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!

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

Attic Institute: FALL Online Campus: The Why and How of Writing Your Life: A Creative Non-Fiction Workshop w Wayne Gregory

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

"There is no greater burden than carrying an untold story." ~ Maya Angelou We live in a time when it is more important than ever for us to tell the stories of our lives. We are inundated with more information than we can ever process and while we communicate with more people via social media, we feel increasingly detached from the feeling of community. In short, we lack enough well-crafted human stories. Stories summon our imagination to experience the life of another and through that experience to better understand the other, as well as ourselves. This workshop is for the one who wants to discover how to identify her/his compelling story and how to create a work that will grab readers and take them on…

$215 – $242

Livestream Reading: Sallie Weissinger

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Annie Bloom's welcomes Portland author Sallie Weissinger for a livestream reading from her memoir, Yes, Again: (mis)Adventures of a Wishful Thinker. Please register in advance for this Zoom event: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcod-muqjMjGtdjuGpzIIznmUbSJiqyhILT If you would like a signed or personalized copy of this book, please leave a note in the comments section of your order! About Yes, Again: In this laughter-through-tears memoir, Sallie Weissinger, a late-in-life widow, recounts the highs and lows of navigating the tricky online dating world of the 2000s. Interwoven throughout her adventures in search of a new relationship are stories from her childhood as a military brat, her southern heritage, her various marriages, and the volunteer work in Central and South America that helped her keep moving forward through it all. Weissinger keeps…

Free

BIPOC Reading Series – October

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. The theme for October is “The Body.” This month’s featured readers are Michelle Ruiz Keil and Zephaniah Sole. Click here to register for this event. This event is open to everyone, but only people who self-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

Gobshite Quarterly 2021 Launch/ with Michael Shay’s The Words I Own

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

Launching Gobshite Quarterly 2021! This first annual, pandemic issue begins with iconic images from the 2020 Black Lives Matter and 1968 Mexico City Olympics protests. Other graphics include Brazilian Tania Cardoso’s illustrations of loneliness, Portland’s Leanne Grabel’s bio of Anne Sexton, and Croatian Miroslav Nemeth’s linocuts on fathers, sons and violence. Our written accounts of living in these times include a selection of Washington poet Armin Toletino’s Superboy poems, Christina Alvarez Lopez on running and Keith Jarrett, poems from Greece, Lithuania, Estonia and New York, and fiction from Slovenia and Springfield, Oregon. Australian artist Graham Willoughby’s fine line etchings illuminate the covers. == “Pan-lingual Gobshite Quarterly, where Paul Krassner meets Vénus Khoury-Ghata, is my favorite source for Hungarian fiction that reads like a song... In…

Free

Submission Deadline: Global Grasshopper: Portland Travel Blogger Competition

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Love Portland, Oregon, and want to share some of its best spots with the rest of the world? Well to celebrate being able to get out and about again we’re launching a competition for you to be a travel blogging superstar for the weekend! We’re aiming to find someone who knows the city of Portland in Oregon well to report back on all their favorite recommendations for unique and under-the-radar destinations in Portland you can visit all year round – so both in winter and summer, hence our hashtag #PortlandBlogger365 In return for the weekend’s blogging, we’ll be paying the lucky winner $1000 as well as $300 expenses. The competition is currently open and due to popular demand, the competition has been extended to 5pm…

Free