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!

Orpheus 2019 Night Two

Fort Vancouver High School 5700 East 18th Street, Vancouver

Featured writers: Jude Brewer, Omar El Akkad, Jewels Pedersen, Laura Moulton, Ben Parzybok.      

Free

QUEER PDXpression

Local Lounge 3536 NE Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, Portland

Please join us Thursday May 16th at the Local lounge. Sign ups will start at 6:30pm and show is at 7:00 pm. We will have the lovely Andy Lee Anderson as our feature. With a mix authentic vulnerability, relevant truth, and humor, Andy Anderson writes poems that make you want to be their friend. They are author of Hello, My Name is Andy, and their work appears in Deep Overstock Journal. Buy their book at this link: https://www.blurb.com/b/9405616-hello-my-name-is-andy Books will also be available at event.

Free

Free Community Reading and Book Release Party

First United Methodist Church PDX 1838 SW Jefferson St, Portland

Join us to celebrate the release of our 56th anthology featuring the talented writers from our spring workshops for adults in recovery, youth experiencing homelessness, adults living in affordable housing and many others. Few Portland events include so many diverse voices! At this event we are also celebrating Write Around Portland's 20th birthday and our 20 years of writers! We’ll have cake and an anthology retrospective to share featuring writers from 1999 to today! The reading is free, ADA-accessible and open to all. Books will be available for purchase. Free guided playtime for children is provided. These readings are funded in part by generous support from: Regional Arts & Culture Council, Oregon Arts Commission, Hillsboro Arts & Culture Council and Multnomah County Cultural Coalition. For…

Free

Slamlandia May Picnic PDX Poetry Open Mic

Picnic PDX 1305 NW 23rd Ave, Portland

Join us on MAY 16TH for our third Thursday Poetry Open Mic! Doors and sign-ups are at 6:30 PM Get there on time to get a spot in the open mic! Show begins at 7:00 PM Picnic PDX 1305 NW 23rd Avenue Portland, OR 97210 This show is all ages. Please see our Accessibility and Safer Space info below. $5 suggested donation at door. This show will not have a poetry slam or a featured poet. We ask for just poetry on this mic, no music or stand up comedy. ★ •*´¨`*• O P E N • M I C •*´¨`*• ★ The open mic will start the show out. The open mic is a great way to share your wonderful poetry! You can share…

Free – $5

George Estreich

Broadway Books 1714 NE Broadway, Portland

Corvallis author George Estreich joins us to talk about his new book from MIT Press: Fables and Futures: Biotechnology, Disability, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves. The book explores how new biomedical technologies require us to imagine who counts as human and what it means to belong. From next-generation prenatal tests, to virtual children, to the genome-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9, new biotechnologies grant us unprecedented power to predict and shape future people. That power implies a question about belonging: which people, which variations, will we welcome? How will we square advances in biotechnology with the real but fragile gains for people with disabilities -- especially when their voices are all but absent from the conversation? The book explores the troubled territory where biotechnology and disability meet. Estreich, an…

Free

Reading: Sacred Stone, Sacred Water

Annie Bloom's Books 7834 SW Capitol Hwy, Portland

Annie Bloom's welcomes six contributors from Sacred Stone, Sacred Water: Women Writers & Artists Encounter Ireland: book editor Carolyn Brigit Flynn, June BlueSpruce, Jean Mahoney, Sarojani Rohan, Linda Serrato, and Jessica Webb. This elegant and intimate collection of writing, art, and photography evokes Ireland's wild beauty and deep soul through the work of 14 American women writers and artists at some of the island's most eminent sacred sites. Their journey produced exquisite poetry, photographs, drawings, and essays from visits to three renowned parts of Ireland. They explored world-famous Newgrange and ancient monastic sites in the Boyne Valley, and experienced the rising sun enter the 5,000-year-old passage mound at Lough Crew. In the scenic southwest, they traveled the world-renowned Healy Pass and the Ring of Beara,…

Free

Portland Review Launch

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland

Each year Portland Review hosts a spring reading in celebration of student editors who are graduating and the incoming cohort of new editors. This reading will feature alumnus and current students of the PSU Creative Writing MFA, as well as contributors featured in the 2019 issue Unchartable. Featuring: Ed Skoog Margot Kahn Case Genevieve Hudson A.M. Rosales Genevieve Hudson is the author of the forthcoming novel Boys of Alabama (W.W. Norton/Liveright), the memoir-hybrid A Little in Love with Everyone (Fiction Advocate, 2018), and the story collection Pretend We Live Here (Future Tense Books, 2018), which is a 2019 LAMBDA Literary Award finalist. Her writing has been published in Catapult, McSweeney’s, Hobart, Tin House online, Joyland, No Tokens, Bitch, The Rumpus, and other places. Her work has…

Free

Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future

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

In Dead Precedents (Repeater), Roy Christopher traces the story of how hip-hop invented the 21st century. Emerging alongside cyberpunk in the 1980s, the hallmarks of hip-hop – allusion, self-reference, the use of new technologies, sampling, the cutting and splicing of language and sound – would come to define the culture of the new millennium. Dead Precedents is a counterculture history of the 20th century, showcasing hip-hop’s role in the creation of the world we now live in.

Free

Poets Rob Schlegel & Jessica Laser

Powell's Books on Hawthorne 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland

Rob Schlegel stands among the genderless trees to shake notions of masculinity and fatherhood. Schlegel’s In the Tree Where the Double Sex Sleeps (University of Iowa) is a tender search for the mother in the father, the poet in the parent, the forest in the human. Sergei Kuzmich From All Sides (Letter Machine) is the debut collection from Jessica Laser, of which poet Margaret Ross says, "The visceral pleasure one experiences reading these poems corresponds to the depth of their ambition: to fathom human feeling – its contradictions, its infinite shifts – and 'see how full of changes change is.'"

Free