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!

Readings

  1. Events
  2. Readings

Events Search and Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

Today

The Hour That Stretches: June 30, 2019

Ford Food and Drink 2505 SE 11th Ave, Portland, OR, United States

Kertoa Kalevala-based comparative mythologist and oral storyteller Ilana Hamilton returns to the Hour; along with founding supporter/author/gallery artist Justin Montgomery, and two fresh, seething Hour virgins... I mean newcomers... poet Josh Baker, and thrice-newcomer poet in the Hour tradition of many other beloved discoveries, Angela Douglass. Your MC will also be reading another chunk of I AM LESION, since you folks like those bits so much. This mutation has to do with Speed. And what happens when someone notices you sitting on an illness. And how incredible people turn a j-o-b into a j-o-y. 6/30/2019, 7-10 PM, 2505 SE 11th Ave, FORD FOOD AND DRINK. NOMINALLY ALL AGES SHOW, SAFE SPACE, BE MINDFUL. FREE BY DONATION, DONATIONS ENCOURAGED. Come help keep live spoken word alive…

Continue readingThe Hour That Stretches: June 30, 2019
Free

Free Range Poetry: Phil Meehan, Penelope Scambly Schott, Betsy Fogelman Tighe

Multnomah County Library 2300 NW Thurman Street, Portland, OR, United States

Free Range Poetry presents Phil Meehan, Penelope Scambly Schott, Betsy Fogelman Tighe Monday, July 1, 2019 Northwest Library 2300 NW Thurman Street Portland An open mic will precede featured poets. Open mic readers limited to two pages of material. Sign up for open mic at 5:45 pm. Reading 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm. PHIL MEEHAN has worked for 40 years as a chef in the Portland area. He retired in 2015 and spends his time writing, dancing and watching the city change with every season. His chapbook 2016 Beached was based on photographs left by his uncle. It celebrates life on the Oregon Coast during the 1910’s. PENELOPE SCAMBLY SCHOTT’S most recent book is November Quilt. She is known to hang out on the east…

Continue readingFree Range Poetry: Phil Meehan, Penelope Scambly Schott, Betsy Fogelman Tighe
Free

Lauren Kate

Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd, Beaverton, OR, United States

The Orphan’s Song (G. P. Putnam’s Sons) is the adult debut novel by author Lauren Kate (the Fallen series), a sweeping love story about family and music — and the secrets each hold — that follows the intertwined fates of two Venetian orphans. Venice, 1736. When fate brings Violetta and Mino together on the roof of the Hospital of the Incurables, they form a connection that will change their lives forever. Both are orphans at the Incurables, dreaming of escape. But when the resident Maestro notices Violetta’s voice, she is selected for the Incurables’ world-famous coro, and must sign an oath never to sing beyond its church doors. After a declaration of love ends in heartbreak, Mino flees the Incurables in search of his family.…

Continue readingLauren Kate
Free

Reading: Heidi Diehl: Lifelines

Annie Bloom's Books 7834 SW Capitol Hwy, Portland, OR, United States

Annie Bloom's welcomes Brooklyn, New York, author Heidi Diehl to read from her novel Lifelines. She'll be joined in conversation with Portland author Sara Jaffe (Dryland). For fans of Meg Wolitzer and Maggie Shipstead: a sweeping debut novel following an American artist who returns to Germany—where she fell in love and had a child decades earlier—to confront her past at her former mother-in-law’s funeral. It’s 1971 when Louise leaves Oregon for Düsseldorf, a city grappling with its nation’s horrific recent history, to study art. Soon she’s embroiled in a scene dramatically different from the one at home, thanks in large part to Dieter, a mercurial musician. Their romance ignites quickly, but life gets in the way: an unplanned pregnancy, hasty marriage, the tense balance of…

Continue readingReading: Heidi Diehl: Lifelines
Free

Joshua A. Douglas

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

In contrast to the anxiety surrounding our voting system, with stories about voter suppression and manipulation, there are actually quite a few positive initiatives toward voting rights reform. Professor Joshua A. Douglas, an expert on our electoral system, examines these encouraging developments in his inspiring new book about how regular Americans are working to take back their democracy, one community at a time. Told through the narratives of those working on positive voting rights reforms, Vote for US (Prometheus) includes chapters on expanding voter eligibility, easing voter registration rules, making voting more convenient, enhancing accessibility at the polls, providing voters with more choices, finding ways to comply with voter ID rules, giving redistricting back to the voters, pushing back on big money through local and…

Continue readingJoshua A. Douglas
Free

Translators Bruce Fulton & Ju-Chan Fulton

Powell's Books on Hawthorne 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, OR, United States

In this shocking English debut, Mina (Two Lines), award-winning Korean author Kim Sagwa delivers an astonishingly complex portrait of modern-day adolescence. With pitch-perfect dialogue and a precise eye for detail, Kim creates a piercingly real teen protagonist — at once powerful, vulnerable, and utterly confused. As one bad decision leads to another, this promising life spirals to a devastating climax. Crystal toils day and night to earn top grades at her cram school. She’s also endlessly texting, shopping, drinking, vexing her boyfriends, cranking up her mp3s, and fantasizing about her next slice of cheesecake. Her nonstop frenzy never quite manages the one thing that might calm her down: opening up about the pressures that are driving her to the edge. She certainly hasn’t talked with…

Continue readingTranslators Bruce Fulton & Ju-Chan Fulton
Free

Poetry Reading: John Sibley Williams and A. Molotkov

Annie Bloom's Books 7834 SW Capitol Hwy, Portland, OR, United States

Annie Bloom's welcomes local poets John Sibley Williams and A. Molotkov to read from their new collections. What happens when metaphysics and social critique meet? Poetry that has to find a new form to express the tension it embodies. John Sibley Williams’ newspaper-like columns in As One Fire Consumes Another do just that. Here, transcendent vision and trenchant social insight meet, wrestle, and end up revitalizing one another. John Sibley Williams confronts the violent side of American history and its effect on our notions of self, fatherhood, and citizenship. The poems, which veer from elegiac to declarative to prayerlike, drill down into the beliefs and fears that underpin this violence." –Poets & Writers Join us for the launch of A. Molotkov’s Synonyms for Silence. His third…

Continue readingPoetry Reading: John Sibley Williams and A. Molotkov
Free

John Larison

Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd, Beaverton, OR, United States

From a blazing new voice in fiction comes a gritty and lyrical American epic about a young woman who disguises herself as a boy and heads west. In the spring of 1885, 17-year-old Jessilyn Harney finds herself orphaned and alone on her family’s homestead. Desperate to fend off starvation and predatory neighbors, she cuts off her hair, binds her chest, saddles her beloved mare, and sets off across the mountains to find her outlaw brother Noah and bring him home. A talented sharpshooter herself, Jess’s quest lands her in the employ of the territory’s violent, capricious Governor, whose militia is also hunting Noah — dead or alive. Wrestling with her brother’s outlaw identity, and haunted by questions about her own, Jess must outmaneuver those who…

Continue readingJohn Larison
Free

Juggalo Country

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

The Insane Clown Posse calls itself "the most hated band in the world," but with 11 million albums sold, the horrorcore hip hop duo from Detroit is a widespread music phenomenon with a cult following. Juggalo Country (Microcosm) is the story of Craven Rock's journey to their annual festival, the Gathering of the Juggalos, where legions of fans in clown makeup come together to attend this family reunion-like event and enjoy musical celebrities, feats of wrestling, debauchery, and most of all, a supportive, tight-knit community. Rock's reporting casts a light on the many contradictions and perils of Juggalodom, sensitively handling questions of gender, health, religion, and what it means to be part of something. Part festival-goer's journal, part music history, part investigative report, part social…

Continue readingJuggalo Country
Free

Oregon Wine: A Deep-Rooted History

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

The history of winemaking in Oregon is steeped in legends so well-known they've become gospel, but reality is even more fascinating. In Scott Stursa’s Oregon Wine: A Deep-Rooted History (History Press), discover the truth about who opened the state's first commercial winery and the real origin of Willamette Valley's famed Pinot Noir. Learn about Portland's daring Italian Americans, who kept home wineries during Prohibition, and the flourishing agriculture that contributed to the popularity of fruit wine. From the 19th-century winemakers through the modern industry that now includes more than 700 wineries, places like HillCrest and The Eyrie have been serving Oregonians for a half century. Uncover the forgotten roots of Oregon wine and raise a glass to its prosperous future.

Free
Click a category label below to view the calendar with only events in that specific category.