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!

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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Melissa Febos in Conversation With Genevieve Hudson

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Winner of the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award, Melissa Febos’s Girlhood (Bloomsbury) examines the narratives women are told about what it means to be female and what it takes to free oneself from them. When her body began to change at eleven years old, Febos understood immediately that her meaning to other people had changed with it. By her teens, she defined herself based on these perceptions and by the romantic relationships she threw herself into headlong. Over time, Febos increasingly questioned the stories she’d been told about herself and the habits and defenses she’d developed over years of trying to meet others’ expectations. The values she and so many other women had learned in girlhood did not prioritize their personal safety, happiness, or…

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Cecily Wong in Conversation With Kimberly King Parsons

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

Everybody’s heard of The Brightons. From rags to riches, sleepy Oregon to haute New York, they are the biracial Chinese American family that built Kaleidoscope, a glittering, ‘global bohemian’ shopping empire sourcing luxury goods from around the world. Statuesque, design savant, and family pet — eldest daughter Morgan Brighton is most celebrated of all. Yet despite her favored status, both within the family and in the press, nobody loves her more than Riley. Smart and nervy Riley Brighton — whose existence is forever eclipsed by her older sister’s presence. When a calamity dismantles the Brightons’ world, it is Riley who’s left with questions about her family that challenge her memory, identity, and loyalty. She sets off across the globe with an unlikely companion to seek…

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Rick Emerson in Conversation With Chelsea Cain

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In 1971, Go Ask Alice reinvented the young adult genre with a blistering portrayal of sex, psychosis, and teenage self-destruction. The supposed diary of a middle-class addict, Go Ask Alice terrified adults and cemented LSD's fearsome reputation, fueling support for the War on Drugs. Five million copies later, Go Ask Alice remains a divisive bestseller, outraging censors and earning new fans, all of them drawn by the book's mythic premise: A Real Diary, by Anonymous. But Alice was only the beginning. In 1979, another diary rattled the culture, setting the stage for a national meltdown. The posthumous memoir of an alleged teenage Satanist, Jay's Journal merged with a frightening new crisis — adolescent suicide — to create a literal witch hunt, shattering countless lives and…

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Louis Bayard in Conversation With Julia Claiborne Johnson

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Louis Bayard, author of The Pale Blue Eye and The Black Tower, is back with a brilliantly wrought, witty, and sensitive novel about the young Jacqueline Bouvier before she became that Jackie — and about a marriage that almost never happened. In the spring of 1951, debutante Jacqueline Bouvier, working as the Inquiring Photographer for the Washington Times-Herald, meets Jack Kennedy, a charming congressman from a notorious and powerful family, at a party in Washington, DC. Young, rebellious, eager to break free from her mother, Jackie is drawn to the elusive young politician, and soon she and Jack are bantering over secret dinner dates and short work phone calls. Jack, busy with House duties during the week and Senate campaigning on the weekend (as well…

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VALID: a literary therapy session

Rose City Book Pub 1329 NE Fremont, Portland, OR, United States

Join us for VALID :: a literary therapy session. Where your feelings are valid. Come and listen to stories of mental health.

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Tiana Clark, Vanessa Friedman & Shayla Lawson in Conversation With Katherine Morgan

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In May 1962, Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl sent shockwaves through the United States, selling more than two million copies in three weeks. The future Cosmopolitan Editor-in-Chief’s book promoted the message that a woman’s needs, ambition, and success during her single years could actually take precedence over the search for a husband. While much of Brown’s advice is outdated and even offensive by today’s standards, her central message remains relevant. In their exceptional anthology, Sex and the Single Woman (Harper Perennial), editors Eliza Smith and Haley Swanson bring together insights from many of today’s leading feminist thinkers and writers to pay homage to Brown’s original work and reinterpret it for a new generation. These contributors provide a much-needed reckoning while addressing today’s…

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CANCELLED Mat Johnson in Conversation With Cari Luna

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

We are sorry to report that this event has been cancelled. When sociologist Nalini Jackson joins the SS Delany for the first manned mission to Jupiter, all she wants is a career opportunity: the chance to conduct the first field study of group dynamics on long-haul cryoships. But what she discovers instead is an entire city encased in a bubble on Europa, one of Jupiter's moons. Even more unexpected, Nalini and the rest of the crew soon find themselves joining its captive population. New Roanoke is a city riven by wealth inequality and governed by a feckless, predatory elite, its economy run on heedless consumption and income inequality. But in other ways it's different from the cities we already know: It’s covered by an enormous…

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