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!

PNCA Low-Res MFA in CW Readings: da Carter, Sara Jaffe, and Jay Ponteri

Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) 511 Northwest Broadway St, Portland

da Carter, Sara Jaffe, Jay Ponteri, 6pm at PNCA Mediatheque The Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) is pleased to announce the launch of the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing with its first residential intensive. In the low-residency model, students will attend two 14-day campus residencies then, beyond residencies, work one-on-one with mentors. Most of the programming during this residency is free and open to the public. From July 28 through August 3, PNCA offers talks, discussions, and readings by acclaimed writers as part of the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing program. Every event is free and open to the public. This innovative creative writing program is distinguished by its being situated within a school of art and…

Free

Maia Kobabe: Gender Queer Reading & Signing

Books with Pictures 1401 SE Division Street, Portland

Come meet Maia and join us for a short reading, then signing, snacks, and hangouts. It's gonna be great! In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia's intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma of pap smears. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender…

Free

Debra Gwartney in Conversation With Apricot Irving

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

Part history, part memoir, Debra Gwartney’s I Am a Stranger Here Myself (University of New Mexico) taps dimensions of human yearning: the need to belong, the snarl of family history, and embracing womanhood in the patriarchal American West. Gwartney becomes fascinated with the missionary Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, the first Caucasian woman to cross the Rocky Mountains and one of 14 people killed at the Whitman Mission in 1847 by Cayuse Indians. Whitman's role as a white woman drawn in to "settle" the West reflects the tough-as-nails women in Gwartney's own family. Arranged in four sections as a series of interlocking explorations and ruminations, Gwartney uses Whitman as a touchstone to spin a tightly woven narrative about identity, the power of womanhood, and coming to peace…

Free