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!

Daria’s Confessional Cabaret

White Eagle 836 N Russell St, Portland, OR, United States

7 Deadly Sins welcomes you to the premier of their newest show, Daria’s Confessional Cabaret. This live confessional gameshow will be hosted by Portland’s own Queen of Darkness and radio icon Daria Eliuk, backed up by her angelic host comedian Christian Burke. Watch three seasoned raconteurs confess their twisted, depraved, and often hilarious sins. It will be up to you and Daria to decide who will be granted absolution, and who must atone live on stage. Plus, you'll be able to win valuable prizes competing against your fellow audience members in our new Virtue: Oh So! game. So get ready, because Judgement Day is coming -- and it will be full of shock, horror, laughs, and prizes. GET TICKETS

$10

Longreads Club: Blood and Soil in Narendra Modi’s India

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

Prime Minister Narendra Modi presents himself as an ascetic economic visionary. He is also a hero of anti-Muslim bigots. The Prime Minister’s Hindu-nationalist government has cast two hundred million Muslims as internal enemies. 13,750 words, about 60 minutes ARTICLE: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/blood-and-soil-in-narendra-modis-india (If the article is pay-walled, click here to read: http://archive.is/DfcVS) If you prefer to listen to the article, there is an audio track at the top of the page. Another option is that you can create a Text-To-Speech mp3 for free here: http://www.fromtexttospeech.com/. The TTS is a robotic voice, but many people get used to it fairly quickly. The Longreads Club is a twice-monthly program hosted by WorldOregon's Young Professionals group. Join us for Longreads Club where we discuss a long-form article focused on global…

Free

The Boy Who Became a Dragon: A Biography of Bruce Lee

Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd, Beaverton, OR, United States

Bruce Lee was born on November 27, 1940 – in both the hour and the year of the dragon. Almost immediately, he was plunged into conflict: as a child in Hong Kong as it was invaded and occupied by the Japanese; as the object of discrimination and bullying; and as a teenager grappling against the influence of gangs. As the world knows, Lee found his salvation and calling through kung fu – first as a student, then as a teacher, and finally as a global star. Jim Di Bartolo’s The Boy Who Became a Dragon (Graphix) tells his astonishing story in brilliant comic form.

Free

True Crime Book Club

Books Around the Corner 40 NW 2nd Street, Gresham, OR, United States

The True Crime Book Club is led by the true crime aficionado Rachel Newton Cumley. We would like to extend an invitation to all of our mystery and thriller loving customers (RSVP is not required). Our book discussions aim to bring people together to talk about books in a safe and inviting atmosphere. Our meetings are lovely and inclusive; we invite you to attend. Come and enjoy a lively discussion about the chosen book with other readers. Join us for the February meeting of the True Crime Book Club. This month's pick is If You Tell by Gregg Olsen. After more than a decade, when sisters Nikki, Sami, and Tori Knotek hear the word mom, it claws like an eagle's talons, triggering memories that have…

Free

Richard Bell

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

Philadelphia, 1825: five young, free black boys fall into the clutches of the most fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers in the United States. Determined to resist, the boys form a tight brotherhood as they struggle to free themselves and find their way home. Their ordeal shines a glaring spotlight on the Reverse Underground Railroad, a black market network of human traffickers and slave traders who stole away thousands of legally free African Americans from their families in order to fuel slavery’s rapid expansion in the decades before the Civil War. Impeccably researched and breathlessly paced, Richard Bell’s Stolen (37 Ink) tells the incredible story of five boys whose courage forever changed the fight against slavery in America.

Free

Pam Houston and Stephanie Land

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

We are pleased to host authors Pam Houston and Stephanie Land reading from their most recent books. With prose as lucid and invigorating as mountain air, Pam Houston's memoir Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country delivers her most profound meditations yet on how "to live simultaneously inside the wonder and the grief... to love the damaged world and do what I can to help it thrive." On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. With her devoted…

Free

It’s Not Me, It’s You: Stories from the Dark Side of Dating

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

We’ve all had them: dates that go terribly, hilariously awry. After hearing these personal stories, you’ll leave either feeling grateful for your current relationship or with the realization that being single isn’t so bad after all. NOW EXPANDED TO 2 NIGHTS WITH 2 DIFFERENT LINEUPS! TIX SELL OUT FAST, SO DON’T DELAY! TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 11TH Host Alina Aliyar, executive producer and host (7 Deadly Sins), chocolatier (Motherland Chocolates) and parent Jake Silberman (Willamette Week Portland Funniest Person 2018) Reema Zaman (actress, screenwriter and author of the memoir “I Am Yours”) Tod Kelly (writer, journalist and creator of the 7 Deadly Sins storytelling series) Leon Anderson (improv comedian and member of Portland’s own Broke Gravy) Erika Worth (producer of Roar and author of “Broken Bits and…

$25 – $30

Emma Copley Eisenberg in Conversation With Vanessa Veselka

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

In the early evening of June 25, 1980, in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, two middle-class outsiders named Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19, were murdered in an isolated clearing. They were hitchhiking to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering but never arrived; they traveled with a third woman, however, who lived. Emma Copley Eisenberg spent years living in Pocahontas and reinvestigating these brutal acts. In The Third Rainbow Girl (Hachette), Eisenberg follows the threads of this crime through the complex history of Appalachia, forming a searing and wide-ranging portrait of America – its divisions of gender and class, and of its violence. Eisenberg will be joined in conversation by Vanessa Veselka, author of Zazen.

Free

It’s Not Me, It’s You: Stories from the Dark Side of Dating

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

We’ve all had them: dates that go terribly, hilariously awry. After hearing these personal stories, you’ll leave either feeling grateful for your current relationship or with the realization that being single isn’t so bad after all. NOW EXPANDED TO 2 NIGHTS WITH 2 DIFFERENT LINEUPS! TIX SELL OUT FAST, SO DON’T DELAY! WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 12TH Host Alina Aliyar, executive producer and host (7 Deadly Sins), chocolatier (Motherland Chocolates) and parent Adam Pasi (Helium Portland Funniest Person 2019) Ben Harkins (Willamette Week Portland Funniest Person 2019) Lance Edward (Willamette Week Portland Funniest Five 2019) Samira Sahebi (Moth GrandSLAM champion, real estate agent) Jaren George (standup comic, host of Optimism comedy showcase) Martin Lendahls (standup comic, filmmaker) Denise Olsen (storyteller, artist, mother) $25 Advance $30 At the…

$25 – $30

Ezra Klein in Conversation With Omar El Akkad

Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd, Beaverton, OR, United States

America’s political system isn’t broken. The truth is scarier: it’s working exactly as designed. In Why We’re Polarized (Avid Reader/Simon & Schuster), journalist Ezra Klein reveals how that system is polarizing us – and how we are polarizing it – with disastrous results. Neither a polemic nor a lament, Why We’re Polarized offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture. Klein will be joined in conversation by Omar El Akkad, author of American War.

Free