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!

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…

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…

$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…

??

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,…

$28

Oregon Jewish Voices 2021

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Started in 1999, and organized by writer Willa Schneberg, this annual event features readings by prominent Oregon Jewish poets and writers. The writers in the 2021 program, who span a range of genres including fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and essays, will share selections from their work in a virtual reading on Zoom.  Register here Donate Today We are grateful for your participation and encourage you to consider supporting our virtual programs. Speakers for 2021 Poet Joan Dobbie was born in Trogen, Switzerland of refugee parents, and grew up in a small town in Northern New York. She teaches Hatha Yoga at University of Oregon, from which she holds an MFA in Creative Writing. Despite her many small press publications, several chapbooks, and two full length poetry…

Free

Pamela Paul in Conversation With Ayad Akhtar

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Remember all those ingrained habits, cherished ideas, beloved objects, and stubborn preferences from the pre-Internet age? They’re gone. To some of those things we can say good riddance. But many we miss terribly. Whatever our emotional response to this departed realm, we are faced with the fact that nearly every aspect of modern life now takes place in filtered, isolated corners of cyberspace — a space that has slowly subsumed our physical habitats, replacing or transforming the office, our local library, a favorite bar, the movie theater, and the coffee shop where people met one another’s gaze from across the room. Even as we’ve gained the ability to gather without leaving our house, many of the fundamentally human experiences that have sustained us have disappeared.…

Free

Memoir Infusion

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. – William Faulkner If the primary purpose of literature is connection, what better way to accomplish that goal than through telling our experiences and how they formed us. This 8-week course is designed for writers already engaged in writing a memoir, who have some knowledge of the craft, and have begun a few chapters of a full-length memoir or have a handful of connected essays for a series of personal essays. Together we’ll discuss elements of craft including, but not limited to, narrative drive and tension, time, scene vs. summary narration, character development (including dialogue), ethics of truth and our faulty memories as we try to recreate our pasts on the page. We’ll also study structure,…

$570

Uli Beutter Cohen in Conversation With Simmone Taitt & Daniel Vosovic

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

For the better part of a decade, Uli Beutter Cohen, the acclaimed creator of Subway Book Review, rode the subway through New York City’s underground to observe society through the lens of our most creative thinkers: the readers of books. Between the Lines (Simon & Schuster) is a timely collection of beloved and never-before-published stories that reflect who we are and where we are going. In over 170 interviews, Uli shares nuanced insights into our collective psyche and gives us an invaluable document of our challenges and our potential. Complete with original photography, and countless intriguing book recommendations, Between the Lines is an enthusiastic celebration of the ways stories invite us into each other’s lives, and a call to action for imagining a bold, empathetic…

Free