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!

Tess Gallagher in Conversation With Greg Simon & Danielle Vermette

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

Tess Gallagher’s new poems are suspended between contradiction and beauty. Is, Is Not (Graywolf) upends our notions of linear time, evokes the spirit and sanctity of place, and hovers daringly at the threshold of what language can nearly deliver while offering alternative corollaries as gifts of its failures. Gallagher will be joined in conversation by poet Greg Simon and writer Danielle Vermette.

Free

Reading with Jason Christie and jayy dodd

The Stacks Coffeehouse 1831 N. Killingsworth St, Portland

Join us for an evening of poetry with Jason Christie and jayy dodd. What happens to identity when we're obsessed with self-surveillance and devalued words? Now that we've sold ourselves to ourselves, shuffling letters and sounds around to hide the pain, how do we represent the uncanny valley in which we've set up shop? In lèse-majesté, Jason Christie recoils in horror at the thoroughness of his self, then begins to write toward a new understanding brokered between all the things that define him and who he thinks he should be and interrogates how we reduce people to words, especially online, turning them into objects. Jason Christie is the author of Canada Post, i-ROBOT, Unknown Actor, and a coeditor of Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry.…

Free

Shane Koyczan – Spoken Word Artist with special guest Micah Fletcher

Alberta Rose Theatre 3000 NE Alberta St, Portland

In a realm where poets rarely intersect with stardom, the Opening Ceremonies for the 2010 Winter Olympics introduced us to Shane Koyczan. With a collective “Wow!” we found the poet of our generation, and we weren’t even looking for one. The world took notice when Shane’s influential, anti-bullying, To This Day Project video went viral in early 2013 with over 14 million views and counting. Powerfully engaging and authentic in attitude, his explorations are relevant to our times in the way that Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen are to theirs. But unlike the musicians that he’s often compared to, poets rarely infiltrate pop culture. Koyzcan emerges in a new wave of 21st century poetry that dares to belong to the people and speak…

$20 – $25