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!
Stay tuned for a special podcast-only Portland Book Festival episode of Literary Arts’ The Archive Project! Karen Eva Carr (Shifting Currents: A World History of Swimming) and Bonnie Tsui (Why We Swim) in conversation, moderated by OPB’s Paul Marshall. This event is podcast only, and will be released on The Archive Project wherever you get your podcasts as part of the 2022 Portland Book Festival.
Stay tuned for a special podcast-only Portland Book Festival episode of Literary Arts’ The Archive Project! A conversation between Oregon Symphony creative chair Gabriel Kahane and author Karen Russell (Sleep Donation). This event is podcast only, and will be released on The Archive Project wherever you get your podcasts as part of the 2022 Portland Book Festival. Karen Russell Karen Russell won the 2012 and the 2018 National Magazine Award for fiction, and her first novel, Swamplandia! (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has also written Orange World and, most recently, Sleep Donation. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, the "5 under 35" prize from the National Book Foundation, the NYPL Young Lions Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and is a former fellow of…
Stay tuned for a special podcast-only Portland Book Festival episode of Literary Arts’ The Archive Project! This podcast will explore the myths and realities of raising children while writing; whether the desire for motherhood is a creative desire, and how intersectional identities impact both motherhood and creativity. Featuring a stellar line-up novelists, poets and memoir authors and witches: Kendra DeColo (Enchantments), Kaitlyn Greenidge (Libertie), Mya Spalter (I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World), and Michelle Tea (Knocking Myself Up). This event is podcast only, and will be released on The Archive Project wherever you get your podcasts as part of the 2022 Portland Book Festival. Kaitlyn Greenidge Kaitlyn Greenidge's debut novel is We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books), one of the…
Stay tuned for a special podcast-only Portland Book Festival episode of Literary Arts’ The Archive Project! Acclaimed, award-winning cookbook author Naomi Duguid discusses her new book, Taste of Persia: A Cook’s Travels Through Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, and Kurdistan with Liz Crain (Dumplings Equal Love). This event is podcast only, and will be released on The Archive Project wherever you get your podcasts as part of the 2022 Portland Book Festival. Liz Crain Liz Crain is the author of Food Lover’s Guide to Portland, and coauthor of the cookbooks Toro Bravo and Hello! My Name Is Tasty, as well as Grow Your Own: Understanding, Cultivating, and Enjoying Cannabis. Her latest is the cookbook Dumplings Equal Love. She is a longtime writer on Pacific Northwest food and drink, and her writing has appeared in Lucky Peach, Food…
In 2019, Mason took a road trip around the country to 50 independent bookstores in 50 days. His goal was to promote his self-published novel, 2084, but his conversations with booksellers shifted his focus. On a second trip, he brought a cameraman along and asked booksellers a simple question: why should we shop indie? The resultant documentary, “The Bookstour”, premiered on public television this spring. Mason works on his books--and bookish films--in Los Angeles. Screening at 8:00, panel discussion at 8:30.
Celebrate the beauty and diversity of life in the Arab diaspora throughout the year. Wrapping grape leaves, playing doumbek, drawing henna tattoos, we’re Arab, Arab, Arab, the whole year through! Yallah! From January to December, join some busy kids as they partake in traditions old and new. There’s so much to do, whether it’s learning to write Arabic or looking at hijab fashion sites while planning costumes for a local comic convention. With details as vivid as the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle perfume (made to remind Mom of Morocco), children bond with friends, honor tradition, and spend loving time with family. Accompanied by buoyant and charming illustrations, this portrait of Arab life and childhood zeal is sure to bring joy all year round. Portland Book Festival…
Selma Blair has played many roles: Ingenue in Cruel Intentions. Preppy ice queen in Legally Blonde. Muse to Karl Lagerfeld. Advocate for the multiple sclerosis community. But before all of that, Selma was known best as … a mean baby. In a memoir that is as wildly funny as it is emotionally shattering, Blair’s Mean Baby tells the captivating story of growing up and finding her truth. Blair is in conversation with Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias. This is one of two Portland Book Festival events at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, and requires a ticket for entry, in addition to your festival pass. A limited number of tickets include priority seating and a signed copy of Mean Baby. Simplify your Portland Book Festival experience…
George Saunders (Liberation Day) and Jess Walter (The Angel of Rome and Other Stories) in conversation, moderated by OPB’s Geoff Norcross. Booker Prize winner George Saunders returns with Liberation Day, his first collection of short stories since the New York Times bestseller Tenth of December. The “best short-story writer in English” (Time) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose—wickedly funny, unsentimental, and exquisitely tuned—Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: Here is a collection of prismatic, resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality. Together, these nine subversive, profound, and essential stories coalesce into…
Two novels that reveal truths about our time — about race and power, but also hope and love — through a reimagined past and a speculative future. Harper Glenn‘s debut Monarch Rising finds us in a chilling near-future New United States of America, where Jo Monarch has grown up in the impoverished borderlands of New Georgia. She’s given one chance to change her fate… if she can survive a boy trained to break hearts. And Justina Ireland, the author of the visionary New York Times bestseller Dread Nation, returns in Rust in the Root with another spellbinding historical fantasy set at the crossroads of race and power in America. Moderated by Alicia Tate of Multnomah County Library. Portland Book Festival General Admission Passes are required for entry…
Two girls — one in Korea at the beginning of the twentieth century, one in a fallen American city in the coming late twenty-first century–must forge their destinies against and alongside that of their respective nations. Juhea Kim‘s Beasts of a Little Land is an epic story of love, war, and redemption set against the backdrop of the Korean independence movement, following the intertwined fates of a young girl sold to a courtesan school and the penniless son of a hunter. 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 in Lidia Yuknavitch‘s newest novel, Thrust. Moderated by Marisa Siegel (Fixed…