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!

Pageturners Author Visit: Rudy Owens

Multnomah County Library - Belmont Meeting Room 1038 SE César E. Chávez Boulevard, Portland

Engage in stimulating conversation about books, exchange perspectives about characters and plot, and get to know your neighbors. Meet the author! Read You Don't Know How Lucky You Are: An Adoptee's Journey Through the American Adoption Experience by Rudy Owens. Nearly 50 years after he was relinquished for adoption, Rudy Owens learned how fortunate life can be. In 2014 in San Diego, Owens met his biological half-sister for the first time. That meeting inspired Owens to tell his adoption story set against the larger adoption narrative that has impacted millions of adoptees, their birth parents, and their collective biological and adoptive families. Pageturners is sponsored by Friends of the Library.

Free

Caroline Kurtz

Broadway Books 1714 NE Broadway, Portland

Caroline Kurtz joins us at 7 pm on Wednesday, September 11th, to read from her recently published memoir A Road Called Down on Both Sides: Growing Up in Ethiopia and America, published by Catalyst Press. From the age of five, Caroline Kurtz grew up in Ethiopia, the child of Presbyterian missionaries. The family lived in the church’s most remote mission station in the mountainous regions of southwestern Ethiopia near the town of Maji. Beginning at the age of ten, Kurtz attended boarding school in Addis Ababa and then in Alexandria, Egypt. She left for college in Illinois at eighteen, totally unprepared for American culture. She eventually married a childhood sweetheart, also the child of American missionaries to Ethiopia, and returned with their family to live…

Free

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

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

In June 2017, Travis Kalanick, the hard-charging CEO of Uber, was ousted in a boardroom coup that capped a brutal year for the transportation giant. Uber had catapulted to the top of the tech world, yet for many came to symbolize everything wrong with Silicon Valley. Award-winning New York Times technology correspondent Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped (W. W. Norton) presents the dramatic rise and fall of Uber. Super Pumped is a page-turning story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth, and bad behavior that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic 12-month periods in corporate history.

Free