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!

Marilyn Stablein

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

Marilyn Stablein joins us at 7 pm on Wednesday, September 25th, to read from her recently published travelogue on her journeys through India, Nepal, and Tibet, Houseboat on the Ganges: Letters from India & Nepal: 1966-1972, published by Chin Music. Stablein left her studies in Berkeley in 1966 as a teenager to live in the Far East, before the heft of the counter-culture's spiritual land rush to India and at a time when -- with few exceptions -- most such accounts were written by the occasional male pilgrim. Through letters Stablein wrote to her family in California, which her mother lovingly saved, we also encounter the astonishing independence of a courageous young woman at the forefront of the spiritual revolution of the '60s. The book…

Free

Naomi Klein in Conversation With Thom Hartmann

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

For more than 20 years, Naomi Klein has been the foremost chronicler of the economic war waged on both people and planet – and an unapologetic champion of a sweeping environmental agenda with justice at its center. In lucid, elegant dispatches from the frontlines of contemporary natural disaster, Klein pens prescient advisories and dire warnings of what future awaits us if we refuse to act, as well as hopeful glimpses of a far better future. On Fire (Simon & Schuster) gathers Klein’s impassioned writing on the staggeringly high stakes of our immediate political and economic choices. Klein will be joined in conversation by Thom Hartmann, radio host and author of The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment.

Free

Wilding: Returning Nature to Our Farm

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

For years Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell struggled to make a go as farmers, doing everything they could to make the heavy clay soils of their farm at Knepp in West Sussex as productive as possible, while rarely succeeding in making a profit. By 2000, facing bankruptcy, the couple decided they would try something new. They would hand their 3,500 acres, farmed for centuries, even millennia, back to nature. They would let it go wild. With minimal human intervention, and with herds of free-roaming animals stimulating new habitats, Knepp is now full of new life. Tree’s book, Wilding (New York Review), points the way to a richer future – a countryside that benefits farming, nature, and us.

Free

Kitchen Table Launch Party

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

Join us for the launch part of the second issue of Kitchen Table, a new print and digital publication that connects adventurous souls, curious cooks, and enthusiastic eaters with talented writers, artists, cartoonists, and photographers who explore not only the how-to's of cooking, but the whys of eating.

Free

Reading: Tom Alkire: Western Waters

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

Annie Bloom's welcomes Portland author Tom Alkire to read from Western Waters: Fly-Fishing Memories and Lessons from Twelve Rivers. In this collection of essays about well-known (and some not-so-well-known) Western waters, Alkire blends how-to, where-to, and natural history with lyrical prose and a deep insight that only comes with knowing a place well. From rainforest rivers to desert rivers, from tidal rivers to those along the Continental Divide, the author has waded and fished these waters over the decades. Along with his fishing adventures, the book also looks at the geography, the early explorers of, and the modern-day impacts on the rivers themselves. Tom Alkire has written about fishing, rivers, and the natural world for more than 30 years. In addition to a prolific freelance…

Free

Health Justice Now: Single Payer and What Comes Next

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

Single payer healthcare is not complicated: the government pays for all care for all people. It’s cheaper than our current model, and most Americans (and their doctors) already want it. So what’s the deal with our current healthcare system, and why don’t we have something better? In Health Justice Now: Single Payer and What Comes Next (Melville House), Timothy Faust explains what single payer is, why we don’t yet have it, and how it can be won.

Free

Lawrence Shainberg

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

“Inexplicably good karma” – to this, Pushcart Prize-winning author Lawrence Shainberg attributes a life filled with relationships with legendary writers and renowned Buddhist teachers. In Four Men Shaking (Shambhala), he weaves together the narratives of three of those relationships: his literary friendships with Samuel Beckett and Norman Mailer, and his teacher-student relationship with the Japanese Zen master Kyudo Nakagawa Roshi. In Shainberg’s lifelong pursuit of both writing and Zen practice, each of these men represents an important aspect of his experience.

Free

An Evening with Anderson Cooper

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

We all know who he is. But few of us know who he really is. What drives him? Who inspires him? What matters most to him? Learn all of this and more from your favorite CNN anchor, Anderson Cooper, as he speaks his mind and shares his stories. Relentless, fearless and locked onto the truth like a heat-seeking missile. Each of these qualities has made veteran journalist Anderson Cooper one of the most recognizable faces on television. Whether recounting his probing of would-be leaders of the free world at a presidential debate or his experiences reporting from the front lines of natural disasters and brutal conflicts around the globe, Cooper shares the heady view from his front row seat to history. Audiences will appreciate his…

$62.55 – $104.95

Hazel Newlevant

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

When 17-year-old Hazel Newlevant takes a summer job clearing ivy from the forest in her hometown of Portland, Oregon, her only expectation is to earn a little money. Homeschooled, affluent, and sheltered, Hazel soon finds her job working side by side with at-risk teens to be an initiation into a new world that she has no skill in navigating. No Ivy League (Lion Forge) is Newlevant’s uncomfortable and compelling graphic memoir – an important story of a girl's awakening to the racial insularity of her life, the power of white privilege, and the hidden story of segregation in Portland.

Free

The (Other) F Word: A Celebration of the Fat & Fierce

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

Editor Angie Manfredi and contributors Bruce Sturgell and Rachelle Abellar will read from this fabulous collection celebrating beauty in all sizes.

Free