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!

Stephen Markley in Conversation With Omar El Akkad

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

From Stephen Markley, author of Ohio, comes a masterful American epic charting a near future approaching collapse and a nascent but strengthening solidarity. In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters — a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that…

Free

Morgan Thomas in Conversation With Genevieve Hudson

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

The nine stories in Morgan Thomas’s shimmering debut collection witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters determined to find themselves reflected in the annals of history, whatever the cost. As Thomas’s subjects trace deceit and violence through Southern tall tales and their own pasts, their journeys reveal the porous boundaries of body, land, and history, and the sometimes ruthless awakenings of self-discovery. A trans woman finds her independence with the purchase of a pregnancy bump; a young Virginian flees their relationship, choosing instead to immerse themself in the life of an intersex person from Colonial-era Jamestown. A writer tries to evade the murky and violent legacy of an ancestor who supposedly disappeared into a midwifery bag, and in the uncanny title story, a young trans person…

Free

Slamlandia

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

Slamlandia is a poetry open mic and slam that meets every month. This mic provides a creative, fun, and welcoming space for all literary communities in Portland. We encourage poets new and old to come share their work. We strive towards a safer space for poets to read their own poetry, witness others, and participate in community. This event takes place in-person. Proof of Covid-19 vaccine or a negative PCR test is required for admittance. Please see our Covid-19 guidelines for in-person events at Literary Arts. Hosted by Julia Gaskill. Julia Gaskill Julia Gaskill is a professional daydreamer hailing from Portland, Oregon. Her poetry examines the tightrope we sometimes walk of feeling our voices censored and also being unabashedly ourselves. Her poems touch on everyday…

Free

Filament Reading Series

The Corporeal Writing Center 510 SW 3rd Ave #101, Portland, OR, United States

Filament is BACK! Filament is an all-genre Creative Writing Reading series from Portland State’s MFA Program. Join us on February 17 from 7 - 8:30 PM at Corporeal Writing to hear five talented writers from the Creative Writing program read their work! Free to attend. Masks and Vaccine Cards Required. Featuring: Joshua Stanek, Natalie Flaherty, Nora Broker, Jay Butler, and Alex Roselio De La Cruz

Free

Fonograf Listening Party: John Ashbery Live at Sanders Theatre & More Poets [POSTPONED]

Dorsa Brevia 625 NW Everett Street #103, Portland, OR, United States

Join us Friday, Feb. 24th for a listening party in celebration of Fonograf's first archival LP, John Ashbery Live at Sanders Theatre, 1976. Readings by Sarah Bartlett, Natalie Garyet, Emmi Greer, and Karolinn Fiscaletti, each will be reading a favorite Ashbery poem, along with a few of their own poems. Drinks, records, books, etc. 7 PM

Free

SPARE ROOM PRESENTS CHRIS DANIELS & DAVID ABEL [POSTPONED]

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

Doors open at 7:00 pm; reading at 7:30 pm Admission free; no late entry Masks recommended Passages Bookshop 1801 NW Upshur, Suite 660 Portland, OR 97209 503-388-7665 = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Chris Daniels is a self-taught (feral) translator of global Lusophone poetry. He has published book-length translations of Josely Vianna Baptista (On the Shining Screen of the Eyelids), Fernando Pessoa (Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro and Collected Later Poems of Alvaro de Campos), and Adelaide Ivanova (The Hammer). One Impossible Step, the selected poems of Orides Fontela, is forthcoming from…

Free

Fonograf Listening Party: John Ashbery Live at Sanders Theatre & More Poets

Dorsa Brevia 625 NW Everett Street #103, Portland, OR, United States

Take two: 7 PM on March 3rd at Dorsa Brevia in downtown PDX. Readings by Sarah Bartlett, Natalie Garyet, Emmi Greer, and Karolinn Fiscaletti. Hope to see you for real this time! Join us Friday, March 3rd for a listening party in celebration of Fonograf‘s first archival LP, John Ashbery Live at Sanders Theatre, 1976. Readings by Sarah Bartlett, Natalie Garyet, Emmi Greer, and Karolinn Fiscaletti, each will be reading a favorite Ashbery poem, along with a few of their own poems. Drinks, records, books, etc. 7 PM

Free

SPARE ROOM PRESENTS CHRIS DANIELS & DAVID ABEL

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

Please note new date & time: Sunday, March 5 Doors open at 5:30 pm; reading at 6:00 pm Admission free; no late entry Masks recommended Passages Bookshop 1801 NW Upshur, Suite 660 Portland, OR 97209 503-388-7665 = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =  Chris Daniels is a self-taught (feral) translator of global Lusophone poetry. He has published book-length translations of Josely Vianna Baptista (On the Shining Screen of the Eyelids), Fernando Pessoa (Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro and Collected Later Poems of Alvaro de Campos), and Adelaide Ivanova (The Hammer). One Impossible Step,…

Free

Ed Roberson Reading

PSU - Smith Memorial Student Union 1825 SW Broadway, Portland, OR, United States

Monday, Mar 6 6pm Smith 338 The PSU Program in Creative Writing is pleased to host the poet Ed Roberson. This event is cosponsored by the Black Studies Department. The in-person reading is free and open to the public; it will be livestreamed via the program's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/PSUCreativeWriting Ed Roberson is the author of thirteen books of poetry, including MPH and Other Road Poems (Verge Books, 2021) and Asked What Has Changed (Wesleyan University Press, 2021). His most recent collection, Aquarium Works (Nion Editions, 2022), details his experiences as a diver and tankman at the Pittsburgh AquaZoo in the 1960s. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Roberson also worked in the area’s steel mills, in an advertising graphics agency, and as a research assistant in…

Free

Works on Paper: Neal Kosaly-Meyer performs Finnegans Wake

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

Works on Paper: Experiments in Language and Sound presents Neal Kosaly-Meyer A Finnegans Wake Project Saturday, March 11 5:30 pm: Doors open 6:00 pm: Lecture and discussion, followed by a short break 7:30 pm: Performance (2.5 hours without a break) $10-20 suggested donation; no one turned away Passages Bookshop 1801 NW Upshur, Suite 660 503-388-7665 ========================== A Finnegans Wake Project, now in its eleventh year, is Neal Kosaly-Meyer’s effort to learn and perform, from memory, and with acute attention to musical detail, each of the seventeen episodes of James Joyce's final novel Finnegans Wake. At Passages Bookshop, Kosaly-Meyer will present Part II, Chapter 1 (the ninth chapter), in its entirety, preceded by a short introductory lecture and a moderated discussion. ========================== Neal Kosaly-Meyer is a…

Free