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!

Madeleine Trebenski in Conversation With Matthew Carroll

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

If you've ever expressed even the slightest bit of dissatisfaction with the current state of your life, you've inevitably gotten the response, "Have you tried meditation? Exercise? Joining a cult? Joining an exercise cult?" And a variety of other helpful suggestions. Madeleine Trebenski’s Do I Feel Better Yet?: Questionable Attempts at Self-Care and Existing in General (Chronicle Prism) explores these topics with intellectual essays like "I'm Moving to the Woods to Live in a Nightmare Shack" and instructional guides such as "Are You Hungry or Are You Just Horny?" If you learn anything from Trebenski’s book, it should be that a $72 artisanal hand-blown glass cup isn't going to change your life. Trebenski will be joined in conversation by Matthew Carroll, author of Can I…

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Joseph Han in Conversation With Gene Kwak

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Things are looking up for Mr. and Mrs. Cho. Their dream of franchising their Korean plate lunch restaurants across Hawaiʻi seems within reach after a visit from Guy Fieri boosts the profile of Cho’s Delicatessen. Their daughter, Grace, is busy finishing her senior year of college and working for her parents, while her older brother, Jacob, just moved to Seoul to teach English. But when a viral video shows Jacob trying — and failing — to cross the Korean demilitarized zone, nothing can protect the family from suspicion and the restaurant from waning sales. No one knows that Jacob has been possessed by the ghost of his lost grandfather, who feverishly wishes to cross the divide and find the family he left behind in the…

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Leah Sottile in Conversation With Ryan Haas

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

Inspired by Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven and Jess Walter’s Every Knee Shall Bow, Leah Sottile’s When the Moon Turns to Blood (Twelve) explores modern-day survivalism and end-times extremism through the story of Lori Vallow and her husband, gravedigger turned doomsday novelist, Chad Daybell. When police in Rexburg, Idaho perform a wellness check on seven-year-old J.J. Vallow and his sister, 16-year-old Tylee Ryan, both children are nowhere to be found. Their mother, Lori Vallow, gives a phony explanation, and when officers return the following day with a search warrant, she, too, is gone. As the police begin to close in, a larger web of mystery, murder, fanaticism, and deceit begins to unravel. Vallow’s case is sinuously complex. As investigators prod further, they find…

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Kaitlyn Tiffany in Conversation With Lindsay Zoladz

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In 2014, on the side of a Los Angeles freeway, a One Direction fan erected a shrine in the spot where, a few hours earlier, Harry Styles had vomited. “It’s interesting for sure,” Styles said later, adding, “a little niche, maybe.” But what seemed niche to Styles was actually an irreverent signpost for an unfathomably large, hyper-connected alternative universe: stan culture. In Everything I Need I Get from You (MCD x FSG), Kaitlyn Tiffany, a staff writer at The Atlantic and a superfan herself, guides us through the online world of fans, stans, and boybands. Along the way we meet girls who damage their lungs from screaming too loud, fans rallying together to manipulate chart numbers using complex digital subversion, and an underworld of inside…

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Sam J. Miller in Conversation With Fonda Lee

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

In Nebula Award-winning author Sam J. Miller’s devastating debut short-fiction collection, Boys, Beasts & Men (Tachyon), queer infatuation, inevitable heartbreak, and brutal revenge seamlessly intertwine. Whether innocent, guilty, or not even human, the boys, beasts, and men roaming through Miller’s gorgeously crafted worlds can destroy readers, yet leave them wanting more. Despite his ability to control the ambient digital cloud, a foster teen falls for a clever con-man. Luring bullies to a quarry, a boy takes clearly enumerated revenge through unnatural powers of suggestion. In the aftermath of a shapeshifting alien invasion, a survivor fears that he brought something out of the Arctic to infect the rest of the world. A rebellious group of queer artists create a new identity that transcends even the anonymity…

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Jim Woodring in Conversation With Gary Groth

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Jim Woodring has been chronicling the adventures of his cartoon everyman, Frank, for almost 30 years. These stories are a singular rarity in the comics form — both bone-chillingly physical in their depictions of Frank’s travails and profoundly metaphysical at the same time. Not since George Herriman’s Krazy Kat has the comics language been so exquisitely distilled into pure, revelatory aesthetic expression. One Beautiful Spring Day (Fantagraphics) combines three previously published volumes — Congress of the Animals, where Frank embarked upon a life-changing voyage of discovery; Fran, where he learned, then forgot, that things are not always what they seem; and Poochytown, in which Frank demonstrated his dizzying capacity for both nobility and ignominy — along with 100 dazzling new pages conceived and drawn by…

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Lidia Yuknavitch in Conversation With Vanessa Veselka

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

As rising waters — and an encroaching police state — endanger her life and family, a girl with the gifts of a carrier travels through water and time to rescue vulnerable figures from the margins of history. Lidia Yuknavitch has an unmatched gift for capturing stories of people on the margins — vulnerable humans leading lives of challenge and transcendence. Now, Yuknavitch offers an imaginative masterpiece: the story of Laisve, a motherless girl from the late 21st century who is learning her power as a carrier, a person who can harness the power of meaningful objects to carry her through time. Sifting through the detritus of a fallen city known as the Brook, she discovers a talisman that will mysteriously connect her with a series…

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The Quaking of America Tour w/ Resmaa Menakem

Alberta House 5131 NE 23rd Ave, Portland, OR, United States

Join us to celebrate the new book The Quaking of America with NYT bestselling Author Resmaa Menakem We are delighted to welcome Resmaa Menakem to the Rose City and be part of his book tour and to celebrate his new book with him in person. June 29th 2022 6pm:  Alberta House 5131 NE 23rd Ave Doors open at 5pm "Resmaa Menakem is one of our country's most gifted racial healers. His brilliant new book could not be more timely—a volume our country, our bodies, and our humanity desperately need."—Michael Eric Dyson, author of Entertaining Race and Long Time Coming In The Quaking of America, therapist and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem takes readers through somatic processes addressing the growing threat of white-supremacist political violence. Through the coordinated…

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Kim Kelly in Conversation With Shane Burley

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

Fight Like Hell (Atria/One Signal) is a revelatory and inclusive history of the American labor movement, from independent journalist and Teen Vogue labor columnist Kim Kelly. Freed Black women organizing for protection in the Reconstruction-era South. Jewish immigrant garment workers braving deadly conditions for a sliver of independence. Asian American fieldworkers rejecting government-sanctioned indentured servitude across the Pacific. Incarcerated workers advocating for basic human rights and fair wages. The queer Black labor leader who helped orchestrate America’s civil rights movement. These are only some of the working-class heroes who propelled American labor’s relentless push for fairness and equal protection under the law. The names and faces of countless silenced, misrepresented, or forgotten leaders have been erased by time as a privileged few decide which stories…

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Michelle Ruiz Keil in Conversation With Emilly Prado

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

Inspired by the Greek myth of Iphigenia and the Grimm fairytale "Brother and Sister," Michelle Ruiz Keil's second novel follows two siblings torn apart, struggling to find each other in early '90s Portland. All her life, 17-year-old Iph has protected her sensitive younger brother, Orr. But this summer, with their mother gone at an artist residency, their father decides it’s time for 15-year-old Orr to toughen up at a wilderness boot camp. When their father brings Iph to a work gala in downtown Portland and breaks the news, Orr has already been sent away against his will. Furious at her father’s betrayal, Iph storms off and gets lost in the maze of Old Town. Enter George, a queer Robin Hood who swoops in on a…

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