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!

Alison Mariella Désir in Conversation With Peter Bromka

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

Running saved Alison Désir’s life. At rock bottom and searching for meaning and structure, Désir started marathon training, finding that it vastly improved both her physical and mental health. Yet as she became involved in the community and learned its history, she realized that the sport was largely built with white people in mind. Running While Black (Portfolio) draws on Désir’s experience as an endurance athlete, activist, and mental health advocate to explore why the seemingly simple, human act of long distance running for exercise and health has never been truly open to Black people. Weaving historical context — from the first recreational running boom to the horrific murder of Ahmaud Arbery — together with her own story of growth in the sport, Désir unpacks…

Free

In-Store Poetry Reading: Dianne Stepp and Judith Montgomery

Annie Bloom's Books 7834 SW Capitol Hwy, Portland

Annie Bloom's welcomes Portland poets Dianne Stepp and Judith Montgomery for an in-store reading from their latest collections. About The Nest's Dark Eye: Some traditions believe a grieving woman-given her vulnerability, given the boundless expanse of her sorrow-stands at the spirit world's threshold. Grief gives her a kind of holiness, a sacred compassion and perception. Dianne Stepp's voice possesses such a power. Her poems are finely crafted, deeply musical lamentations for her son who committed suicide. Her poems are grateful paeans to the natural world's bounty and grace. A poet-mother trying to fathom her son's final, devastating actions, she's "craning to see, twisting / to search the shape / of his death." The Nest's Dark Eye offers us sorrow's keen insight, its fraught and luminous…

Free