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!

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

Grief and The Holidays

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The holiday season isn't only cheer and carols. It can be hard too. Grief can be louder. Let's come together and write about it. Join us Wednesday December 8 at Noon Pacific. Any level of writing. Everybody welcome. It's for humans including writers and non writers. It's a free one day drop-in writing session. Limited spaces! Join the zoom room at noon Pacific https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84694083515?pwd=czFibEpBakFVQ0U2ck5uK3dXeUJNZz09 Meeting ID: 846 9408 3515 Passcode: eggnog Bring your laptop or pen. Your coffee too. Bring your friends! Invite them on this Facebook event :) We will include a brief meditation, prompts around the holidays and grief, time to write, and time to share. Who are we? We are a mom/daughter team who created Coffee and Grief during the beginning of…

Free

Shea Ernshaw in Conversation With Amanda Montell

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

From Shea Ernshaw, author of The Wicked Deep, comes a richly atmospheric adult debut following three residents of a secluded, seemingly peaceful commune as they investigate the disappearances of two outsiders. Travis Wren has an unusual talent for locating missing people. Hired by families as a last resort, he requires only a single object to find the person who has vanished. When he takes on the case of Maggie St. James — a well-known author of dark, macabre children’s books — he’s led to a place many believed to be only a legend. Called Pastoral, this reclusive community was founded in the 1970s by like-minded people searching for a simpler way of life. By all accounts, the commune shouldn’t exist anymore and soon after Travis…

Free