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!

Tin House Summer Workshop Lectures: Patricia Smith, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Kaveh Akbar

Reed College 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, Portland, OR, United States

2:30 pm-3:20 pm, Vollum Lecture Hall Congratulations! You Are a Writer—Therefore, You Own the World, with Patricia Smith For as long as there have been Moleskins, #2 pencils, Bics, keyboards, and imagination, there has been a feverish, high-decibel debate about who has the right to tell what story. Can a white, middle-aged man from Vermont do justice to the story of a young woman in the antebellum South? Can a sighted storyteller have a blind protagonist? What “qualifications” do we need in order to write across lines of race, region, religion, history, and ability? 3:30 pm – 4:20 pm, Vollum Lecture Hall Revisiting Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, with Claire Vaye Watkins This lecture will reconsider Chopin’s classic novella through multiple critical lenses and wonder after…

$10

Tin House Summer Workshop Readings: Kristen Radtke, Lan Samantha Chang, and Laura van de Berg

Reed College 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, Portland, OR, United States

8:00 pm, Vollum Lecture Hall – Signing to Follow Kristen Radtke, Lan Samantha Chang, Laura van de Berg Kristen Radtke is the author of the graphic nonfiction book Imagine Wanting Only This (Pantheon, 2017). She is the art director and deputy publisher of The Believer magazine. She is at work on a graphic essay collection, Seek You: Essays on American Loneliness, and Terrible Men, a graphic novel, both forthcoming from Pantheon. Her writing and illustrations have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Marie Claire, The Atlantic, GQ, New Yorker’s “Page Turner,” Oxford American, and many other places. Lan Samantha Chang is the author of a collection of short fiction, Hunger, and two novels, Inheritance, and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. Her work…

Free

Tin House Summer Workshop Lectures: Mitchell S. Jackson, Laura van den Berg, and Maureen N. McLane

Reed College 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, Portland, OR, United States

2:30 pm-3:20 pm, Vollum Lecture Hall Voice as Comp, with Mitchell Jackson Writers with a distinctive literary voice have a greater chance to, as Susan Sontag says, “preserve the works of the mind against oblivion.” Voice consists of qualities that include diction, syntactical usage, sound, and visual logic. At its best, voice is as singular as one’s thumbprint. This craft lecture will present philosophies on voice and some of the rhetorical tools used to compose—yes, it’s an act of composition—a remarkable one. We will read passages from the work of master prose stylists—a list that includes John Edgar Wideman, Joan Didion, Grace Paley, and Denis Johnson—with an eye toward critiquing the elements that make their literary voice distinctive, compelling, enduring. 3:30 pm – 4:20 pm,…

$10

Tin House Summer Workshop Readings: Danielle Evans, Maureen N. McLane, and Kelly Link

Reed College 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, Portland, OR, United States

8:00 pm,  Cerf Amphitheater– Signing to Follow Danielle Evans, Maureen N. McLane, Kelly Link Danielle Evans is the author of the short-story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self,  a co-winner of the 2011 PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize for a first book, a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 selection for 2011, the winner of the 2011 Paterson Prize for Fiction and the 2011 Hurston-Wright award for fiction, and an honorable mention for the 2011  PEN/Hemingway award.  Her work has appeared in magazines including The Paris Review, A Public Space, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, The Sewanee Review, and Phoebe,  and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2008, 2010, 2017, and 2018, and in New Stories from the South. She…

Free

Tin House Summer Workshop Lectures: Nicole J. Georges, Rebecca Makkai, Lan Samantha Chang, and Terese Marie Mailhot

Reed College 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, Portland, OR, United States

9:00 am – 9:50 am, Vollum Lecture Hall Drawing A Line, with Nicole J. Georges Nicole will discuss her 20-year career as a self-taught artist, from zinester beginnings in suburban Kansas, to Sister Spit’s queer literary tour, the creation of award-winning graphic novels Calling Dr. Laura and Fetch.  This talk lays out the basics of empowerment through self-expression, the value of community in your practice, art as activism, forging a career & supporting yourself as a self-taught artist, discipline in cartooning, and what it takes to transform a life of experiences into a 300-page graphic memoir. 2:30 pm – 3:20 pm, Vollum Lecture Hall You Talkin’ to Me?: The “Ear” of the Story, with Rebecca Makkai We talk a lot about a story’s point of…

$10

Incite: Queer Writers Read

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

Keep the Pride coming! Celebrate with the theme of unity with Marcus Lund, Trystan Angel Reese, Mary Mandeville, and David Oates. Poetry, fiction, reality, all incredibly powerful and fabulous. Join us. The theme this month is “Unity”. Join us for featured readings by Mary Mandeville, Marcus Lund, David Oates, and Trystan Angel Reese.

Free

Tin House Summer Workshop Readings: Claire Vaye Watkins, Karen Shepard, and D.A. Powell

Reed College 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, Portland, OR, United States

8:00 pm,  Cerf Amphitheater– Signing to Follow Claire Vaye Watkins, Karen Shepard, D.A. Powell Claire Vaye Watkins is the author of Gold Fame Citrus and Battleborn, which won the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Karen Shepard is a Chinese-American born and raised in New York City.  She is the author of four novels, An Empire of Women, The Bad Boy’s Wife, Don’t I Know You?,  The Celestials, and the collection of stories, Kiss Me Someone.  Her short fiction has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, and Ploughshares, among others.  Her nonfiction has appeared in More, Self,…

Free

Tin House Summer Workshop Readings: R.O. Kwon, Michelle Tea, Justin Torres, and Camille T. Dungy

Reed College 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, Portland, OR, United States

8:00 pm,  Cerf Amphitheater– Signing to Follow R.O. Kwon, Michelle Tea, Justin Torres, Camille T. Dungy R.O. Kwon is the author of The Incendiaries, published by Riverhead (U.S.) and Virago (U.K.). The Incendiaries is an American Booksellers Association Indie Next #1 Great Read and Indies Introduce selection, and it was named a best book of the year by over forty publications. The novel is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award for Best First Book, Los Angeles Times First Book Prize, and Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Fiction Prize, and is nominated for the Aspen Prize and American Library Association Carnegie Medal. The Incendiaries is being translated into five languages. Kwon’s writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Paris Review, Vice,…

Free

Tin House Summer Workshop Lectures: Kristen Radtke, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Michelle Tea, and Jim Shepard

Reed College 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, Portland, OR, United States

9:00 am – 9:50 am, Vollum Lecture Hall Framing and Perspective in Graphic Storytelling, with Kristen Radtke We use framing and perspective all the time in prose writing, but we probably don’t think about them in the same way. We’ll look at how framing—from the simple way that illustrations are confined, to more complicated shapes—as well as pace, visual silence, visual argument, and interruption. Then we’ll talk about how these tools are employed beyond comics and into prose, poetry, and a myriad of visual storytelling forms. 2:30 pm – 3:20 pm, Vollum Lecture Hall Power and Audience: On Not Writing for White People, with Ingrid Rojas Contreras This lecture will look at the many ways we adopt speaking to address majority cultures, how those corners…

$10