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!

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…

Free

JJJJJerome Ellis

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The PSU Program in Creative Writing is pleased to host an remote event with writer and performer JJJJJerome Ellis. This event is cosponsored by the departments of Black Studies and Speech and Hearing at Portland State. JJJJJerome Ellis is an artist and stutterer from Tidewater, Virginia. His website is jjjjjerome.com. Please register for the event at https://pdx.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_At2scnYfRe-yhzt9f1SWHg.

Free

Filament Reading Series

The Corporeal Writing Center 510 SW 3rd Ave #101, Portland, OR, United States

Filament is BACK! Filament is an all-genre Creative Writing Reading series from Portland State’s MFA Program. Join us on February 17 from 7 - 8:30 PM at Corporeal Writing to hear five talented writers from the Creative Writing program read their work! Free to attend. Masks and Vaccine Cards Required. Featuring: Joshua Stanek, Natalie Flaherty, Nora Broker, Jay Butler, and Alex Roselio De La Cruz

Free

OMSI After Dark: Books & Brews

Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) 1945 SE Water Avenue, Portland, OR, United States

Join us for OMSI After Dark: Books & Brews! Find your next favorite book, learn how to get self published and sample local brews. The ultimate night out! Typically the last Wednesday of the month, OMSI After Dark is a 21+ event that gathers local vendors, artisans, and science content for you to enjoy. Get ready to taste test a local brew, catch a show, or try a science demo – all while exploring the museum’s permanent exhibit halls. CURRENT COVID RULES Masks are optional for guests although we still highly encourage you to wear a mask and recommend you wear an N95 or KN95. We are limiting capacity to 1,200 guests. 21+ Only | A valid government issued ID is required for entry for…

$25 – $40

Constellation #3: Correa, Smith, Keil

Tin House 2617 NW Thurman Street, Portland, OR, United States

After a memorable gathering last month, we invite you to join us at a new Constellation. In March we're hosting local writer Michelle Ruiz Keil and two writers from the Carolyn Moore Writers House residency: Cristina Correa and Kira Brooke Smith. Doors open at 6:45 and the reading starts around 7:15. Cristina Correa (she/her) is from Chicago and is the recipient of awards from CantoMundo, VONA/Voices, Hedgebrook Foundation, and more. Her writing has been featured in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, Missouri Review, Obsidian, NPR’s Latino USA, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Her poem “Reflection from a Bridge” was selected by former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith in the Best New Poets series. Kira Brooke Smith (she/her) is a nonfiction…

Free

Gust Burns & dana jnnfrsn

Passages Bookshop 1801 NW Upshur, Suite 660, Portland, OR, United States

Works on Paper: Experiments in Language and Sound presents GUST BURNS DANA JNNFRSN Saturday, March 18 7:30 pm (doors open 7:00) $10-20 suggested donation; no one turned away Passages Bookshop 1801 NW Upshur, Suite 660 503-388-7665 ========================== GUST BURNS on hearing jimi comprises the presentation of a series of musical excerpts performed on turntable, alongside a series of texts. Through its recursive, multi-modal interweaving of subject and object, active affection and passive affectability, the performance presents a preliminary exploration of hearing and listening that positions practices/conditions of aurality within a larger political-ontological framework. Gust Burns is a theorist, critic, teacher, musician, and composer. Currently, he is finishing his dissertation, Aesthetic Ontology of Anti-Blackness: Prohibition and Persistence across Black Arts, at the University of Washington’s Department…

Free – $20

Application Deadline: Environmental Writing Fellowship and Residency

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The forests of the Oregon Coast Range are part of a vast ecosystem spanning from Northern California to the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. The Pacific temperate rainforest is, acre for acre, better than the Amazon Rainforest at absorbing and storing carbon. If left to grow, the majestic cedars, spruces, hemlocks, and firs can hold carbon for an astonishing 800 years or more. These forests are climate forests. As we work toward stabilizing the climate, there is no technology that can sequester carbon at the scale of maturing and ancient forests. Yet less than 10% of Oregon’s old-growth forest remains. Throughout the Oregon Coast Range, the patchwork scars of ongoing industrial clearcuts and wide-scale liquidation of ancient forests are visible reminders of our limited imaginations…

Free

2023 Oregon Book Awards

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Join us for an evening honoring our state’s most accomplished writers in the categories of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, young readers, and drama. Finalists in all categories will be announced in January, 2023.  Luke Burbank Luke Burbank is the host of Live Wire, a public radio variety show taped monthly in front of a live audience in Portland. He grew up as one of seven kids, learning early on how to vie for attention. Those profound childhood issues have propelled him to various media projects including “This American Life,” “Wait Wait Don't Tell Me,” “CBS Sunday Morning,” and the daily podcast “Too Beautiful To Live.” Luke’s uniquely charming, quick-witted, and refreshingly vulnerable interview style is a winner with Live Wire guests and listeners alike.

$65

One Page Wednesday – April

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

Here is an opportunity to share or listen to one page of work in progress from talented writers from everywhere. Come with a single page of work and sign up to read – or come to listen and prepare to be inspired. Our host is the one and only, Emme Lund. Our featured reader is JZL JMZ.  Please review our Covid-19 guidelines.  Masks are not required but encouraged. If you have any questions, contact Jessica at jessica@literary-arts.org. Emme LundJZL JMZ (FKA JAYY DODD) Emme Lund is an author living and writing in Portland, Oregon. She has an MFA from Mills College. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Time, The Rumpus, Autostraddle, and many more. In 2019, she was awarded an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship in Fiction. The Boy with a…

Free

Delve Readers Seminar: Little Things: A Study of Literary Compression

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

“It’s the little things that count”; “Good things come in small packages”; “Brevity is the soul of wit”; “The Devil’s in the details”… We’ll put these aphorisms to the test in this Delve Seminar exploring short poems, prose poetry, and short/micro fiction. These compressed forms aren’t lacking for content in their brevity, and we will explore ways of extracting their compressed contents like we would with zip files, expanding them like dry sponges in water, receiving the full communications of their code like expert cryptographers. We’ll also try writing a few small pieces of our own to learn through direct experience just what makes them tick. Authors we’ll read include Emily Dickinson, Russell Edson, Lucille Clifton, William Carlos Williams, Matsuo Bashō, and many more. Access…

$240