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!

Jacob Frank in His Time and Ours: Prof. Pawel Maciejko on the Historical Contexts of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The 2022 Lorry I. Lokey Program at Portland State University Presents: Jacob Frank in His Time and Ours: Prof. Pawel Maciejko on the Historical Contexts of Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob  In 2014, the Polish Nobel-prizewinning author Olga Tokarczuk published her epic novel The Books of Jacob about Jacob Frank, a real-life messianic leader in eighteenth-century Poland. Pawel Maciejko is an internationally recognized authority on the history of Jacob Frank. Join us for Prof. Maciejko’s scholarly response to the question: How does history inform Tokarczuk’s novel and our reading of it? There will be a question and answer period following Prof. Maciejko’s talk. Jacob Frank was a religious charismatic who claimed to be the messiah. In 1759 he led his Jewish followers into Catholic…

Free

Frank Wilderson on Afropessimism

PSU - Lincoln Hall 1620 SW Park Ave, Portland, OR, United States

PSU's Black Studies Department invites you to a discussion with Frank B. Wilderson III on his recent book Afropessimism. Wednesday April 13, 2022 | 6-8pm Why does race seem to color almost every feature of our moral and political universe? Why does a perpetual cycle of slavery―in all its political, intellectual, and cultural forms―continue to define the Black experience? And why is anti-Black violence such a predominant feature not only in the United States but around the world? These are just some of the compelling questions that animate Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson III’s seminal work on the philosophy of Blackness. Radical in conception, remarkably poignant, and with soaring flights of lyrical prose, Afropessimism reverberates with wisdom and painful clarity in the fractured world we inhabit. It positions Wilderson as a paradigmatic thinker…

Free

The George Floyd Rebellion and the Power of Black Lives Matter

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Please join us for a talk by Cedric Johnson, faculty in Black Studies and Political Science at University of Illinois, Chicago. Professor Johnson will be discussing his new book, The Panthers Can't Save Us Now: Debating Left Politics and Black Lives Matter (Verso). Cedric Johnson is Professor of Black Studies and Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  His teaching and research interests include African American political thought, neoliberal politics, and class analysis and race. His most recent book, The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now (Verso, 2022), reprises the debate surrounding his eponymous essay, which cautioned against the perils of nostalgia and ethnic politics during Black Lives Matter’s first wave.  Johnson’s book, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (University of Minnesota…

Free

Solve for X: How X-Men Comics Got a New Identity

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The X-Men comic books of the past three years—the "Krakoan era"—have reinvented the long-running, impossibly rococo superhero franchise, devising ingenious solutions to its longstanding narrative and design problems. Douglas Wolk will present a whistle-stop tour of six decades' worth of Marvel's mutant comics, and discuss how "Head of X" Jonathan Hickman, designer Tom Muller, artists Pepe Larraz and R.B. Silva, colorist Marte Gracia and their collaborators overhauled the X-Men line in 2019. Douglas Wolk is the author of All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told, and teaches comics history at Portland State University. He’s written about comics and music for magazines, newspapers and web sites including Time, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, The Believer, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice,…

Free

Hawai’i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific

PSU Native American Student and Community Center 710 SW Jackson St, Portland, OR, United States

Please join us for a talk by Nitasha Tamar Sharma, Professor of African American Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. Professor Sharma will be discussing her new book Hawai'i is my Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific (Duke University Press, 2021). A comparative race studies scholar, Nitasha Tamar Sharma is a professor of African American Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University, where she was the Charles Deering Professor of Teaching Excellence. Hawai'i is my Haven is an ethnography that maps the context and contours of Black life in the Hawaiian Islands to highlight the paradox of Hawaiʻi as a multiracial paradise and site of unacknowledged antiBlack racism. Dr. Sharma is also the author of Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global…

Free

In-conversation with Jason Tanamor about LOVE, DANCE & EGG ROLLS

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Ooligan Press is honored to host Jason Tanamor, in-conversation with Tracy Badua (author of FREDDIE VS. THE FAMILY CURSE), in celebration of his new YA novel, LOVE, DANCE & EGG ROLLS, on Tuesday 05/10/2022 at 5pm PT (8pm ET). No registration necessary. About LOVE, DANCE & EGG ROLLS: Jamie Santiago is just an ordinary high school teenager―he has a huge crush on a girl from school, he watches a ton of sitcoms, and he is constantly trying to keep his dad from feeding egg rolls to his white friends. Not to mention he also aspires to be the next Tinikling master. Okay, maybe he’s not so ordinary. It's hard enough balancing the demands of high school, but when the last ever Asian Folk Festival falls…

Free

Everybody Reads: OLGA TOKARCZUK’S THE BOOKS OF JACOB

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The 2022 Levy Event The Sixth Annual Levy Event at Portland State University Everybody Reads: OLGA TOKARCZUK’S THE BOOKS OF JACOB We invite you to read Olga Tokarczuk’s masterpiece, now translated for the first time into English, and attend a worldwide discussion of the book guided by our distinguished panelists, held on Zoom. HOW TO PARTICIPATE: 1. Read the book. Go ahead and start reading! The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk is widely available! Purchase through your favorite bookseller! 2. Register. This event is free with prior registration and will be held on Zoom. Please go to our registration page. 3. Log in on May 15 and participate in the community-wide discussion. About the book and its author Poland’s literary star Olga Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019.…

Free

A CONVERSATION WITH JOHN JENNINGS AND DAMIAN DUFFY

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Join Comics Studies and the Portland Center for the Humanities at PSU for a conversation with John Jennings and Damian Duffy, co-collaborators on Black Comix Returns and the graphic novelization of Octavia Butler's prescient dystopian novel Parable of the Sower. John Jennings is a Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside. Jennings is co-editor of the Eisner Award-winning collection The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of the Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art. Jennings is also a 2016 Nasir Jones Hip Hop Studies Fellow with the Hutchins Center at Harvard University. Jennings' current projects include the horror anthology Box of Bones, the coffee table book Black Comix Returns (with Damian Duffy), and the Eisner-winning, Bram Stoker Award-winning, New York…

Free

Cut Paste Fold: A Zine Show

IPRC (Independent Publishing Resource Center) 318 SE Main Street #175, Portland, OR, United States

Curated by: A'misa Chiu, Jakelen Diaz, Nat Turner Project, Small Axe Projects Proof of Vaccination + Masks required Opening reception: 4-6pm Curators talk at 5pm

Free

David Duchovny in Conversation With Kristi Turnquist

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

David Duchovny’s The Reservoir (Akashic) follows an unexceptional man in an exceptional time. We see our present-day pandemic world and New York City through the eyes of a former Wall Street veteran, Ridley, as he, in his enforced quarantined solitude, looks back upon his life. He examines his wins, his failures, the gnawing questions — his career, his divorce, his estranged daughter — and wonders what it all means and who he really is. Sitting and brooding night after night, gazing out his huge picture window high above the Central Park Reservoir, Ridley spots a flashing light in an apartment across the park as if a lonely quarantined person is signaling him in Morse code. His determination to find out who this mystery woman is,…

Free