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!

Fonograf Editions Five-Year Anniversary

Oregon Contemporary (formerly DISJECTA) 8371 N Interstate Avenue, Portland, OR, United States

(image by Adie Bovee) Celebration & Fundraiser With performances by Eileen Myles, Samuel Ace, Allison Cobb, Brandi Katherine Herrera, and Sara Jaffe and Auctioning print and analog delights from our friends: milkweed editions, Canarium Books, Fence, Albina Music Trust, Poetry Foundation, and many more.

Free

Poetry Reading & Process Talk

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Join us for the next Siren Nation Speaks on December 5, a Poetry Reading & Process Talk with authors Dao Strom, Michele Glazer, and Endi Bogue Hartigan. They’ll read from their work, talk about their creative processes, and answer your questions. Find out how they get started on a piece, see it forward, and explore the power of language and art. Speakers Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. The author of five books and two song-cycles, most recently the poetry collection Instrument (Fonograf Editions) and its companion album, Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records), Strom was born in Vietnam and grew up in the Sierra Nevadas of California. Her bilingual…

Free

The Finish Line :: how to finish your book and move toward the world :: A Webgasm

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

WHAT: A three-hour online webgasm with Lidia Yuknavitch and at least one magical guest. (With a 15-minute intermission.) WHEN: Sunday, December 5th, 1PM-4PM Pacific (4PM-7PM Eastern) WHERE: ZOOM. Meeting ID will be provided ahead of time. (Interested in this event but unable to join it live? All registered attendees will receive a link to a recording of it that will be viewable for one week afterwards.) HOW MUCH: $150. Payment plans are available, contact Daniel Elder at registration@corporealwriting.com SCHOLARSHIPS: Scholarships are always available. Click here to apply. Well let's face it. Trying to finish a book-length work is kind of a clusterfuck. If this sounds like you, join Lidia for a webgasm focused on strategies for finishing your book, including shaping the whole, amplifying the…

$150

Passages Bookshop: MOVING SALE! — ONE WEEK ONLY!

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

MONDAY, DECEMBER 6 – SUNDAY, DECEMBER 12 50% OFF all books priced $25 or less 30% OFF all other books* Passages Bookshop is moving to a new location in NW Portland. Take advantage of great discounts to stock up on Christmas gifts, pick up those books you’ve been coveting, and help us lighten our load. Hundreds of new arrivals in every category are included: used books, rare books, bargain books, remainders. Sale prices for items on the website will appear by Monday morning. * Please note that a small number of consigned books will not be included in the sale.

Free

Featuring Kelli Russell Agodon

Wildwood Saloon 1955 W Burnside St, Portland, OR, United States

The old Tony’s Talkin’ To, rebirthed as the Last Stand at Wildwood Saloon. Open mic poetry, sign ups start at 7:30. No guitars. Fighting literary isolation and cultural oppression of poetry and free thought since 2006 or so. This is the Last Stand. Together we stand for the poetic revolution of open minds and cultural plurality, community, LGBTQ+ friendly, uncensored, unrestrained & uninhibited. And this month we welcome Kelli Russell Agodon in a sort of book launch for her newest publication from Copper Canyon Press, DIALOGUES WITH RISING TIDES. Kelli comes to us from a paddle board deep in the Seattle Sound where she has been distilling spells and feeding the mites and bits that reside within the Rainier Writer’s Workshop.

Free

Maxine Scates and Joseph Millar

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Join beloved and award-winning Oregon poets Maxine Scates and Joseph Millar for a virtual reading and discussion celebrating their latest collections. Many poems in My Wilderness by Maxine Scates chronicle how a wooded Oregon hillside, her longtime home, has turned from a refuge into a landscape of change where trees once numerous are now threatened by storm and the presence of the humans who live among them. Grounded in the shifting borders of migrations and extinctions, plant, animal, and human, of memory and grief, My Wilderness inevitably asks us to consider not only our own mortality but also our impact on the world around us. Dark Harvest showcases two decades of Joseph Millar’s finest poetic work, poems centered on the unseen men and women at…

Free

Grief and The Holidays

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The holiday season isn't only cheer and carols. It can be hard too. Grief can be louder. Let's come together and write about it. Join us Wednesday December 8 at Noon Pacific. Any level of writing. Everybody welcome. It's for humans including writers and non writers. It's a free one day drop-in writing session. Limited spaces! Join the zoom room at noon Pacific https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84694083515?pwd=czFibEpBakFVQ0U2ck5uK3dXeUJNZz09 Meeting ID: 846 9408 3515 Passcode: eggnog Bring your laptop or pen. Your coffee too. Bring your friends! Invite them on this Facebook event :) We will include a brief meditation, prompts around the holidays and grief, time to write, and time to share. Who are we? We are a mom/daughter team who created Coffee and Grief during the beginning of…

Free

Christopher Howell Poetry Reading

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Christopher Howell's poetry reading will be livestreamed on December 8, 2021 on the Ledding Library YouTube Channel. (link is external) Born in Portland, Oregon, Christopher Howell attended Pacific Lutheran University from 1963 to ’66. After service as a military journalist during the Viet Nam war, he received graduate degrees from Portland State University and the University of Massachusetts. He is author of twelve collections of poems, most recently The Grief of a Happy Life (U. Washington Press, 2019), Love’s Last Number and Gaze (both from Milkweed Editions), and Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected (UW Press, 2010). He has received the Washington State Governor’s Award, the Washington State Book Award, two fellowships from National Endowment for the Arts, two from the Artist Trust, and a number of…

Free

One Page Wednesday: December

Online N/A, 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! December’s One Page Wednesday is hosted by Jessica Meza-Torres. The featured readers are Laura Moulton and Ben Hodgson Register here for One Page Wednesday Ben Hodgson was a computer technician in the air force and a cab driver for many years. He is currently on the board of Street Books, and works as a street librarian, speaker, and inventory specialist. Loaners, co-written with Laura Moulton, is his first book. Laura Moulton teaches in the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College and leads…

Free

On The Metaphysics of Deep Gossip: Bagley Wright Lecture Series

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In this memoir and craft talk, Lisa Jarnot reflects on her entanglement in the New York poetry scene over twenty-five years. Beginning with the proposition that deep gossip and urban mindfulness are sacred practices, she explores the places where the New York School’s feminine, marvelous, and tough irreverence opens into a deeper mystery that is passed down as a liturgy of ecstatic connectedness. The Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry supports contemporary poets as they explore in-depth their own thinking on poetry and poetics, and give a series of lectures resulting from these investigations. Lectures are delivered publicly in partnership with institutions and organizations nationwide. Find out more about past, present, and future lecturers, and explore the archive at www.bagleywrightlectures.org. Charlie Wright, Publisher of Wave…

Free