A resource for the PDX literary community. Produced by Old Pal.
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!
Join us for the launch of Charles Valle's book-length poem, Proof of Stake: An Elegy, featuring readings by Charles, Ashley Toliver, Stephanie Adams-Santos and Robert Lashley.
Like many of us, Lisa Wells has spent years overwhelmed by news of apocalyptic-scale climate change and a coming sixth extinction. She did not need to be convinced of the stakes. But what can be done? Wells embarked on a pilgrimage, seeking answers in dedicated communities — outcasts and visionaries — on the margins of society. Wells meets Finisia Medrano, an itinerant planter and misanthrope leading a group of nomadic activists to rewild the American desert. She finds a group of environmentalist Christians practicing "watershed discipleship" in New Mexico; another group in Philadelphia turning the tools of violence into tools of farming — guns into plowshares. She watches the world’s greatest tracker teach how to read a trail, and visits botanists who are restoring land…
Live on Crowdcast! Joshilyn Jackson, Mother May I, in conversation with Samantha Downing, For Your Own Good IF YOU WANT TO ATTEND AND REQUIRE SHIPPING PLEASE EMAIL US AND WE'LL EXPLAIN THE PROCESS. ORDER AND PREORDER ON OUR WEBSITE NOW! MOTHER MAY I Revenge doesn't wait for permission. Growing up poor in rural Georgia, Bree Cabbat was warned that the world was a dark and scary place. Bree rejected that fearful outlook, and life has proved her right. Having married into a family with wealth, power, and connections, Bree now has all a woman could ever dream of. Until the day she awakens and sees someone peering into her bedroom window--an old gray-haired woman dressed all in black who vanishes as quickly as she appears.…
Karolina Waclawiak’s breakout novel, Life Events (Picador), follows Evelyn, who, at 37, is on the verge of divorce and anxiously dreading the death of everyone she loves. She combats her existential crisis by avoiding her husband and aimlessly driving along the freeways of California looking for an escape — one that eventually comes when she discovers a collective of “exit guides.” Evelyn enrolls in their training course, where she learns to provide companionship and a final exit for terminally ill patients seeking a conscious departure. She meets Daphne, a dying woman still full of life; Lawrence, an aging porn king; and Daniel, who seems too young to die and whom Evelyn falls for, despite knowing better, not to mention the exit guide code. Each client…
A family returns to their hometown — and to the dark past that haunts them still — in The Book of Accidents (Del Rey), a new masterpiece of literary horror by Chuck Wendig, bestselling author of Wanderers. Long ago, Nathan Graves lived in a house in the country with his abusive father — and has never told his family what happened in that house. Long ago, Maddie Graves was a little girl making dolls in her bedroom when she saw something she shouldn’t — and is trying to remember that lost trauma by making haunting sculptures. Long ago, something sinister, something hungry, walked in the tunnels and the mountains and the coal mines of their hometown in rural Pennsylvania. Now Nate and Maddie are married,…
IPRC is excited to partner with the City of Portland, I Am M.O.R.E, The Numberz.fm, NAYA Many Nations Academy, and the Portland Art Museum for event that is a part of the City of Portland “Supporting Community Healing with Art” Initiative. Saturday, July 31st join us from 12-4 PM in Madison Street Plaza (1219 SW Park Avenue) for poetry, printmaking, DJs, Open Mic, and free ice cream.
A sentient, murderous prosthetic leg; shadowy creatures lurking behind a shimmering wall; brutal barrow men — of all the terrors that populate The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell (Coffee House), perhaps the most alarming are the beings who decimated the habitable Earth: humans. In his new short story collection, Brian Evenson envisions a chilling future beyond the Anthropocene that forces excruciating decisions about survival and self-sacrifice in the face of toxic air and a natural world torn between revenge and regeneration. Combining psychological and ecological horror, each tale thrums with Evenson’s award-winning literary craftsmanship, dark humor, and thrilling suspense. Evenson will be joined in conversation by Matt Bell, author of Appleseed and In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods. Register…
The third and final event in First Matter Press's Convos in Cohort series will feature Gabby Hancher, author of THE GROWTH LINES, forthcoming in September. Gabby will give a short reading and then discuss her work with fellow cohort members Jessica E. Pierce and Dan Wiencek. Audience Q & A will follow. Start time: 6:30 pacific Register here for Zoom access: https://www.firstmatterpress.org/events.html Or watch live on our Facebook page. Previews of Hancher's work can be found on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDuRXJSuv4sgqhQxE_X_iSQ/videos
Two theater icons meet in the afterlife. Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward, one pilloried for being gay and the other the ultimate symbol of cool sophistication. Hear what they have to say on all manner of things, scandal, play writing, coming out. This one-act play is definitely not in hell, but maybe in heaven, maybe in purgatory. At 7 pm Pacific Time, please join us using this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83860730981?pwd=YzRDd0xNUmNOYngxa3BTUUE4K1RRUT09 Meeting ID: 838 6073 0981 Passcode: 725789 One tap mobile +16699006833,,83860730981#,,,,*725789# US (San Jose) Dial by your location +1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma) Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kcAo2emuE NOTE: When our readings are conducted as virtual sessions, readers usually have been pre-cast by the playwrights. Fellow writers, actors and listeners are warmly invited to participate…
Nearly a century after his wrenching death, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) remains one of our most enigmatic writers. Believing he could do “more in dreams than Napoleon,” yet haunted by the specter of hereditary madness, Pessoa invented dozens of alter egos, or “heteronyms,” under whose names he wrote in Portuguese, English, and French. Unsurprisingly, this “most multifarious of writers” (Guardian) has long eluded a definitive biographer — but in renowned translator and Pessoa scholar Richard Zenith, he has met his match. Relatively unknown in his lifetime, Pessoa was all but destined for literary oblivion when the arc of his afterlife bent, suddenly and improbably, toward greatness, with the discovery of some 25,000 unpublished papers left in a large, wooden trunk. Drawing on this…