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!

Fonda Lee in Conversation With Sarah Gailey

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In Fonda Lee’s Jade Legacy (Orbit), the page-turning conclusion to the Green Bone Saga, the Kaul siblings battle rival clans for honor and control over an East Asia-inspired fantasy metropolis. Jade, the mysterious and magical substance once exclusive to the Green Bone warriors of Kekon, is now coveted throughout the world. Everyone wants access to the supernatural abilities it provides, from traditional forces such as governments, mercenaries, and criminal kingpins, to modern players, including doctors, athletes, and movie studios. As the struggle over the control of jade grows ever larger and more deadly, the Kaul family, and the ancient ways of the Kekonese Green Bones, will never be the same. Battered by war and tragedy, the Kauls are plagued by resentments and old wounds as…

Free

Fonograf Editions Five-Year Anniversary

Oregon Contemporary (formerly DISJECTA) 8371 N Interstate Avenue, Portland, OR, United States

(image by Adie Bovee) Celebration & Fundraiser With performances by Eileen Myles, Samuel Ace, Allison Cobb, Brandi Katherine Herrera, and Sara Jaffe and Auctioning print and analog delights from our friends: milkweed editions, Canarium Books, Fence, Albina Music Trust, Poetry Foundation, and many more.

Free

Neal Stephenson in Conversation With Lev Grossman

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Neal Stephenson's sweeping, prescient new novel transports readers to a near-future world in which the greenhouse effect has inexorably resulted in a whirling-dervish troposphere of superstorms, rising sea levels, global flooding, merciless heat waves, and virulent, deadly pandemics. One man — visionary billionaire restaurant chain magnate T. R. Schmidt, Ph.D. — has a Big Idea for reversing global warming, a master plan perhaps best described as "elemental." But will it work? And just as important, what are the consequences for the planet and all of humanity should it be applied? Ranging from the Texas heartland to the Dutch royal palace in the Hague, from the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas to the sunbaked Chihuahuan Desert, Termination Shock (William Morrow) brings together a disparate group of…

Free

Book Release Party: Thomas Lucky Richards

Mother Foucault's Bookshop 523 SE Morrison St, Portland, OR, United States

I will be reading from my newest book, Thirst for Beginners: poems, prose, and quizzes. My special musical guests will be Larry Yes!

Free

Poetry Reading & Process Talk

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Join us for the next Siren Nation Speaks on December 5, a Poetry Reading & Process Talk with authors Dao Strom, Michele Glazer, and Endi Bogue Hartigan. They’ll read from their work, talk about their creative processes, and answer your questions. Find out how they get started on a piece, see it forward, and explore the power of language and art. Speakers Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. The author of five books and two song-cycles, most recently the poetry collection Instrument (Fonograf Editions) and its companion album, Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records), Strom was born in Vietnam and grew up in the Sierra Nevadas of California. Her bilingual…

Free

Robin George Andrews in Conversation With Steve Olson

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Volcanoes are capable of acts of pyrotechnical prowess verging on magic: they spout black magma more fluid than water, create shimmering cities of glass at the bottom of the ocean and frozen lakes of lava on the moon, and can even tip entire planets over. Between lava that melts and reforms the landscape, and noxious volcanic gases that poison the atmosphere, volcanoes have threatened life on Earth countless times in our planet’s history. Yet despite their reputation for destruction, volcanoes are inseparable from the creation of our planet. A lively and utterly fascinating guide to these geologic wonders, Super Volcanoes (W. W. Norton) revels in the incomparable power of volcanic eruptions past and present, earthbound and otherwise — and recounts the daring and sometimes death-defying…

Free

Featuring Kelli Russell Agodon

Wildwood Saloon 1955 W Burnside St, Portland, OR, United States

The old Tony’s Talkin’ To, rebirthed as the Last Stand at Wildwood Saloon. Open mic poetry, sign ups start at 7:30. No guitars. Fighting literary isolation and cultural oppression of poetry and free thought since 2006 or so. This is the Last Stand. Together we stand for the poetic revolution of open minds and cultural plurality, community, LGBTQ+ friendly, uncensored, unrestrained & uninhibited. And this month we welcome Kelli Russell Agodon in a sort of book launch for her newest publication from Copper Canyon Press, DIALOGUES WITH RISING TIDES. Kelli comes to us from a paddle board deep in the Seattle Sound where she has been distilling spells and feeding the mites and bits that reside within the Rainier Writer’s Workshop.

Free

Michael J. Fox in Conversation With Willie Geist / Ticketed Event

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The entire world knows Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly, the teenage sidekick of Doc Brown in Back to the Future; as Alex P. Keaton in Family Ties; as Mike Flaherty in Spin City; and through numerous other movie roles and guest appearances on shows such as The Good Wife and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Diagnosed at age 29, Fox is equally engaged in Parkinson’s advocacy work, raising global awareness of the disease and helping find a cure through The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, the world’s leading nonprofit funder of PD science. In his new memoir, No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality (Flatiron), Fox shares personal stories and observations about illness and health, aging, the strength of family and friends,…

$17.99

Juhea Kim in Conversation With Caroline Kim

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In 1917, deep in the snowy mountains of occupied Korea, an impoverished local hunter on the brink of starvation saves a young Japanese officer from an attacking tiger. In an instant, their fates are connected — and from this encounter unfolds a saga that spans half a century. In the aftermath, a young girl named Jade is sold by her family to Miss Silver’s courtesan school, an act of desperation that will cement her place in the lowest social status. When she befriends an orphan boy named JungHo, who scrapes together a living begging on the streets of Seoul, they form a deep friendship. As they come of age, JungHo is swept up in the revolutionary fight for independence, and Jade becomes a sought-after performer…

Free

Maxine Scates and Joseph Millar

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Join beloved and award-winning Oregon poets Maxine Scates and Joseph Millar for a virtual reading and discussion celebrating their latest collections. Many poems in My Wilderness by Maxine Scates chronicle how a wooded Oregon hillside, her longtime home, has turned from a refuge into a landscape of change where trees once numerous are now threatened by storm and the presence of the humans who live among them. Grounded in the shifting borders of migrations and extinctions, plant, animal, and human, of memory and grief, My Wilderness inevitably asks us to consider not only our own mortality but also our impact on the world around us. Dark Harvest showcases two decades of Joseph Millar’s finest poetic work, poems centered on the unseen men and women at…

Free