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!
Come hear 5 amazing readers share their grief stories. Every month we hear a wide range of grief subjects. Come listen. The zoom call lasts about an hour. Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89523333213?pwd=SFhmNmxWL2s0WTJYdjZ4Kzd2U0xOdz09 Meeting ID: 895 2333 3213 Passcode: 964790
Inspired by the Greek myth of Iphigenia and the Grimm fairy tale “Brother and Sister,” Michelle Ruiz Keil’s second novel follows two siblings torn apart and struggling to find each other in early ’90s Portland. All her life, 17-year-old Iph has protected her sensitive younger brother, Orr. But this summer, with their mother gone at an artist residency, their father decides it’s time for 15-year-old Orr to toughen up at a wilderness boot camp. When their father brings Iph to a work gala in downtown Portland and breaks the news, Orr has already been sent away against his will. Furious at her father’s betrayal, Iph storms off and gets lost in the maze of Old Town. Enter George, a queer Robin Hood who swoops in…
A Black man’s life, told in scenes — through every time he’s been called nigger. A Black son who visits his estranged white father in Los Angeles just as the ’92 riots begin. A Black Republican, coping with a skin disease that has turned him white, is forced to reconsider his life. A young Black man, fetishized by a married white woman he’s just met, is offered a strange and tempting proposal. The nine tales in Chris Stuck’s Give My Love to the Savages (Amistad) illuminate the multifaceted Black experience, exploring the thorny intersections of race, identity, and Black life through an extraordinary cast of characters. From the absurd to the starkly realistic, these stories take aim at the ironies and contradictions of the American…
Comedian and television writer Tom Scharpling is good at being funny, which is a miracle, considering what he's survived. Like hitting a deer and narrowly escaping with his life on the night of the 2016 election. But that's nothing compared to the struggles he had earlier in his life. It Never Ends (Abrams) is his memoir of a life writing comedy amidst a lifelong struggle with mental illness, a story he has never told before. It’s the heartbreaking account of his intense coming-of-age, and the lengths he's undertaken to pull away from the brink of self-destruction. Scharpling brought himself back to life first with punk zines and NBA coverage, then through the world of comedy, writing and executive producing Monk, and creating one of the…
Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Featuring Andrea Hollander Hosted by Christopher Luna and Morgan Paige 7 pm Thursday, July 8 On Zoom $5 Suggested donation LGBTQ+ FRIENDLY, PRO-SCIENCE, ANTI-FASCIST, ALL AGES, AND UNCENSORED SINCE 2004 Please support Niche Wine Bar, whose owner, Leah Jackson, provided a home for the reading series from 2015-2020: https://nichewinebar.com/ Andrea Hollander moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2011, after living for more than three decades in the Arkansas Ozarks, where she was innkeeper of a bed & breakfast for 15 years and the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College for 22. Hollander’s 5th full-length poetry collection was a finalist for the Best Book Award in Poetry from the American Book Fest; her 4th was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; her 1st…
Open Mic and Poetry Reading a virtual event on Zoom. Co-sponsored by the Milwaukie Poetry Series and St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church. Featured Readers are the Pendleton Poetry group. The Open Mic will follow their reading. Email Tom Hogan at tomhogan2@comcast.net (link sends e-mail) to register. You will receive a zoom link prior to the event. Plan to read 1 or 2 poems depending on the number of participants and length of the poems. If time permits additional poems will be allowed. The event will be recorded and available for viewing on demand on the Ledding Library YouTube Channel (link is external) after the event.
Kimberly Dark is the author of Damaged Like Me: Essays on Love, Harm, and Transformation. She joins us, along with local author Lidia Yuknavitch - most recently the author of Verge, to discuss their stories and the challenges and triumphs of living in bodies. About the book Kimberly Dark's Damaged Like Me is a series of essays and stories that reveal a complex social landscape. It shows how possible and vital it is to build roads to a more equitable and loving collective culture that includes body sovereignty, racial justice, gender equity/liberation, and much more. It does so by relying on the insights and approaches to knowledge production of those on the receiving end of inequity and violence, those whose "objectivity" on issues of oppression…
Annie Bloom's welcomes back Dana Spiotta for a livestream reading from her new novel, Wayward. Dana will be in conversation with Christine Schutt, author of Pure Hollywood: And Other Stories. Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYod-6rrTouGtVLK_OnwY6uC09ttA7xmjeA About Wayward: A moving, funny, engrossing novel about mothers and daughters, and one woman's midlife reckoning, from the renowned author of Stone Arabia and Eat the Document. On the heels of the election of 2016, Samantha Raymond's life begins to come apart: her mother is ill, her teenage daughter is increasingly remote, and at fifty-two she finds herself staring into the Mids--that hour of supreme wakefulness between three and four in the morning in which women of a certain age suddenly find themselves contemplating motherhood, mortality, and, in this case, the state…
Please join us today at 4pm PST as Kelli Jo Ford & Brandon Hobson discuss managing multiple points of view in works of fiction that span generations & what draws these two Cherokee writers to this type of narrative. ASL provided.
Annie Bloom's welcomes Kelly Williams Brown, author of Adulting, for a livestream reading from her new book, Easy Crafts for the Insane: A Mostly Funny Memoir of Mental Illness and Making Things. She will be joined by Amy Dresner, author of the memoir My Fair Junkie. Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAqf-ysrzwvHtYrpZxKpm8HJj5kawCR1p-T About Easy Crafts for the Insane: From the New York Times bestselling author of Adulting comes a story about how to make something when you’re capable of nothing. Kelly Williams Brown had 700 Bad Days. Her marriage collapsed, she broke three limbs in separate and unrelated incidents, her father was diagnosed with cancer, and she fell into a deep depression that ended in what could delicately be referred to as a "rest cure" at an inpatient facility.…