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 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…
The Independent Publishing Resource Center hosts as cool zinesters read their new work. The Independent Publishing Resource Center will host a live zine reading during #virtualpzs2021. The line-up is yet to be announced but the IPRC is very cool, and we are very excited for this event.
Join us for the launch of Charles Valle's book-length poem, Proof of Stake: An Elegy, featuring readings by Charles, Ashley Toliver, Stephanie Adams-Santos and Robert Lashley.
Like many of us, Lisa Wells has spent years overwhelmed by news of apocalyptic-scale climate change and a coming sixth extinction. She did not need to be convinced of the stakes. But what can be done? Wells embarked on a pilgrimage, seeking answers in dedicated communities — outcasts and visionaries — on the margins of society. Wells meets Finisia Medrano, an itinerant planter and misanthrope leading a group of nomadic activists to rewild the American desert. She finds a group of environmentalist Christians practicing "watershed discipleship" in New Mexico; another group in Philadelphia turning the tools of violence into tools of farming — guns into plowshares. She watches the world’s greatest tracker teach how to read a trail, and visits botanists who are restoring land…