the mountainous regions of southwestern Ethiopia near the town of Maji. Beginning at the age of ten, Kurtz attended boarding school in Addis Ababa and then in Alexandria, Egypt. She left for college in Illinois at eighteen, totally unprepared for American culture. She eventually married a childhood sweetheart, also the child of American missionaries to Ethiopia, and returned with their family to live…

Continue readingCaroline Kurtz
Free

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

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

In June 2017, Travis Kalanick, the hard-charging CEO of Uber, was ousted in a boardroom coup that capped a brutal year for the transportation giant. Uber had catapulted to the top of the tech world, yet for many came to symbolize everything wrong with Silicon Valley. Award-winning New York Times technology correspondent Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped (W. W. Norton) presents the dramatic rise and fall of Uber. Super Pumped is a page-turning story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth, and bad behavior that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic 12-month periods in corporate history.

Free

Liz Prato in Conversation with Jacqueline Keeler

Broadway Books 1714 NE Broadway, Portland, OR, United States

We welcome Liz Prato, author of Volcanoes, Palm Trees, and Privilege: Essays on Hawaiʻi, in conversation with Jacqueline Keeler at 7 pm on Thursday, September 12th. Volcanoes, Palm Trees, and Privilege, published by Overcup Press, explores what it means to be a white tourist in a seeming paradise that has been formed – and largely destroyed – by white outsiders. Hawaiian history, pop culture, and contemporary affairs are woven with personal narrative in fifteen essays that examine how the touristic ideal of Hawai’i came to be. In the book, Prato examines her multi-layered relationship with Hawai’i and her soul connection with this group of islands. Author Lidia Yuknavitch describes the book as “a love letter to the land and people of Hawai’i.” Prato will read…

Continue readingLiz Prato in Conversation with Jacqueline Keeler
Free

Echo of Distant Water – JB Fisher

Another Read Through 3932 N Mississippi Ave, Portland, OR, United States

Join us for a reading of Echo of Distant Water: The 1958 Disappearance of Portland’s Martin Family by JB Fisher! Echo of Distant Water tells the true and largely forgotten story of Ken Martin, his wife Barbara, and their three young daughters—who vanished while hunting Christmas greens in the Columbia River Gorge on December 7, 1958. Despite one of the largest missing persons searches in Oregon history, the case remains perplexingly unsolved to this day. After discovering a stack of old newspaper articles about the case in his McMinnville garage, author JB Fisher obtained a wealth of first-hand and never-before publicized information including an intriguing trail left in the personal notebooks and papers of Multnomah County criminal detective Walter E. Graven. These provide fascinating insight…

Continue readingEcho of Distant Water – JB Fisher
Free
Click a category label below to view the calendar with only events in that specific category.