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!

WITS Reading: Gresham High School

Online N/A, Portland

Writers in the Schools (WITS) has served public high school students with creative writing residencies in Portland, and more recently Gresham, since 1996. Published local writers collaborate with classroom teachers to lead an immersive semester-long workshop series designed to further class themes, curricula, and student interests. Each residency culminates with a public reading, ordinarily held in a local café or bookstore. With distance learning, we look forward to hosting our reading on Zoom and invite you to join us in celebrating these students and their work. This end-of-residency reading will feature students who worked with WITS writers Brian Benson, Valarie Pearce, Bruce Poinsette, and Dey Rivers. Register in advance for this meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUkceqtrj0jEtFY8_hup8LY5RdjSWL-6eKq After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining…

Free

André Aciman in Conversation With Jonathan Burnham

Online N/A, Portland

André Aciman, the New York Times-bestselling author of Find Me and Call Me by Your Name, returns to the essay form with a collection of thoughts on time, the creative mind, and great lives and works. In Homo Irrealis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Aciman explores what the present tense means to artists who cannot grasp the here and now. Irrealis is not about the present, or the past, or the future, but about what might have been but never was — but could in theory still happen. From meditations on subway poetry and the temporal resonances of an empty Italian street, to considerations of the lives and work of Sigmund Freud, Constantine Cavafy, W. G. Sebald, John Sloan, Éric Rohmer, Marcel Proust, and Fernando Pessoa,…

Free

Livestream Reading: Jack Estes

Online N/A, Portland

Annie Bloom's welcomes back Portland author Jack Estes for a livestream readings from his latest novel, Searching for Gurney. Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwtfu-gpjMpGNMTQTTvICrt-2_SfXSyYru3 About the book: Searching for Gurney explores the damaged lives of three U.S. Marines and one North Vietnamese soldier in the late 1960s and '70s. Each character's story begins at a different place-JT, home and struggling with flashbacks; Coop, on leave and getting drunk at his grandfather's funeral; Hawkeye, at the moment a judge gives him the choice of jail or boot camp; and Vuong, leaving his small village to join the NVA with patriotic fervor. Sent home after a horrific ambush, the Marines face new battles with PTSD and a hostile American public that treats them as criminals. Nightmares, anger, and substance…

Free