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

Smallpresspalooza

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

After a four-year absence, Smallpresspalooza is back! Powell's presents this marathon reading of authors published by local and national small presses for the twelfth time. This year's lineup features Marcelle Heath, Sam Rose Preminger, Nicholas Yandell & Timothy Arliss O'Brien, Craig Buchner, Benjamin Kessler, Marialicia González, Eric Tran, Alyssa Giannini, Ashley Yang-Thompson, Quinn Gancedo, X.C. Atkins, and April Alexis Hernandez. Hosted by Powell's small-press champion and publisher of Future Tense Books, Kevin Sampsell. A full Smallpresspalooza schedule is available here. Preorder a Signed Edition (Heath) Preorder a Signed Edition (Preminger) Preorder a Signed Edition (Yandell & O’Brien) Preorder a Signed Edition (Buchner) Preorder a Signed Edition (Kessler) Preorder a Signed Edition (González) Preorder a Signed Edition (Tran) Preorder a Signed Edition (Giannini) Preorder a Signed…

Continue readingSmallpresspalooza
Free

Katherine Corcoran in Conversation with Tim DuRoche

Broadway Books 1714 NE Broadway, Portland, OR, United States

We are pleased to welcome journalist Katherine Corcoran in conversation with Tim DuRoche, Director of Programs at WorldOregon, discussing her book In the Mouth of the Wolf: A Murder, A Cover-Up, and the True Cost of Silencing the Press, published by Bloomsbury. In the Mouth of the Wolf is a true crime story that examines the ongoing epidemic of journalist killings through the story of one legendary reporter, Regina Martinez, and her untimely death in 2012. A fearless journalist out of Mexico’s Gulf Coast state of Veracruz who wrote for the magazine Proceso, Martinez spent decades laying out the corruption and abuse underlying Mexican politics, and constantly fought to report the truth and give a voice to those without one in the country. A behind-the-scenes…

Continue readingKatherine Corcoran in Conversation with Tim DuRoche
Free

BIPOC Reading Series- April

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 April is “Transformation.” Our featured reader is Brandt Maina. Brandt Maina (he/they) – RIOA wa RIOE —is an abstRact and absuRdist artist, performer and writer from Nairobi, Kenya. In the month of the year of our Lard, May 2020, they graduated with a BFA in Acting and Vocal Performance from Taylor University, a small conservative Christian University in rural Indiana. Simply stated, with a background in the arts, and fresh memories of being homeless…

Continue readingBIPOC Reading Series- April
Free

Nicole Chung in Conversation With Lydia Kiesling

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

From the bestselling author of All You Can Ever Know comes a searing memoir of class, inequality, and grief — a daughter’s search to understand the lives her adoptive parents led, the life she forged as an adult, and the lives she’s lost. When Nicole Chung graduated from high school, she couldn’t hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university on the East Coast and no longer the only Korean she knew, she found a sense of community she had always craved as an Asian American adoptee — and a path to the life she’d long wanted. But the middle-class world she begins to raise a family in — where there are big homes…

Continue readingNicole Chung in Conversation With Lydia Kiesling
Free

Jessica Machado Reading

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

The PSU Program in Creative Writing is pleased to host a reading by Jessica Machado. The event is cosponsored by the School of Music, and is free and open to the public. Jessica Machado is a graduate of Portland State University's MFA in creative writing program. She is currently an editor at NBC News and was previously a staff editor at Vox, the Daily Dot, and Rolling Stone. Local, a memoir woven with Hawaiian history, is her first book.

Free

Chloé Cooper Jones in Conversation With Lydia Kiesling, Kimberly King Parsons & Casey Parks

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

From Chloé Cooper Jones — Pulitzer Prize finalist, philosophy professor, and Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient — comes an “exquisite” (Oprah Daily) and groundbreaking memoir about disability, motherhood, and the search for a new way of seeing and being seen. “I am in a bar in Brooklyn, listening to two men, my friends, discuss whether my life is worth living.” So begins Easy Beauty (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster), Jones’s bold, revealing account of moving through the world in a body that looks different than most. Jones learned early on to factor “pain calculations” into every plan, every situation. Born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis which affects both her stature and gait, her pain is physical. But there is also the pain…

Continue readingChloé Cooper Jones in Conversation With Lydia Kiesling, Kimberly King Parsons & Casey Parks
Free

Kids’ Storytime With Elizabeth Rusch & Elizabeth Goss

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

Nothing is really something! What might be hidden in the space around things, and how is that space important? In art, this is known as negative space, but “nothing” can be thought of more broadly — as free time during the day or the space between people. When we allow ourselves a moment of nothingness, we make room for creativity and so much more. All about Nothing (Charlesbridge) – written by Elizabeth Rusch and illustrated by Elizabeth Goss — is an artful picture-book exploration of negative space and the beauty of nothingness. This mindful meditation encourages children to see the world differently. Preorder a Signed Edition

Free

Matt Kracht

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

Guess what: bees are incredible. If you don't think so, you're wrong; but you're also in luck! Extreme bee enthusiast Matt Kracht — author of The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America and its sequel, The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of the Whole Stupid World — is here to set the record straight with his helpful guidebook to all things bees. With lighthearted watercolor and ink drawings, humorous quips, lists, and musings, OMFG, BEES! (Chronicle) will show you just how important these esteemed bee-list celebrities really are. (Hint: We can't live without them.) Delving into various bee topics, from distinguishing between bees and not bees (very crucial), to exploring the absolute wonder that is bee behavior (they do a coded dance directing…

Continue readingMatt Kracht
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 an Iranian-American poet and scholar, and the author of Pilgrim Bell, published by Graywolf Press; Calling a Wolf a Wolf, published by Alice James Books in the US and Penguin Books in the UK; and the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic, published by Sibling Rivalry Press. In 2014, he founded the poetry interview…

Continue readingThe Break with Kaveh Akbar
Free

Jake Bittle in Conversation With Monica Samayoa

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

When the subject of migration that will be caused by global climate change comes up in the media or in conversation, we often think of international refugees — those from foreign countries who will emigrate to the United States to escape disasters like rising shorelines and famine. What many people don’t realize though, is that climate migration is happening now — and within the borders of the United States. A human-centered narrative with national scope, Jake Bittle’s The Great Displacement (Simon & Schuster) is the first book to report on climate migration in the US. From half-drowned Louisiana to fire-scorched California, from the dried-up cotton fields of Arizona to the soaked watersheds of inland North Carolina, people are moving. In the last decade alone, the…

Continue readingJake Bittle in Conversation With Monica Samayoa
Free
Click a category label below to view the calendar with only events in that specific category.