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!
Hodgepodge! November 24! 5-8pm! The Jade Lounge! Hosted by Aaron Simon! Readers: Dianna Faulk Kenneth Gorden Daniel Griggs Aaron Simon Actual writeup and reader bios coming soon.
Rob struggles to straddle his Japanese father’s religious traditions and the indulgent lifestyle of his new boarding school friends. Then his mind really explodes when upon marrying his Brazilian wife, Latin, Asian, and American cultures collide. This heartfelt, laugh-out-loud journey of self-discovery explores the challenge of expressing truth and love.
From Whiting Award and American Book Award winner and Lambda finalist, Tommy Pico, comes Feed (Tin House), the final book in the Teebs Cycle. The fourth book in Pico’s tetralogy, Feed is an epistolary recipe for the main character, a poem of nourishment, and a jaunty walk through New York's High Line Park, with the lines, stanzas, paragraphs, dialogue, and registers approximating the park's cultivated gardens of wildness. Among its questions, Feed asks: What's the difference between being alone and being lonely? Can you ever really be friends with an ex? How do you make perfect mac & cheese? Feed is an ode of reconciliation to the wild inconsistencies of a northeast spring, a frustrating season of back-and-forth, of thaw and blizzard, but with a…
Why is there no Native woman David Sedaris? Or Native Anne Lamott? Humor categories in publishing are packed with books by funny women and humorous sociocultural-political commentary – but no Native women. There are presumably more important concerns in Indian Country. More important than humor? Among the Diné/Navajo, a ceremony is held in honor of a baby’s first laugh. While the context is different, it nonetheless reminds us that laughter is precious, even sacred. Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s (Bison) is a powerful and compelling collection of Tiffany Midge’s musings on life, politics, and identity as a Native woman in America. Artfully blending sly humor, social commentary, and meditations on love and loss, Midge weaves short, standalone musings into a memoir that stares…
Join us every Saturday for kids’ storytime. Today we’re reading The Perfect Seat by Minh Lê and Gus Gordon.
Wordlights Saturday poetry evenings presented by NovaPDX, Rocking Frog Cafe and hosted by Igor Brezhnev. On Saturday, November 30th, we'll have a feature from Dan Raphael and a long set poetry open mic! OUR FEATURE: Dan Raphael Dan Raphael is 6 foot 6 and when performing seems possessed by language, shoes off, at least one arm always moving. He has been active in Portland and the Northwest for 4 decades as poet, performer, editor and reading host. Manything, from Unlikely Books of New Orleans, is his 21st book. Most Wednesdays dan writes and records a political poem for The KBOO Evening News. *** Sign-ups start at 5:30, show starts at 6PM. On first and third Saturdays each performer in the open mic gets 10 minutes,…
The Voice of Empathy is back for season 2 at thetinytheaterPDX, 3306 SE 65th Ave, Portland, OR. Please spread out the parking around the neighborhood to avoid congestion. The series showcases poets whose work investigates the human capacity for compassion and generosity and invites the reader/listener to care deeply for others and the world. This description is for the poets’ reference only and does not presume to impose any constraints on the work selected for presentation. There is room for 37-39 poetry lovers. Please come a few minutes in advance to reserve your seats. In case of snow, please monitor this event for possible rescheduling. Laura Winter lives in Portland Oregon. Author of 6 collections, broadsides and performance projects, her book Coming Here to be…
Taking its inspiration from the work of Russian absurdist authors such as Alexander Vvedensky and Daniil Kharms, Jeff Alessandrelli’s Fur Not Light (Burnside Review) interrogates how deep senselessness runs in a post-truth and truthiness world. When Dao Strom’s The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint) was first published in 2006, it was groundbreaking in its depiction of contemporary young Vietnamese women living in the United States, centering their ordinary lives as mothers, lovers, friends, and daughters against the backdrop of immigration and assimilation. Available now for the first time in paperback, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys is a beautifully written, psychologically astute foray into the rite of female passage. Alessandrelli and Strom will be joined in conversation by Danielle Frandina, Literary Arts…
You’ve read Leanne Grabel’s article (https://www.pdxmonthly.com/articles/2019/10/23/meet-the-poets-who-defined-a-portland-era-and-are-still-at-it) in November’s Portland Monthly about 8 Portland poets who’ve continued writing and performing their work while building and supporting the region’s literary network for 4 decades. Here’s a chance to hear, see and meet the writers Leanne Grabel Walt Curtis Douglas Spangle Barbara LaMorticella Tim Barnes Casey Bush dan raphael & hopefully Judith Barrington Leanne Grabel loves mixing genres and collaborating with musicians and a funky old casio. Her latest work is a collection of flash memoir about her long-ass marriage and co-conspirator in Cafe Lena and performance work, Steve Sander. Born on the 4th of July, Walt Curtis has long been's Portland unofficial poet laureate. Douglas Spangle tries out new pens and butters toast for absent friends. Barbara…
In his new book, Beyond the Valley: How Innovators Around the World Are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow (MIT), Ramesh Srinivasan describes the Internet as both an enabler of frictionless efficiency and a dirty tangle of politics, economics, and other inefficient, inharmonious human activities. To make a better Internet, Srinivasan says, we need a new ethic of diversity, openness, and inclusivity, empowering those now excluded from decisions about how technologies are designed, who profits from them, and who are surveilled and exploited by them.