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!

Submissions Open!

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

neverland (ne-vər-land): 1.) an unreal, imaginary, or ideal state, condition, place 2.) any remote, isolated, barren, or sparsely settled region Send us your stories and poems of pipe dreams, utopias, and Shangri-Las! HOCUS accepts prose, poetry, and creative nonfiction of up to 2,000 words. We welcome literary fiction and poetry submissions from everyone regardless of race, class, gender, sexuality, geography, religious or cultural background. Our programming is in English. We especially invite Black, Indigenous, and other people of color to take part. We recognize all genders. The reading will be on Friday, March 11th from 7:30 - 9:00 p.m. at the Rose City Book Pub in NE Portland. Please be aware that the Book Pub is currently requiring proof of vaccination. We are keeping in…

Free

BOOKLOVER’S BURLESQUE: Cozy Classics

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

“We would be together and have our books, and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.” -Ernest Hemingway It’s time to get warm and cozy with us as Lacy Productions and The Alberta Rose Theatre present BOOKLOVER’S BURLESQUE: Cozy Classics 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 piece of poetry, fiction (from any genre), memoir, non-fiction, etc, which is then followed by a burlesque performance inspired by the piece. Join us as we bring the sensual heat of words and wantonness rivaling the warmth of a fireplace…

$20 – $30

Chuck Klosterman

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The ’90s brought about a revolution in the human condition we’re still groping to understand. Beyond epiphenomena like “Cop Killer” and Titanic and Zima, there were wholesale shifts in how society was perceived: the rise of the Internet, pre-9/11 politics, and the paradoxical belief that nothing was more humiliating than trying too hard. Pop culture accelerated without the aid of a machine that remembered everything, generating an odd comfort in never being certain about anything. It was the last era that held to the idea of a true, hegemonic mainstream before it all began to fracture, whether you found a home in it or defined yourself against it. In The Nineties (Penguin Press), Chuck Klosterman makes a home in all of it: the film, the…

Free

HOCUS: Submissions Open!

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

neverland (ne-vər-land): 1.) an unreal, imaginary, or ideal state, condition, place 2.) any remote, isolated, barren, or sparsely settled region Send us your stories and poems of pipe dreams, utopias, and Shangri-Las! HOCUS accepts prose, poetry, and creative nonfiction of up to 2,000 words. We welcome literary fiction and poetry submissions from everyone regardless of race, class, gender, sexuality, geography, religious or cultural background. Our programming is in English. We especially invite Black, Indigenous, and other people of color to take part. We recognize all genders. The reading will be on Friday, March 11th from 7:30 - 9:00 p.m. at the Rose City Book Pub in NE Portland. Please be aware that the Book Pub is currently requiring proof of vaccination. We are keeping in…

Free

Write Now Online: The Narrative Triptych w/ videos by Lidia Yuknavitch (Introvert VersionOngoing)

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Write Now: The Narrative Triptych—a 4-week creative incubator Extrovert Version Begins March 13th! A painted or carved triptych typically has three hinged panels, and the two outer panels can be folded in towards the central one. A literary or musical triptych generally consists of three closely related or contrasting themes or parts. Triptych derives from the Greek triptychos ("having three folds"), formed by combining tri- ("three") and ptychē ("fold" or "layer"). Although triptych originally described a specific type of Roman writing tablet that had three hinged sections, it is not surprising that the idea was generalized first to a type of painting, and then to anything composed of three parts. The triptychs most etched on Lidia’s brain are Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, Ruben's Elevation of the Cross, and Bacon's Three Studies for…

$99

Overcoming Rejection for Writers

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

FEATURING: Jami Attenberg Deesha Philyaw Tommy Pico Moderated by Denne Michele Norris Sponsored by GrubStreet's Muse & the Marketplace conference Whether you’re just starting out or a seasoned pro, all writers face rejection—but how we cope with that rejection plays a huge role in shaping our literary future. Rebounding can be tough, but rather than allowing rejection to stop us in our tracks, we can reframe it into a motivational and instructional tool. Some rejections actually make us stronger—as writers, editors, applicants, and people—while others just need to be ignored. Poet and TV writer Tommy Pico (JUNK, Reservation Dogs), memoirist Jami Attenberg (I Came All This Way to Meet You), and award-winning short story writer Deesha Philyaw (The Secret Lives of Church Ladies) will share…

$10

Frank Wilderson on Afropessimism

PSU - Lincoln Hall 1620 SW Park Ave, Portland, OR, United States

PSU's Black Studies Department invites you to a discussion with Frank B. Wilderson III on his recent book Afropessimism. Wednesday April 13, 2022 | 6-8pm Why does race seem to color almost every feature of our moral and political universe? Why does a perpetual cycle of slavery―in all its political, intellectual, and cultural forms―continue to define the Black experience? And why is anti-Black violence such a predominant feature not only in the United States but around the world? These are just some of the compelling questions that animate Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson III’s seminal work on the philosophy of Blackness. Radical in conception, remarkably poignant, and with soaring flights of lyrical prose, Afropessimism reverberates with wisdom and painful clarity in the fractured world we inhabit. It positions Wilderson as a paradigmatic thinker…

Free

The George Floyd Rebellion and the Power of Black Lives Matter

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Please join us for a talk by Cedric Johnson, faculty in Black Studies and Political Science at University of Illinois, Chicago. Professor Johnson will be discussing his new book, The Panthers Can't Save Us Now: Debating Left Politics and Black Lives Matter (Verso). Cedric Johnson is Professor of Black Studies and Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  His teaching and research interests include African American political thought, neoliberal politics, and class analysis and race. His most recent book, The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now (Verso, 2022), reprises the debate surrounding his eponymous essay, which cautioned against the perils of nostalgia and ethnic politics during Black Lives Matter’s first wave.  Johnson’s book, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (University of Minnesota…

Free

Hawai’i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific

PSU Native American Student and Community Center 710 SW Jackson St, Portland, OR, United States

Please join us for a talk by Nitasha Tamar Sharma, Professor of African American Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. Professor Sharma will be discussing her new book Hawai'i is my Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific (Duke University Press, 2021). A comparative race studies scholar, Nitasha Tamar Sharma is a professor of African American Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University, where she was the Charles Deering Professor of Teaching Excellence. Hawai'i is my Haven is an ethnography that maps the context and contours of Black life in the Hawaiian Islands to highlight the paradox of Hawaiʻi as a multiracial paradise and site of unacknowledged antiBlack racism. Dr. Sharma is also the author of Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global…

Free

Submission Deadline: Pathos Literary Magazine: Spring 2022

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Pathos Literary Magazine submissions for the Spring 2022 issue are open until April 29th! did you have any bright ideas over spring break? 💡we want to read them! submissions for our spring 2022 issue are now open 🌿🌸 You must be a current student at Portland State University to be considered for publication. We are funded by PSU and serve as a creative outlet for its students. We are happy to point non-students toward local publishing resources, but cannot publish non-students at this time. Please only put your name and identifying info in the specified section of the form. All submissions are blind — only the managing editor will know the identity of the submitter until after selections have been made. This eliminates conflicts of interest and…

Free