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 Break with Kaveh Akbar

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In partnership with Alano Club of Portland, “The Break is a monthly virtual gathering of writers and artists lead by Kaveh Akbar, celebrating amongness, collaboration, and interdisciplinary creative experimentation. Though many of the activities and discussions orbit or are inflected by recovery themes (Akbar has been in active recovery for eight years), participants are not required to self-identify as being in recovery to participate.” Register at: https://www.portlandalano.org/the-break Kaveh Akbar Kaveh Akbar is a poet, teacher and the poetry editor for The Nation. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, Paris Review, Poetry, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. His newest book, Pilgrim Bell, was published by Graywolf in 2021; he is also the author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James,…

Free

Hannah Sward in Conversation With Amy Dresner

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Born in the bohemian seventies, Hannah Sward was abandoned by her mother, and lived with her poet father on an island with no stores or cars. Kidnapped and molested by a stranger at age six, she grew up to be a stripper and a prostitute with a taste for crystal meth — which seemed to be a sure-fire way to lose weight — with stops along the way for silent gurus, sugar daddies, and drinking in the CVS bathroom before therapy sessions. Painstakingly honest, often humorous, Strip (Tortoise Books) is Sward's heartfelt memoir revealing a woman’s journey from innocence to a dark existence, and beyond it to a world of empowerment. Sward will be joined in conversation by Amy Dresner, author of My Fair Junkie.…

Free

Portland Correspondence Co-op

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

PDXCC is a monthly gathering where participants make and share analog correspondence in the great mail art tradition of Ray Johnson and Anna Banana: art and conversation through the mail. This uniquely democratic, DIY art form incorporates writing, drawing, collage, rubber stamps, faux postage, decorative tape, typewriters – anything goes, as long as it goes through the mail. Hang out, skill share and send the glorious results through the mail. Monthly events hosted by the Portland chapter of the Correspondence Co-op and Niko Courtelis. Basic materials will be on hand (scissors, glue sticks, envelopes’85), but you’re encouraged to bring whatever materials fuel your creative spirit. Free and open to the public, every third Tuesday of the month  

Free

Amy Fusselman in Conversation With Kevin Sampsell

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

The Means (Mariner) is the debut novel from “wholly original” (Vogue) memoirist Amy Fusselman, a tragicomic family saga that skewers contemporary issues of money, motherhood, and class through a well-to-do woman’s quest to buy a Hamptons beach house. Shelly Means, a wealthy, stay-at-home mom and disgraced former PTA president, is poised to get the one thing in life she really wants: a beach house in the Hamptons. Who would have guessed that Shelly, the product of frugal Midwesterners, or her husband George, an unrepentant thrift shopper, would ever be living among such swells? But Shelly believes it’s possible. It might be a very small house, and it might be in the least-fancy part of the Hamptons, but Shelly has a vision board, an architect, and…

Free

Steven Hyden in Conversation With Chuck Klosterman

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Ever since Pearl Jam first blasted onto the Seattle grunge scene three decades ago with their debut album, Ten, they have sold over 85 million albums, performed for hundreds of thousands of fans around the world, and have even been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In Long Road: Pearl Jam and the Soundtrack of a Generation (Hachette), music critic and journalist Steven Hyden celebrates the life, career, and music of this legendary group, widely considered to be one of the greatest American rock bands of all time. Long Road is structured like a mix tape, using 18 different Pearl Jam classics as starting points for telling a mix of personal and universal stories. Each chapter tells the tale of this great…

Free

Where We Come From: Writing Your Ethnoautobiography w/ Ella deCastro Baron, G. Ravyn Stanfield, and Anya Pearson—Begins September 27th

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Where We Come From: Writing Your Ethnoautobiography With Ella deCastro Baron, G. Ravyn Stanfield, and Anya Pearson  A six bi-weekly generative Collaboration (Please note: there is a brief application process for this workshop! Press the Apply Now button at the bottom of this text.) We have to co-create a better, fuller story of who we are. When we speak or write the stories of how our ancestors were harmed or harmed others, we clear the way for justice in the present. When we tell the truth about the past, we move towards the possibility for healing and repair. Ancestry gives us heritage: “traditions and practices that inform how we move through the world.” Who are our ancestors of blood, love, and spirit? This circle will…

$500 – $600

Liz Prato in Conversation with Aaron Gilbreath

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

We are thrilled to welcome back Liz Prato, in conversation with Aaron Gilbreath, to discuss her new book Kids in America: A Gen X Reckoning. In this revealing and provocative essay collection, Prato reveals a generation deeply affected by terrorism, racial inequality, rape culture, and mental illness, in an era when none of these issues were openly discussed. Part memoir, part journlistic exploration, Kids in America illuminates a generation often written off as cynical, sarcastic slackers, showing that its impact on culture and society is undeniable. Prato herself is a GenXer, growing up in Denver in the '70s and '80s, so the issues she explores here are issues of her generation, and a lot of the book is about coming to terms with things they…

Free

Drink and Write Tuesdays

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

Jeanne Faulkner hosts this drop-in writing workshop on the last Tuesday of every month. Jeanne provides the prompts, tips, and coaching. You bring your computer and notebook.

Free

Two Rivers Book Club – September: Ruth Ozeki

Two Rivers Bookstore 8836 N Lombard Street, Portland, OR, United States

Returning to In-Person Meetings This Month! We'll be meeting at 6:30 in the courtyard behind our shop. The entrance is on N Chicago Ave, between Lombard and Ivanhoe. To get your name added to the email list for the book club, email christine@tworiversbooks.com --------------------------- September: The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki From the publisher: With its blend of sympathetic characters, riveting plot, and vibrant engagement with everything from jazz, to climate change, to our attachment to material possessions, The Book of Form and Emptiness is classic Ruth Ozeki—bold, wise, poignant, playful, humane and heartbreaking. Check your email for the Zoom link or email Christine@tworiversbooks.com to be added. October pick: This House is Haunted - Preorder now for September 27 release! Event date:…

Free

Hiron Ennes in Conversation With Sara A. Mueller

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

Hiron Ennes surreal and horrifying debut, Leech (Tordotcom) combines parasitic body horror with gothic family drama in a post-post-apocalyptic masterpiece — defying our understanding of identity, heredity, and bodily autonomy. In an isolated chateau, as far north as north goes, the baron’s doctor has died. The doctor’s replacement has a mystery to solve: discovering how the Institute lost track of one of its many bodies. For hundreds of years the Interprovincial Medical Institute has grown by taking root in young minds and shaping them into doctors, replacing every human practitioner of medicine. The Institute is here to help humanity, to cure and to cut, to cradle and protect the species from the apocalyptic horrors their ancestors unleashed. In the frozen north, the Institute's body will…

Free