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!

Talks & Discussions

  1. Events
  2. Talks & Discussions

Events Search and Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

Today

TAP@PBF: Cookbooks

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

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…

Continue readingTAP@PBF: Cookbooks
Free

Documentary Screening: The Bookstour

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

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.

Free

Storytime: Arab Arab All Year Long!

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

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…

Continue readingStorytime: Arab Arab All Year Long!
Free

Mean Baby: Selma Blair with Esmé Weijun Wang

Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall 1037 SW Broadway, Portland, OR, United States

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…

Continue readingMean Baby: Selma Blair with Esmé Weijun Wang
$5 – $30

Long Live Short Stories: George Saunders & Jess Walter

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

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…

Continue readingLong Live Short Stories: George Saunders & Jess Walter
Free

Reimagine Resistance: Harper Glenn & Justina Ireland

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

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…

Continue readingReimagine Resistance: Harper Glenn & Justina Ireland
Free

National Anthems: Juhea Kim & Lidia Yuknavitch

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

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…

Continue readingNational Anthems: Juhea Kim & Lidia Yuknavitch
Free

Storytime: Friends Are Friends, Forever

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

A picture book based on the author’s own immigration story, the infinite impact of friendship, and passing on love and kindness around the world. On a snowy Lunar New Year’s Eve in Northeastern China, it’s Dandan’s last night with Yueyue. Tomorrow, she moves to America. The two best friends have a favorite wintertime tradition: crafting paper-cut snowflakes, freezing them outside, and hanging them as ornaments. As they say goodbye, Yueyue presses red paper and a spool of thread into Dandan’s hands so that she can carry on their tradition. But in her new home, Dandan has no one to enjoy the gift with—until a friend comes along. Portland Book Festival General Admission Passes are required for entry into all events. Passes are $15 in advance and…

Continue readingStorytime: Friends Are Friends, Forever
Free

Think Out Loud: Somewhere Sisters

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Journalist Erika Hayasaki discusses her riveting new book, Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity, and the Meaning of Family with Dave Miller, host of OPB’s Think Out Loud. More about Somewhere Sisters Identical twins Isabella and Hà were born in Vietnam and raised on opposite sides of the world, each knowing little about the other’s existence, until they were reunited as teenagers, against all odds. The twins were born in Nha Trang, Vietnam, in 1998, where their mother struggled to care for them. Hà was taken in by their biological aunt, and grew up in a rural village, going to school, and playing outside with the neighbors. They had sporadic electricity and frequent monsoons. Hà’s twin sister, Loan, spent time in an orphanage before a…

Continue readingThink Out Loud: Somewhere Sisters
Free

Reality Bites: Rafael Agustin & Chuck Klosterman

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Reckoning with the nineties, a decade that is not only back in fashion in a big way but a political, social, and societal impact that still ripples through our culture today. We’ll look at the the nineties from two very different perspectives: intensely personal, with Rafael Agustin’s memoir Illegally Yours; and from the stance of cultural criticism, with Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties. Moderated by Eden Dawn (The Portland Book of Dates). When Rafael Agustin (Illegally Yours) tried to get his driver’s license during his junior year of high school, his parents were forced to reveal his immigration status. Suddenly, the kid who modeled his entire high school career after American TV shows had no idea what to do — there was no episode of Saved…

Continue readingReality Bites: Rafael Agustin & Chuck Klosterman
Free
Click a category label below to view the calendar with only events in that specific category.