LitPDX seeks to amplify marginalized voices, and welcomes all, their ideas, their events, and their words.

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Book Club: Skip

Books with Pictures 1401 SE Division Street, Portland, OR, United States

Molly Mendoza is an illustrator currently living in Portland, Oregon. She is captivated by the relationships that she has built with friends, family, and foes alike over the course of her life. Molly sets out to emulate those relationships through her chaotic yet rhythmic style to make some dang-good drawings. A colorful, unpredictable postapocalyptic world comes alive in Skip, when two unlikely friends, Bloom and Gloopy, find themselves tossed from dimension to dimension. Gloopy is running toward adventure, and away from their home and friends who don't understand their creative talent. Bloom is desperately trying to return home to their lake, and avoid the terrible violence of the city. Instead, both Bloom and Gloopy find what they need in each other, and bravely return home…

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Free

WITS Grant High School

Broadway Books 1714 NE Broadway, Portland, OR, United States

On Wednesday, January 22nd, from 7 to 8 pm, local author and writing instructor Joanna Rose leads a team of students and teachers from Grant High School reading from their own work on this high-energy night. We are consistently blown away by the talent and passion of these young people. Come see for yourself -- it's always one of the most fun nights in the store. Literary Arts’ Youth Programs reinforce the real world importance of reading and writing. They work with high-school-age students in schools and organizations throughout Portland, East Multnomah County, and Oregon. Their programs inspire students to find their voices and allow youth to be a part of the broader literary community. In particular, the Writers in the Schools program offers semester-long…

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Free

DELVE: Women Write the West: Leslie Marmon Silko, Annie Proulx and Claire Vaye Watkins

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

In this seminar, we will explore the works of award-winning contemporary writers Leslie Marmon Silko, Annie Proulx, and Claire Vaye Watkins and how they confront, disrupt, challenge, and complicate the dominant narrative of the West. Leslie Marmon Silko’s now classic novel Ceremony weaves desert landscape and tribal origin stories into a tale of a returning war veteran’s trauma and healing. In Close Range: The Wyoming Stories, the first of three short story collections unified by setting, Annie Proulx tells the hard luck tales of Wyoming’s inhabitants in her exacting prose. The stories are merciless, yet beautifully rendered, the antithesis of a romanticized cowboy tale. Claire Vaye Watkins rounds out the seminar with her stunning debut short story collection Battleborn, set in the Mojave Desert and…

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$220

William Gibson

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

Verity Jane, gifted app-whisperer, has been out of work since her exit from a problematic relationship with a Silicon Valley billionaire. Then she signs the NDA of a dodgy start-up, becoming the beta tester for their latest product: a digital assistant, accessed through a pair of ordinary-looking glasses. “Eunice,” the disarmingly human AI in the glasses, soon manifests a face, a fragmentary past, and an unnervingly canny grasp of combat strategy. Meanwhile, a century ahead, Wilf Netherton works amid plutocrats and plunderers, survivors of the slow and steady apocalypse known as the Jackpot. His employer, Ainsley Lowbeer, can look into alternate pasts and nudge their ultimate directions. Verity and Eunice have become her current project. Wilf can see what Verity and Eunice can’t: their own…

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Free

Learn Make Share: Bindfast Training

IPRC (Independent Publishing Resource Center) 318 SE Main Street #175, Portland, OR, United States

In this Learn Make Share, folks will be guided through the steps to bind a book using our Bindfast machine. Everyone will have a chance to practice using the paper stack cutter to prepare pages and bind 2-3 books. ** This LMS is part of a monthly series of trainings for the Bindfast. Once trained, members are certified to bind their own books during listed Bindfast open hours with volunteer support. *Free for IPRC members taking the workshop as one of 3 annual Learn Make Shares *$5-15 sliding scale for nonmembers, or for members who have already taken their 3 annual workshop. Payment taken at front desk. Register Here 

$5 – $15

WITS Student Reading: Madison High School

Old School Coffee 8101 SE Division St. Suite 107, Portland, OR, United States

Listen to Madison High School students read the original creative pieces they wrote in the WITS residencies that took place in their classrooms. Free and open to all.

Free

Kate Milford

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

Marzana and her best friend are bored. Even though they live in a notorious city where normal rules do not apply, nothing interesting ever happens to them. Nothing, that is, until Marzana’s parents are recruited to help solve an odd crime, and she realizes that this could be the excitement she’s been waiting for. She assembles a group of kid detectives with special skills and together, they explore hidden passageways, navigate architecture that changes overnight, and try to unravel the puzzle of who the kidnappers are. But will they beat the deadline for a ransom that’s impossible to pay? The Thief Knot (Clarion) is the new standalone middle reader mystery set in the world of the Greenglass House, from National Book Award nominee and Edgar…

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Free

Poetry Reading: Emmett Wheatfall & John Sibley Williams

Annie Bloom's Books 7834 SW Capitol Hwy, Portland, OR, United States

Annie Bloom's welcomes Portland poets Emmett Wheatfall & John Sibley Williams. Emmett Wheatfall presents his latest poetry collection, Our Scarlet Blue Wounds. Wheatfall shows us how the roots of love grow deep in the soil of sacrifice. He illustrates the intensely complex relationship between idealism and realism. His poems hurt in just the right way. And it's no small feat opening one's own racial and cultural wounds for the world to see. It takes courage. It takes trust that a country will recognize itself, and its complicity, in those wounds. And Wheatfall trusts us to witness along with him. He proves himself ready and willing, even eager, to, as the titular poem in this collection demands, "build a new world" together. John Sibley Williams's latest…

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Free

John Bruning

Powell's Books on Hawthorne 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, OR, United States

In 1942, America's deadliest fighter pilot, or "ace of aces" – the legendary Eddie Rickenbacker – offered a bottle of bourbon to the first U.S. fighter pilot to break his record of 26 enemy planes shot down. Seizing on the challenge to motivate his men, General George Kenney promoted what they would come to call the "race of aces" as a way of boosting the spirits of his war-weary command. What developed was a wild three-year sprint for fame and glory, and the chance to be called America's greatest fighter pilot. Based on new research, John R. Bruning's Race of Aces (Hachette) tells the story of how five American pilots contended for personal glory in the Pacific while leading Kenney's resurgent air force against the…

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Free

Carmen Maria Machado in Conversation With Lidia Yuknavitch

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

In the Dream House (Graywolf) is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope, through which Machado examines the past from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. Machado…

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Free
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