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!

Submission Deadline: Submission Reading Series: BIPOC Writers

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Presenting “Submission by and for BIPOC": Submission Reading Series is run by blind online submission based out of Portland, OR. We will be open to poetry/prose submissions from BIPOC writers from January 1st - January 29th. As always, submissions are free, and writers may submit once in each genre. For this upcoming reading, BIPOC-identifying authors Janice Lee (prose) and Skyler Reed (poetry) will serve as guest editors and choose the winning readers. Thanks to a generous grant by Regional Arts & Culture Council, the winning submitters in each genre will receive $100 and an opportunity to read their work alongside the guest editors on Saturday, Feb. 22nd in Portland, OR. Extended submission guidelines: https://submissionpdx.submittable.com/submit Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions — our…

Free

Fiction Addiction Book Club

Books Around the Corner 40 NW 2nd Street, Gresham, OR, United States

We will discuss The River by Peter Heller. The story of two college students on a wilderness canoe trip--a gripping tale of a friendship tested by fire, white water, and violence. Available at a 15% discount to order if you plan on attending the book club.

Free

Classics Book Group

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

This month our group meets to discuss Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. Join us!

Free

Reading: Marcy Houle: A Generous Nature

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

Annie Bloom's welcomes back Portland author Marcy Houle. A Generous Nature: Lives Transformed by Oregon offers profiles of twenty-one conservationists and activists who have made enduring contributions to the preservation of Oregon’s wild and natural places and its high quality of life. These stories speak to their courage, foresight, and actions—at times against great odds—to save places, enact legislation, and motivate others to cherish and protect the places that make Oregon unique. These stories do more than educate. They will inspire readers and demonstrate that individually we can make a difference. They underscore that the natural wonders of our state should be guarded and not taken for granted. In these times of unsettled political polarization and divisiveness, A Generous Nature is a crucial reminder of…

Free

A Reading of The Berlin Diaries

Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education 724 NW Davis Street, Portland, OR, United States

Hand2Mouth Theatre and OJMCHE present a theatrically staged reading of The Berlin Diaries, by Andrea Stolowitz, finalist for the 2017 Oregon Book Award. Performers are Erin Leddy and Damon Kupper, Directed by Hand2Mouth's Artistic Director Jonathan Walters. The great-grandfather of playwright Andrea Stolowitz kept a journal for his descendants after escaping to New York City in 1939 as a German Jew. Following the complicated lure of genealogy, Stolowitz goes back to Berlin to bring the story of her unknown ancestors out of the archives into the light. The record keeps as many secrets as it shares; how do people become verschollen, lost, like library books? In this complex, contemporary drama about the search for home, fragmented heritage and Jewish diaspora, two performers scintillate between characters…

$10 – $15

Crissy Van Meter in Conversation With Leni Zumas

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

Evie grew up with her well-meaning but negligent father, surviving on the money he made dealing the island’s world-famous strain of weed, Winter Wonderland. Although her father raised her with a deep respect for the elements, the sea, and the creatures living within it, he also left her to parent herself. With wit, love, and bracing flashes of anger, Creatures (Algonquin) probes the complexities of love and abandonment, guilt and forgiveness, betrayal and grief – and the ways in which our childhoods can threaten our ability to love if we are not brave enough to conquer the past. Lyrical, darkly funny, and ultimately cathartic, Crissy Van Meter’s mesmerizing, provocative debut exerts a pull as strong as the tides. Van Meter will be joined in conversation…

Free

7DS: Pants On Fire!

White Eagle 836 N Russell St, Portland, OR, United States

Pants On Fire! features seven storytellers telling the most insane, outrageous, hard-to-believe stories from their own lives. The catch? One of those seven will actually be telling a bald-faced lie -- a whopper that never actually happened. Think you can spot which of our seven storytellers is the liar? If you can, you might win a stay at McMenamin's Edgefield Hotel on us. Not sure you can which is guess the liar? No worries! There will be other ways to win valuable prizes throughout the evening, including a chance to take on one of your fellow audience members in our Two Truths & A Lie Mano-y-Mano Cage Match. Even if you don't win, you'll walk away having heard seven of the most wild, outrageous, hard-to-believe…

$10

Horror Book Club

Books Around the Corner 40 NW 2nd Street, Gresham, OR, United States

We will discuss Ghost Story by Peter Straub. Please note the change in week for this month only. For four aging men in the terror-stricken town of Milburn, New York, an act inadvertently carried out in their youth has come back to haunt them. Now they are about to learn what happens to those who believe they can bury the past -- and get away with murder. Available at a 15% discount to order if you plan on attending the book club.

Free

Reading: Rachel Carter & Sarah Coomber

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

Annie Bloom's welcomes Northwest authors Rachel Carter & Sarah Coomber. How do you live when all you can feel is pain? The best word to describe Rachel Carter’s life was “fearless.” She rode a motorcycle in high school, she worked in a cannery in Alaska at 20, and then backpacked solo through Europe. When she finally “settled down,” she married Josh and pursued a career in sales. She lived a picture-perfect life—then Multiple Sclerosis caught up with her. After two years of rapid decline, Rachel found herself lying on the floor, writhing in agony, hoping to die. In Enduring the Cure, Rachel Carter shares how she overcame her struggle with the debilitating disease. It’s a story of pain, decline, an experimental treatment, and healing. But…

Free

Jackie Shannon Hollis

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

Jackie Shannon Hollis in Conversation with Annilee Durfey Hyre We are pleased to welcome Portland author Jackie Shannon Hollis to read from her new memoir, This Particular Happiness: A Childless Love Story, published by Forest Avenue Press. Joining Hollis in conversation will be her niece, Annilee Durfey Hyer, to discuss the many ways of being a parent and mentor to the children in our lives. As a farm girl in eastern Oregon, feeding bottles to bummer lambs and babysitting her little sister, Hollis expected to become a mother someday. After a series of failed relationships, she met Bill, the man she wanted to spend her life with--a man who never wanted children. Saying “I do” meant saying “I don't” to a rite of passage her…

Free