LitPDX seeks to amplify marginalized voices, and welcomes all, their ideas, their events, and their words.

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Marc Bloom

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

Marc Bloom’s Amazing Racers: The Story of America's Greatest Running Team and Its Revolutionary Coach (Pegasus) is the inspiring, untold story about a group of remarkable athletes and their groundbreaking coach who live and train in startling ways – and are redefining running excellence in the United States. Everything Coach Bill Aris does with his runners – male and female alike – is new and extraordinary, and he has created a new American running dynasty. From adopting long-forgotten “Stotan” creeds – combining the rigors of a Spartan and stoic lifestyle – to delving into teenage developmental psychology and gender-blindness in training, Amazing Racers is a must-read for millions of runners and the millions more who strive for better performance.

Free

Friending: Creating Meaningful, Lasting Adult Friendships

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

Friendship is one of the most important, yet most underrated necessities of life. But making and keeping friends becomes increasingly difficult when we become adults with busy careers, family responsibilities, and dispersed locations. Keeping in touch through social media isn't fulfilling. Developing true, deep, lasting bonds of friendship is. In Gina Handley Schmitt’s Friending: Creating Meaningful, Lasting Adult Friendships (Microcosm), you'll learn how to choose and make friends, support them and let them support you, maintain friendships even when your life paths diverge, repair friendships after a conflict, decide to break up a friendship, and much more.

Free

Kids’ Storytime With Travel Oregon & Cheryl Strayed

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

Yeti and Squatch in the Winter Wonderland of Oregon (Travel Oregon) is the storybook tale of two big-footed buds: Yeti and Squatch. Squatch loves the summer and is super bummed that the seasons are a-changin’. But luckily, Yeti is more of a winter person, er, creature. In this heartwarming tale, Yeti takes Squatch all over Oregon, hoping that Squatch will see it for the winter wonderland it really is. Cheryl Strayed joins us for a reading of Yeti and Squatch in the Winter Wonderland of Oregon.

Free

Wordlights Poetry ft. Nikki Burian

Rocking Frog Cafe 2511 SE Belmont St, Portland, OR, United States

Wordlights Saturday poetry evenings presented by NovaPDX, Rocking Frog Cafe and hosted by Igor Brezhnev. On Saturday, December 7th, we'll have a feature from Nikki Burian celebrating the release of Nikki's book Letters In My Nightstand (Lightship Press, 2019) and a long set poetry open mic! OUR FEATURE: Nikki Burian Nikki Burian is a queer, nonbinary slam poet currently living in Portland, OR. Nikki primarily uses they/them but welcomes any and all pronouns. They are a recipient of the 2011 Iowa Poetry in Public award, are the co-founder of the quarterly open mic event, Merde, and have been featured in Woke Monozine, Prickly Pear Printing’s 2019 volume of We Grow Anyway, and on SlamFind. Nikki represented Portland in both the 2018 National Poetry Slam and…

Continue readingWordlights Poetry ft. Nikki Burian
Free

Spare Room reading: Gabriel Urza, Joel Bettridge

Passages Bookshop 1801 NW Upshur, Suite 660, Portland, OR, United States

$5 suggested donation for the readers (no one turned away for lack of funds) *** Gabriel Urza is the author of the novel All That Followed (Henry Holt & Co.) and the novella The White Death: An Illusion. His fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, Guernica, The Guardian, LitHub, and other publications. He teaches Creative Writing in the MFA program at Portland State University. Joel Bettridge is the author of four books of poetry, Ligatures (Dos Madres 2019), The Public Life of Chemistry (The Cultural Society 2007), Presocratic Blues (Chax 2009), and That Abrupt Here (The Cultural Society 2007), as well as two critical studies, Avant-Garde Pieties: Aesthetics, Race, and the Renewal of Innovative Poetics (Routledge 2018) and Reading as Belief: Language Writing, Poetics, Faith (Palgrave 2009). He co-edited Ronald Johnson: Life and Works (The National Poetry Foundation 2008). He is Professor of English…

Continue readingSpare Room reading: Gabriel Urza, Joel Bettridge
Free – $5

A Night Out with Buddy Wakefield

The Siren Theater 315 NW Davis St, Portland, OR, United States

BUDDY WAKEFIELD, three-time world champion spoken word artist and the most toured performance poet in history, returns to Portland with a few real special guests for the release of A Choir of Honest Killers, his first book of new work in eight years. You're not gonna wanna miss this. Come exactly as you are. Except babies. Don't bring those. Or children. I promise. $15 at door. www.buddywakefield.com

$10 – $15

Joy of Cooking

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

In the nearly 90 years since Irma S. Rombauer self-published the first 3,000 copies of Joy of Cooking in 1931, it has become the kitchen bible, with more than 20 million copies in print. The new 2019 edition of Joy of Cooking (Scribner) has been thoroughly revised and expanded by Irma's great-grandson John Becker and his wife, Megan Scott. Becker and Scott developed more than 600 new recipes for this edition, tested and tweaked thousands of classic recipes, and updated every section of every chapter to reflect the latest ingredients and techniques available to today's home cooks.

Free

Tell Me a Story

Rose City Book Pub 1329 NE Fremont, Portland, OR, United States

A curated series of readings hosted by Jessica Wadleigh.

Free

Jeff VanderMeer in Conversation With Omar El Akkad

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

A messianic blue fox who slips through warrens of time and space on a mysterious mission. A homeless woman haunted by a demon who finds the key to all things in a strange journal. A giant leviathan of a fish, centuries old, who hides a secret, remembering a past that may not be its own. Three ragtag rebels waging an endless war for the fate of the world against an all-powerful corporation. Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts (MCD/FSG) presents a City with no name of its own, where in the shadow of the all-powerful Company, lives human and otherwise converge in terrifying and miraculous ways. At stake: the fate of the future, the fate of Earth – all the Earths. VanderMeer will be joined in conversation…

Continue readingJeff VanderMeer in Conversation With Omar El Akkad
Free

Revolutionary Love: A Political Manifesto to Heal and Transform the World

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

From social theorist and psychotherapist Michael Lerner comes a strategy for a new socialism built on love, kindness, and compassion. Revolutionary Love (University of California) proposes a method to replace what Lerner terms the “capitalist globalization of selfishness” with a globalization of generosity, prophetic empathy, and environmental sanity. Lerner details how a civilization infused with love could put an end to global poverty, homelessness, and hunger, while democratizing the economy, shifting to a 28-hour work week, and saving the life-support system of Earth.

Free
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