A resource for the PDX literary community. Produced by Old Pal.
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!
Today at 4:00pm PST, join Crystal Hana Kim and Nicole Chung for a wide-ranging conversation about teaching, writing, and carving out space for their work while balancing the demands of parenting and identities/experiences as Asian American writers.
The Breakfast Club meets The Silver Linings Playbook in Together We Will Go (Gallery/Scout), a powerful, provocative, and heartfelt novel about 12 endearing strangers who come together to make the most of their final days, from Babylon 5 creator and award-winning author J. Michael Straczynski. Mark Antonelli, a failed young writer looking down the barrel at 30, is planning a cross-country road trip. He buys a beat-up old tour bus. He hires a young army vet to drive it. He puts out an ad for others to join him along the way. But this will be a road trip like no other: His passengers are all fellow disheartened souls who have decided that this will be their final journey — upon arrival in San Francisco,…
Slamlandia is a poetry open mic and slam that meets every month. This mic provides a creative, fun, and welcoming space for all literary communities in Portland. We encourage poets new and old to come share their work. We strive towards a safer space for poets to read their own poetry, witness others, and participate in community. [Featuring Amir Safi Amir Safi is from College Station and is based out of Houston, Texas. He is a graduate of Texas A&M University. He is the co-founder of Mic Check 501(c)3, the Texas Grand Slam Poetry Festival and the founder of Write About Now. He is a 2017 Houston Poet Laureate Finalist, a 2013 and 2015 Southern Fried Poetry Slam Champion, a 2013 National Slam Poetry semi-finalist…
Today at 2:30 pm PST, tune in with Laura van den Berg and ‘Pemi Aguda for their conversation How to Build a Universe in a Bottle: A discussion about stretching the boundaries of time and reality in the short form. Open to the public and with ASL interpretation.
Today at 4pm PST, join Dantiel W. Moniz and Leah Hampton for Unerasing the South: A conversation about busting open conventional perceptions of Florida, Appalachia, and “regional” fiction.
Join us for an evening of conversation with Emilly Prado and Celeste Noche, and a discussion of Funeral for Flaca, Emilly Prado’s new book from Future Tense Books. You can read more about Emilly and the book in this feature story on Portland Monthly. Register in advance for this meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0oduqqrj4sEtAXV3Fj0pmKR8yQEme1Q_7U Emilly G. Prado is a writer, DJ, and educator living in Portland, Oregon. As an award-winning multimedia journalist, Emilly spent half a decade independently reporting on a wide range of topics, most often centered on amplifying the voices and experiences of people from historically marginalized communities. Her writing has been published hundreds of times, appearing in nearly 30 publications including NPR, Marie Claire, Bitch Media, The Oregonian, and Eater. Emilly is the author of…
*A Triple Book Launch!* *An Outdoor Poetry Reading!* *The First In-Person Spare Room Event in 16 Months!* Spare Room Presents ALLISON COBB & YUKIYO KAWANO ENDI BOGUE HARTIGAN JESSE MORSE Sunday, July 18 2021 4:00 p.m. at 1122 Outside, 7629 SE Harrison, Portland, OR free / buy books / outdoors / masks and social distancing encouraged Please help us celebrate a (tentative) return to in-person events and three (not tentative) new books by the readers! Walking Mountains, an art exhibit by Erika Rier, will be on view in the outdoor gallery, and there is a "Paint Your Own Mountains" event earlier in the day, from 1 to 3 pm. Visitors are encouraged to come for the mountains and stay for the reading! *** Allison Cobb…
From Omar El Akkad, the widely acclaimed author of American War, comes What Strange Paradise (Knopf), a beautifully written, unrelentingly dramatic, and profoundly moving new novel that brings the global refugee crisis down to the level of a child’s eyes. More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another overfilled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives in their homelands. And only one has made the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who has the good fortune to fall into the hands not of the officials but of Vänna: a teenage girl, native to the island, who lives inside her own sense…
After a childhood marked by neglect, poverty, and periods of homelessness, and raised by a mother who believed herself to be the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary, Carrot Quinn moved out on her own. She found a sense of belonging among straight-edge anarchists who taught her how to traverse the country by freight trains, sleep in fields under the stars, and feed herself by foraging in dumpsters. Her new life was one of thrilling adventure and freedom, but still, she was haunted by the ghosts of her lonely and traumatic childhood. The Sunset Route (Dial Press) is a powerful and brazenly honest adventure memoir set in the unseen corners of the United States — in the Alaskan cold, on trains rattling through forests and deserts,…
Patrick Wyman, creator of the hit podcast series Tides of History and Fall of Rome, explores the four explosive decades between 1490 and 1530, bringing to life the dramatic and deeply human story of how the West was reborn. In the bestselling tradition of The Swerve and A Distant Mirror, The Verge (Twelve) tells the story of a period that marked a decisive turning point for both European and world history. Here, Wyman examines two complementary and contradictory sides of the same historical coin: the world-altering implications of the developments of printed mass media, extreme taxation, exploitative globalization, humanistic learning, gunpowder warfare, and mass religious conflict in the long term, and their intensely disruptive consequences in the short term. As told through the lives of…