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

Delve Readers Seminar: “First – Poets – Then the Sun”: Emily Dickinson’s Craft, Life, and Legacy

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

Emily Dickinson has achieved the rarest of distinctions for a nineteenth-century poet (and a female one at that): lasting, evolving fame. Having escaped the confines of academic study and school syllabi, Dickinson has become a popular figure beloved by a wide and varied readership and the subject of films, television programs, and fan clubs. She is acknowledged not only as an important American poet, but as one of the greatest poets of any time and place. Dickinson understands the power and the magic of words and knows how to breathe life into metaphor. Her writing is associative and allusive, frequently enigmatic or ambiguous, and always peculiarly original. Poetry was for her not just a craft or a vocation (though it was certainly both of these),…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: “First – Poets – Then the Sun”: Emily Dickinson’s Craft, Life, and Legacy
$340

Casey Parks in Conversation With Anna Griffin

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

Part memoir, part sweeping journalistic saga: as Casey Parks follows the mystery of a stranger's past, she is forced to reckon with her own sexuality, her fraught Southern identity, her tortured yet loving relationship with her mother, and the complicated role of faith in her life. When Parks came out as a lesbian in college back in 2002, she assumed her life in the South was over. Her mother shunned her, and her pastor asked God to kill her. But then Parks's grandmother, a stern conservative who grew up picking cotton, pulled her aside and revealed a startling secret. "I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man," and then implored Casey to find out what happened to him. Diary…

Continue readingCasey Parks in Conversation With Anna Griffin
Free

William Deresiewicz in Conversation With Audrey Bilger

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

What is the internet doing to us? What is college for? What are the myths and metaphors we live by? These are the questions that William Deresiewicz has been pursuing over the course of his award-winning career. His new book, The End of Solitude (Henry Holt), brings together more than 40 of his finest essays. Ranging widely across the culture, they take up subjects as diverse as Mad Men and Harold Bloom, the significance of the hipster, and the purpose of art. Drawing on the past, they ask how we got where we are. Scrutinizing the present, they seek to understand how we can live more mindfully and freely, and they pose two fundamental questions: What does it mean to be an individual, and how…

Continue readingWilliam Deresiewicz in Conversation With Audrey Bilger
Free

HOCUS Open Submissions: October 21st Reading with Theme: “Spirits”

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

HOCUS has opened submissions for an October 21st reading at Rose City Book Pub, with a central theme of "Spirits." HOCUS is looking for prose and poems of up to 2,000 words related to hauntings, liquor, or states of mind! The submission deadline is September 23rd.

Free

BIPOC Reading Series – August

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

This bimonthly reading series is intended to prioritize the safety, creativity, and stories of Black people, Indigenous people, and People of Color. Come listen to our featured readers, or sign up to share your work in our open mic. Readings will be followed by a short community discussion. Click here to register for this event. This event is open to everyone, but only people who identify as Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Color will be invited to read. If you have any questions, please contact our host Jessica at  jessica@literary-arts.org.  

Free

Patio Reading: Jessica Wadleigh

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

A reading and zine launch celebrating Alone (With You), a zine by Jessica Wadleigh. With performances by Sylvia Rodemeyer, Alissa Hattman, Alayna Becker, and Misha Moon. Friends, please save the date! My zine launch/birthday party is going to be on Saturday, August 27 from 6PM - 8PM on the back patio at the Rose City Book Pub, and you’re invited! @not_plath @poemsbymisha @dudelookslikealayna_ @alissahattman will be joining us for the evening to share their wonderful words as we welcome Alone (With You) into the world. I hope you can join us! Doors at 6 PM, reading starting promptly at 6:30. I am so grateful to be back at the @rose_city_book_pub for an in-person event - very excited to share space with all of you again.…

Continue readingPatio Reading: Jessica Wadleigh
Free

Book Sale

Ledding Library of Milwaukie 10660 SE 21st Avenue, Milwaukie, OR, United States

Sundays May through October (weather permitting) from 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. the Friends of the Ledding Library will sell books you'll love next to the amphitheater at the north end of the Ledding Library building. Sales of donated books benefit library programs and purchase. From early readers to teens and adults, the library serves all our community. You can help by purchasing books and by joining the Friends and/or volunteering. Learn more at www.leddingfriends.org (link is external). Room Location: Next to the amphitheater

Free

The Break with Kaveh Akbar

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In partnership with Alano Club of Portland, “The Break is a monthly virtual gathering of writers and artists lead by Kaveh Akbar, celebrating amongness, collaboration, and interdisciplinary creative experimentation. Though many of the activities and discussions orbit or are inflected by recovery themes (Akbar has been in active recovery for eight years), participants are not required to self-identify as being in recovery to participate.” Register at: https://www.portlandalano.org/the-break Kaveh Akbar Kaveh Akbar is a poet, teacher and the poetry editor for The Nation. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, Paris Review, Poetry, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. His newest book, Pilgrim Bell, was published by Graywolf in 2021; he is also the author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James,…

Continue readingThe Break with Kaveh Akbar
Free

Rinker Buck

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

Seven years ago, readers around the country fell in love with a singular American voice: Rinker Buck, whose infectious curiosity about history launched him across the West in a covered wagon pulled by mules and propelled his book about the trip, The Oregon Trail, to ten weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Now, Buck returns to chronicle his latest incredible adventure: building a wooden flatboat from the bygone era of the early 1800s and journeying down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. A modern-day Huck Finn, Buck casts off down the river on the flatboat Patience, accompanied by an eccentric crew of daring shipmates. Over the course of his voyage, Buck steers his fragile wooden craft through narrow channels dominated by massive cargo…

Continue readingRinker Buck
Free

Satya Doyle Byock

Mother Foucault's Bookshop 523 SE Morrison St, Portland, OR, United States

Portland author Satya Doyle Byock will read from Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood (Random House, July 2022). Satya is a psychotherapist, the founder and director of The Salome Institute, and a former Delve guide at Literary Arts who has been a part of the PDX literary scene for 15 years. Her first book, which Publisher’s Weekly called a “perceptive debut” seeks to fill a longstanding gap in soulful psychology books available for people in the first half of adulthood. Through clinical storytelling from her practice as well as a look into history and literature, Quarterlife offers people between the ages of 16-36 insight on how “to find and create one’s own life and purpose in a complex and deeply fraught world.” New York Times…

Continue readingSatya Doyle Byock
Free
Click a category label below to view the calendar with only events in that specific category.