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!

Joy Castro & S. Tremaine Nelson

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Join us for a conversation with Joy Castro, author of One Brilliant Flame, and S. Tremaine Nelson of the Northwest Review. This is a virtual event. Click here to register in advance. If you have any questions, reach out to Jessica Meza-Torres at jessica@literary-arts.org. Joy Castro Joy Castro is the award-winning author of Flight Risk, a finalist for a 2022 International Thriller Award; the post-Katrina New Orleans literary thrillers Hell or High Water, which received the Nebraska Book Award, and Nearer Home, which have been published in France by Gallimard’s historic Série Noire; the story collection How Winter Began; the memoir The Truth Book; and the essay collection Island of Bones, which received the International Latino Book Award. She is also editor of the craft…

Free

Transmit Culture: Entrepreneurship in the Book Business

Portland State University - Fariborz Maseeh Hall 1855 SW Broadway, Portland, OR, United States

Ninety-nine percent of all businesses in the US are small businesses. From freelance publishing services (marketing, design, editing, etc.) to independent publishers and bookstores, entrepreneurs and the businesses they start are the heart of the publishing industry. In this panel of book publishing entrepreneurs, the presenters will discuss how they forged their own paths, built book businesses on their own terms, acquired capital, developed business plans, and overcame entrepreneurial challenges. FMH 204

Free

Science Pub Portland: Comics & Women’s Liberation

Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) 1945 SE Water Avenue, Portland, OR, United States

Learn More & Get Tickets In 1977 a comic was launched with the tagline, “This female fights back!” We can’t disclose who the character is, but you would recognize her from her blue and red outfit and oversized fists. Indeed, this character punched her way past a cavalcade of villains, but did so while struggling not to gain weight and keeping her day job as a magazine editor. This character was identified as “This Woman, This Warrior” in the first issue of her solo series, and her story arc offers a complicated response to second-wave feminism in the mainstream media, particularly as she was written by male creators who, based on interviews and letter columns, seemed unfamiliar with key tenets of feminism and were more…

Free – $5

JJJJJerome Ellis

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The PSU Program in Creative Writing is pleased to host an remote event with writer and performer JJJJJerome Ellis. This event is cosponsored by the departments of Black Studies and Speech and Hearing at Portland State. JJJJJerome Ellis is an artist and stutterer from Tidewater, Virginia. His website is jjjjjerome.com. Please register for the event at https://pdx.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_At2scnYfRe-yhzt9f1SWHg.

Free

Transmit Culture: Entrepreneurship in the Book Business

PSU - Fariborz Maseeh Hall 1855 SW Broadway, Portland, OR, United States

Ninety-nine percent of all businesses in the US are small businesses. From freelance publishing services (marketing, design, editing, etc.) to independent publishers and bookstores, entrepreneurs and the businesses they start are the heart of the publishing industry. In this panel of book publishing entrepreneurs, the presenters will discuss how they forged their own paths, built book businesses on their own terms, acquired capital, developed business plans, and overcame entrepreneurial challenges. FMH 204

Free

Works on Paper: Neal Kosaly-Meyer performs Finnegans Wake

Passages Bookshop 1801 NW Upshur, Suite 660, Portland, OR, United States

Works on Paper: Experiments in Language and Sound presents Neal Kosaly-Meyer A Finnegans Wake Project Saturday, March 11 5:30 pm: Doors open 6:00 pm: Lecture and discussion, followed by a short break 7:30 pm: Performance (2.5 hours without a break) $10-20 suggested donation; no one turned away Passages Bookshop 1801 NW Upshur, Suite 660 503-388-7665 ========================== A Finnegans Wake Project, now in its eleventh year, is Neal Kosaly-Meyer’s effort to learn and perform, from memory, and with acute attention to musical detail, each of the seventeen episodes of James Joyce's final novel Finnegans Wake. At Passages Bookshop, Kosaly-Meyer will present Part II, Chapter 1 (the ninth chapter), in its entirety, preceded by a short introductory lecture and a moderated discussion. ========================== Neal Kosaly-Meyer is a…

Free

Book Launch: “The Butter House,” by Sarah Gerard

Keys Lounge 533 NE Killingsworth Street, Portland, OR, United States

Celebrate the release of The Butter House, a new book from Lambda award-winning author Sarah Gerard. The Butter House follows a woman who moves to Florida and becomes a caretaker for a feral cat colony. Publishers Weekly says, "With precise and lush details, Gerard captures a sense of life's fragility amid new possibilities." Hosted by Portland-based publisher, Conium Press, this event will feature an author discussion between Sarah Gerard and James R. Gapinski. Paperback and limited-edition hardcover copies will be available, and there will be a book signing after the event. Keys Lounge is a 21+ venue with a full food and drink menu, including vegan, vegetarian, and gluten free options. Learn more about this event on the Conium Press website or find this event on Facebook.

Free

A Conversation with Comics Creator Maia Kobabe

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

To join us for this lively event, please register here. On Monday, March 13, Portland State University hosts Will Eisner Week 2023, celebrating sequential art and freedom of expression in a no-holds-barred conversation with creator Maia Kobabe (e/em/eir), author and illustrator of Gender Queer, the US’s most banned book of 2022! The Zoom discussion will be moderated by Dr. Susan Kirtley, director of PSU’s Comics Studies program, in conjunction with the department of English, the department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning, and the Center for Urban Studies. Winner of the comics industry’s Ignatz Award, the American Library Association Alex Award, and the Stonewall Books Award, Maia Kobabe is a nonbinary, queer author and illustrator from the Northern California Bay Area,…

Free

Everybody Reads 2023 celebrates Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being

Keller Auditorium 222 SW Clay St, Portland, OR, United States

Let’s read, reflect and learn together. Everybody Reads is a community-wide project that promotes shared reading and discussion around a single book. About the book Ruth Ozeki’s award-winning novel A Tale for the Time Being tells the story of two strangers whose lives become connected across time and an ocean. Ruth is a novelist living on an island off the coast of British Columbia. While beachcombing, she comes upon a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed ashore, detritus from a tsunami in Japan. Inside, she discovers the diary of 16-year-old Nao Yasutani of Tokyo. Ruth becomes absorbed by the drama of Nao’s life and her unknown fate. In Tokyo, Nao is the target of her classmates’ bullying, and she struggles with a pervasive sense of loneliness. Increasingly,…

$21 – $65

Ari Shapiro in Conversation With Thomas Lauderdale / TICKETED EVENT

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

In his first book, broadcaster Ari Shapiro — the beloved host of NPR's All Things Considered — takes us around the globe to reveal the stories behind narratives that are sometimes heartwarming, sometimes heartbreaking, but always poignant. He details his time traveling on Air Force One with President Obama, or following the path of Syrian refugees fleeing war, or learning from those fighting for social justice both at home and abroad. As the self-reinforcing bubbles we live in become more impenetrable, Shapiro keeps seeking ways to help people listen to one another; to find connection and commonality with those who may seem different; to remind us that, before religion, or nationality, or politics, we are all human. Shapiro's stirring memoir-in-essays, The Best Strangers in the…

$38.99