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!

Readings

  1. Events
  2. Readings

Events Search and Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

Today

Verselandia! 2023

Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall 1037 SW Broadway, Portland, OR, United States

Youth Poetry Slam Championship Celebrate Portland’s youth poets during Literary Arts’ annual Verselandia! Youth Poetry Slam Championship. Cheer on students from Portland and East Multnomah County public high schools competing for poetic glory at this energetic and inspiring event. Support provided by: To support this event as a sponsor, please contact Lydah DeBin at lydah@literary-arts.org or call 503-989-7110.  

$10 – $70

Anastacia-Reneé in Conversation With Jamila Osman

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

Anastacia-Reneé’s Side Notes from the Archivist (Amistad Press) is a preservation of Black culture viewed through a feminist lens. The Archivist leads readers through poems that epitomize youthful renditions of a Black girl coming of age in Philadelphia’s pre-funk ’80s; episodic adventures of “the Black Girl” whose life is depicted through the white gaze; and selections of verse evincing affection for self and testimony to the magnificence within Black femme culture at-large. Every poem in Side Notes elevates and honestly illustrates the buoyancy of Blackness and the calamity of Black lives on earth. In her uniquely embracing and experimental style, Anastacia-Reneé documents these truths as celebrations of diverse subjects, from Solid Gold to halal hotdogs; as homages and reflections on iconic images, from Marsha P.…

Continue readingAnastacia-Reneé in Conversation With Jamila Osman
Free

Endi Bogue Hartigan & Flávia Rocha in Conversation

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

Join us in celebration of the launch of oh orchid o’clock (Omnidawn Publishing, 2023) by Endi Bogue Hartigan who will introduce her new collection. She will be joined by Brazilian poet Flávia Rocha, who will read from her most recent book Exosfera. Enjoy an evening of lyric investigations into space, time, our time, and orchids, followed by a short discussion and Q&A. This collection speaks the language of the clock as a living instrument, exposing the sensory impacts of our obsession with time. In oh orchid o’clock, lyrics wind through histories like a nervous system through a body. The poems speak to how we let our days become over-clocked, over-transactional, and over-weaponed. With an instrumental sensibility, Endi Bogue Hartigan investigates what it is to be…

Continue readingEndi Bogue Hartigan & Flávia Rocha in Conversation
Free

Kids’ Storytime

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

Join us every Saturday for kids' storytime. Today we're reading All the Ways to Be Smart by Davina Bell. Buy the Book

Free

Spare Room Annual Marathon Reading: Gertrude Stein & Jackson Mac Low

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

Spare Room and Passages Bookshop present a marathon reading IDA  by  Gertrude Stein Pieces o’ Six  by  Jackson Mac Low Sunday, April 30 12:00 pm until finish (probably around 8:00-8:30 pm) Admission free Passages Bookshop 1801 NW Upshur, Suite 660 Portland, OR 97209 503-388-7665 = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = The Spare Room Reading Series hosts an annual marathon reading, in which local writers, artists, and friends read aloud one or more booklength texts. This year's marathon features Gertrude Stein's short novel Ida (1945) and Jackson Mac Low's thirty-three "poems in prose"…

Continue readingSpare Room Annual Marathon Reading: Gertrude Stein & Jackson Mac Low
Free

Ram Shankar Siva Kumar & Hyrum Anderson

Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd, Beaverton, OR, United States

In Not With A Bug, But With A Sticker (Wiley), adversarial machine learning researchers Ram Shankar Siva Kumar and Hyrum Anderson deliver a riveting account of the most significant risk to artificial intelligence systems: cybersecurity threats. The authors take you on a sweeping tour — from inside secretive government organizations to academic workshops at ski chalets to Google’s cafeteria — recounting how major AI systems remain vulnerable to the exploits of bad actors of all stripes. Siva Kumar and Anderson outline the different ways any AI system — from Alexa to Tesla — can be manipulated by adversaries. Their book is aimed at a general audience, and, in playful language and anecdotes, attempts to answer a multitude of questions: How to subvert these AI systems?…

Continue readingRam Shankar Siva Kumar & Hyrum Anderson
Free

WORKS ON PAPER: EXPERIMENTS IN LANGUAGE & SOUND PRESENTS MARK SO

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

Works on Paper: Experiments in Language and Sound presents an evening of tapes, readings, and text-objects by MARK SO Saturday, May 6 4:00 pm – 10:00 pm, come and go as you wish $10-20 suggested donation; no one turned away Passages Bookshop 1801 NW Upshur, Suite 660 503-388-7665 ======================================= A six-hour multichannel playback of So’s experimental taped through-reading of John Ashbery's booklength poem Flow Chart provides a lively scrim for several discrete but related nucleii of his work to appear and coincide: • a group of his Ashbery scores which composer Manfred Werder performed for a month at a time, marked only by his sparse overtyping and occasional polaroids • several typescripts from late in the Ashbery series, no longer scores but radical transcriptions of…

Continue readingWORKS ON PAPER: EXPERIMENTS IN LANGUAGE & SOUND PRESENTS MARK SO
Free – $20

Maartje Hensen’s ‘Pride Atlas!’

Bishop & Wilde 2601 NW Thurman Street, Portland, OR, United States

Come celebrate the publication of writer and influencer Maartje Hensen’s new book, “The Pride Atlas!” Space is limited, so register for the event here! Order the book now at bishopandwilde.com or add your name below to reserve a copy for pickup the day of the event.

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…

Continue readingSlamlandia
Free

Constellation #5: Ajose-Fisher, Mayer, Minto

Tin House 2617 NW Thurman Street, Portland, OR, United States

April's event was a stunner, and we're thrilled to announce a stellar local lineup for our fifth Constellation on May18th, along with some exciting changes. Changes first: the reading space has been transformed into a beautiful independent bookstore! Bishop & Wilde will be open before the event. Feel free to arrive early and shop. And now, this month's readers: Kesha Ajose-Fisher (she/her) is the author of the award-winning collection of stories, No God Like the Mother, which focuses on the lives and realities of women who have been tasked with holding up the sky, all while the world whispers “you’re doing it wrong.” She has also earned a number of prestigious awards for other essays and stories she has written over the years, including The…

Continue readingConstellation #5: Ajose-Fisher, Mayer, Minto
Free
Click a category label below to view the calendar with only events in that specific category.