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

Write Around Portland: Bi-Monthly BIPOC Online Writing Workshop

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

For people who identify as Black, Indigenous or People of Color (BIPOC). 2nd & 4th Friday of every month from 4 to 5:30 pm (Pacific Time), Free. (No workshops 11/26 & 12/25.) Workshops are held via Zoom. Pre-registration is required. Registration opens the 1st of the month every month. Pre-register for our 2nd Friday workshop here. Pre-register for our 4th Friday workshop here. Click here for more workshop details.

Free

BOOKLOVER’S BURLESQUE: The Gothic Edition

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

Show | 7pm // Doors | 6pm “Deep into that darkness…dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” -Edgar Allen Poe Dream dreams you’ve never dared to dream before and venture into the darkness with us as Lacy Productions and the Alberta Rose Theatre present… BOOKLOVER’S BURLESQUE: The Gothic Edition A Booklover’s Burlesque special edition at the Alberta Rose Theater, where we explore the strange, the mysterious, the creepy, and the unexplained in the sexiest literary way possible, just in time for All Hallow’s Eve! Booklover’s Burlesque is the world’s sexiest literary salon which matches titillating, inspiring, and empowering book readings with burlesque, boylesque, and draglesque performances all in one show! Professional readers, actors, and/or local authors & writers read aloud a three to…

Continue readingBOOKLOVER’S BURLESQUE: The Gothic Edition
$20 – $30

Portland Storytellers’ Guild: Storytelling 101

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

A virtual workshop on Zoom For aspiring, beginning and intermediate tellers Hone your craft! Shape and practice your story! Are you working on a short story to share with family, to tell at the Moth or a story swap, or to another audience? Would you like to polish a story to submit to the Guild Selection Committee in hopes of appearing in the Guild Storython, where many tellers share 5 minute stories? (The Storython is a prerequisite for new tellers to be considered for a PSG main stage show.) Join us in the workshop with a 5-6 minute story that you wish to prepare for presentation. Please check the story timing before the workshop. Aim for 5 minutes. Stories should be spoken rather than read.…

Continue readingPortland Storytellers’ Guild: Storytelling 101
$25

The Trauma-Informed Creative Writing Classroom

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The creative writing classroom is not an explicitly healing space—yet writers regularly bring their stories of trauma into workshops. What are our obligations to these students as instructors? What are the best practices for managing workshop discussions about potentially triggering material? In this 6-hour intensive, learn when writing heals and harms, discuss syllabus disclaimers and content warnings, identify craft issues common to trauma writing, consider how feedback lands in an activated nervous system, and assess your own self-regulation skills. This class is limited to 15 students. October 23 and 24, 2021 Saturday and Sunday, 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. (two sessions) Online via Zoom Katherine Standefer Katherine Standefer is the author of Lightning Flowers: My Journey To Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life, which…

Continue readingThe Trauma-Informed Creative Writing Classroom
$145

Portland Storytellers’ Guild: Guild EXTRA Show

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Long time Guild member Ken Iverson shares many of his favorite Halloween stories. The program will include original stories as well as ones he's collected over 40 years of story telling. "Make some popcorn, get a favorite drink, turn the lights down and settle in. We'll have fun! These stories will help you laugh your way through the darkness." Ken Iverson has brought stories to life for audiences for over 35 years. He loves how a story can bring people together. He tells original stories and traditional and contemporary folktales and myths from around the world for all ages. Ken believes that the old adage “laughter is the best medicine is close to true. “It's not the only medicine,” he says, “but it is certainly…

Continue readingPortland Storytellers’ Guild: Guild EXTRA Show
$10

Submission Deadline: Tin House 2022 Winter Workshop

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Applications Open: October 4th With ongoing concerns about the increase in Covid numbers and our ability to safely gather indoors, we have decided to hold our 2022 Winter Workshop online again. 2021 Winter Scholars: A. Meinen, Angelique Stevens, Christopher James Llego, Jeanetta Craigwell-Graham, Kimberly Reyes, Krys Malcolm Belc, Luke Dani Blue, Lydia Abedeen, Marissa Davis, Marlanda Dekine-Sapient Soul, Michaeljulius Y. Idani, Naphisa Senanarong, Reena Shah, Sabrina Imbler, Tatiana Johnson-Boria, Vincent Chavez

$600

Pre-Show Author Talk & Book Signing with Emilly Prado

Portland Center Stage 128 NW 11th Avenue, Portland, OR, United States

Join us for a special pre-show author talk and book signing with Chicana writer Emilly Prado, author of Funeral For Flaca. She will read a brief excerpt from the book that retraces her experience coming of age as a prep-turned-chola-turned-punk in this collection that is one-part memoir-in-essays, and one-part playlist, zigzagging across genres and decades, much like the rapidly changing and varied tastes of her youth. For anyone that purchases a copy of the book at the event, Emilly will stay after and sign them for the guests in attendance. All guests who attend events or gatherings at The Armory must provide documentation that they have been fully vaccinated for COVID-19 by the date of their visit. If you are unable to be vaccinated, you may provide proof of a negative COVID-19 test taken…

Continue readingPre-Show Author Talk & Book Signing with Emilly Prado
Free

Premise Course: How do illness and pain define the human experience? Zadie Smith’s Intimations and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Illness is a defining aspect of the human experience. In this course we will explore the question: How do illness and pain define and shape the human experience? We’ll read and discuss Susan Sontag’s classic 1978 essay Illness as Metaphor and a selection of essays in Zadie Smith’s newest collection. Participants will read Smith’s essays about Covid and our collective understanding of how disease shapes who we are. Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor: In 1978 Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as "one of the most liberating books of its time." A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients…

Continue readingPremise Course: How do illness and pain define the human experience? Zadie Smith’s Intimations and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor
$35

An Evening with Yamiche Alcindor

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The Oregon Historical Society is thrilled to kick-off the 2022 Mark O. Hatfield Lecture Series with a virtual presentation by PBS NewsHour White House Correspondent Yamiche Alcindor. In her presentation, “Truth in Journalism: Reporting on Politics and Identity in America,” Alcindor looks at the current political issues facing the United States and shares her experiences reporting on international, national, and local dynamics. She offers her observations on the White House and Washington politics, her thoughts on how social justice issues are affecting the country’s future, and her analysis of the latest stories surrounding elections. Alcindor also talks about how her decision to pursue journalism came at 16 years old when she learned the tragic truth about the 1955 murder of Emmett Till and the launch…

Continue readingAn Evening with Yamiche Alcindor
??

Alyssa Milano in Conversation With Charlotte Clymer / Ticketed Event

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Sorry Not Sorry (Dutton) is Alyssa Milano’s sharply observed, uproarious, and deeply intimate ode to the life she has lived and the issues that matter most. In her new book, the actress and activist delivers a collection of powerful personal essays that get to the heart of her life, career, and all-out humanitarianism. Milano’s essays are unvarnished and elegant, funny and heartbreaking, and utterly real. A timely book that shows in almost real time the importance of taking care of others, it also gives a gut-punch-level wake-up call in an era where the noise is a distraction from what really needs to happen, if we want to live in a better world. These are stories of growing up in celebrity, of family and of friends,…

Continue readingAlyssa Milano in Conversation With Charlotte Clymer / Ticketed Event
$28
Click a category label below to view the calendar with only events in that specific category.