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!

Eric Barnes

Powell's Books on Hawthorne 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, OR, United States

In Above the Ether (Arcade), the prequel to Eric Barnes's acclaimed cli-fi novel, The City Where We Once Lived, six sets of characters move through a landscape and a country just beginning to show the signs of cataclysmic change. While every night the news alternates images of tsunami destruction with the baseball scores, the characters converge on a city where the forces of change have already broken — a city half abandoned, with one part left to be scavenged as the levee system protecting it slowly fails — until, in their vehicles on the highway that runs through it, they witness the approach of what looks to be just one more violent storm. A mesmerizing novel of unfolding dystopia amid the effects of climate change…

Free

Tin House Summer Workshop Readings: Kristen Radtke, Lan Samantha Chang, and Laura van de Berg

Reed College 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, Portland, OR, United States

8:00 pm, Vollum Lecture Hall – Signing to Follow Kristen Radtke, Lan Samantha Chang, Laura van de Berg Kristen Radtke is the author of the graphic nonfiction book Imagine Wanting Only This (Pantheon, 2017). She is the art director and deputy publisher of The Believer magazine. She is at work on a graphic essay collection, Seek You: Essays on American Loneliness, and Terrible Men, a graphic novel, both forthcoming from Pantheon. Her writing and illustrations have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Marie Claire, The Atlantic, GQ, New Yorker’s “Page Turner,” Oxford American, and many other places. Lan Samantha Chang is the author of a collection of short fiction, Hunger, and two novels, Inheritance, and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. Her work…

Free

Jay Wexler, Our Non-Christian Nation

Rose City Book Pub 1329 NE Fremont, Portland, OR, United States

Join me as I talk about my new book, Our Non-Christian Nation. Free, open to all, and no RSVP required. I will sign books and also draw a picture of your favorite fruit or vegetable saying something idiotic, if you want. Less and less Christian demographically, America is now home to an ever-larger number of people who say they identify with no religion at all. These non-Christians have increasingly been demanding their full participation in public life, bringing their arguments all the way to the Supreme Court. The law is on their side, but that doesn't mean that their attempts are not met with suspicion or outright hostility. In Our Non-Christian Nation, Jay Wexler travels the country to engage the non-Christians who have called on…

Free

Anthony McCann in Conversation With Leah Sottile

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

In 2016, a group of armed, divinely inspired right-wing protestors led by Ammon Bundy occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in the high desert of eastern Oregon. Encamped in the shadowlands of the republic, insisting that the federal government had no right to own public land, the occupiers were seen by a divided country as either dangerous extremists dressed up as cowboys, or as heroes insisting on restoring the rule of the Constitution. From the occupation’s beginnings, to the trials of the occupiers in federal court and their tumultuous aftermaths, Anthony McCann’s Shadowlands (Bloomsbury) is a clarifying, exhilarating story of a nation facing an uncertain future and a murky past in a time of great collective reckoning. Gathering into its vortex the realities of social…

Free

Tin House Summer Workshop Readings: Danielle Evans, Maureen N. McLane, and Kelly Link

Reed College 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, Portland, OR, United States

8:00 pm,  Cerf Amphitheater– Signing to Follow Danielle Evans, Maureen N. McLane, Kelly Link Danielle Evans is the author of the short-story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self,  a co-winner of the 2011 PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize for a first book, a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 selection for 2011, the winner of the 2011 Paterson Prize for Fiction and the 2011 Hurston-Wright award for fiction, and an honorable mention for the 2011  PEN/Hemingway award.  Her work has appeared in magazines including The Paris Review, A Public Space, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, The Sewanee Review, and Phoebe,  and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2008, 2010, 2017, and 2018, and in New Stories from the South. She…

Free

Voices of a People’s History: A Movement of Movements

Revolution Hall 1300 SE Stark St, Portland, OR, United States

Voices of a People’s History celebrates diverse movement leaders by sharing their stories, in their own words. Leaders of today perform readings of notable speeches and essays from inspiring figures past and present. It's a radically-empowering opportunity to hear the echoes of history in the modern day. Voices is the biggest night of the year for OPAL, and brings us closer together while strengthening our resolve to fight for racial, social and economic justice. Featuring Performances By Portland City Commissioner JoAnn Hardesty Gresham City Councilor Eddy Morales, Founder, East County Rising Paul Lumley, Executive Director, Native American Youth and Family Center Reyna Lopez, Executive Director, Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN) Ana del Rocio, Executive Director, Oregon Futures Lab and ColorPAC Nakisha Nathan, Executive…

$25 – $50

Reading: Karl Marlantes: Deep River

Annie Bloom's Books 7834 SW Capitol Hwy, Portland, OR, United States

Annie Bloom's welcomes back Karl Marlantes to read from his latest novel, Deep River. Karl Marlantes's debut novel Matterhorn has been hailed as a modern classic of war literature. In his new novel, Deep River, Marlantes turns to another mode of storytelling--the family epic--to craft a stunningly expansive narrative of human suffering, courage, and reinvention. In the early 1900s, as the oppression of Russia's imperial rule takes its toll on Finland, the three Koski siblings--Ilmari, Matti, and the politicized young Aino--are forced to flee to the United States. Not far from the majestic Columbia River, the siblings settle among other Finns in a logging community in southern Washington, where the first harvesting of the colossal old-growth forests begets rapid development, and radical labor movements begin…

Free

Incite: Queer Writers Read

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

Keep the Pride coming! Celebrate with the theme of unity with Marcus Lund, Trystan Angel Reese, Mary Mandeville, and David Oates. Poetry, fiction, reality, all incredibly powerful and fabulous. Join us. The theme this month is “Unity”. Join us for featured readings by Mary Mandeville, Marcus Lund, David Oates, and Trystan Angel Reese.

Free

An Environmental History of the Willamette Valley

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

Western Oregon's Willamette Basin, once a vast wilderness, became a thriving community almost overnight. When Oregon territory was opened for homesteading in the early 1800s, most of the intrepid pioneers settled in the valley, spurring rapid changes in the landscape. Heralded as fertile with a mild climate and an abundance of natural resources, the valley enticed farmers, miners, and loggers, who were quickly followed by the construction of rail lines and roads. Dams were built to harness the once free-flowing Willamette River and provide power to the growing population. As cities rose, people like Portland architect Edward Bennett and conservationist governor Tom McCall worked to contain urban sprawl. In An Environmental History of the Willamette Valley (History Press), authors Elizabeth and William Orr bring to…

Free

Tin House Summer Workshop Readings: Claire Vaye Watkins, Karen Shepard, and D.A. Powell

Reed College 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, Portland, OR, United States

8:00 pm,  Cerf Amphitheater– Signing to Follow Claire Vaye Watkins, Karen Shepard, D.A. Powell Claire Vaye Watkins is the author of Gold Fame Citrus and Battleborn, which won the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Karen Shepard is a Chinese-American born and raised in New York City.  She is the author of four novels, An Empire of Women, The Bad Boy’s Wife, Don’t I Know You?,  The Celestials, and the collection of stories, Kiss Me Someone.  Her short fiction has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, and Ploughshares, among others.  Her nonfiction has appeared in More, Self,…

Free