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!

Buckman Journal Poetry Prize

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The award-winning Buckman Journal is pleased to open submissions for the Buckman Journal Poetry Award, February 14 - 27, 2022. One poet will receive $300.00, and their work featured in Buckman Journal. The prize is open to Oregon and SW Washington residents only. There is no entry fee. Please send no more than five pages of unpublished poems. Simultaneous submissions are fine if noted in the cover letter. All styles are welcome, however Buckmxn favors the brave. Poets who use a word in an unexpected manner, lyrical without heavy handed and multiple adjectives, employ a joy working the sound and rhythm of words, strike Buckmxn most. Buckmxn also notes that there a lot of poems written solidly, squarely in the 1st person. Consider this if…

Free

HOCUS: Submissions Open!

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

neverland (ne-vər-land): 1.) an unreal, imaginary, or ideal state, condition, place 2.) any remote, isolated, barren, or sparsely settled region Send us your stories and poems of pipe dreams, utopias, and Shangri-Las! HOCUS accepts prose, poetry, and creative nonfiction of up to 2,000 words. We welcome literary fiction and poetry submissions from everyone regardless of race, class, gender, sexuality, geography, religious or cultural background. Our programming is in English. We especially invite Black, Indigenous, and other people of color to take part. We recognize all genders. The reading will be on Friday, March 11th from 7:30 - 9:00 p.m. at the Rose City Book Pub in NE Portland. Please be aware that the Book Pub is currently requiring proof of vaccination. We are keeping in…

Free

A Poetry Reading by Nikky Finney

Lewis & Clark College 0615 SW Palatine Hill Road, Portland, OR, United States

Finney has authored four books of poetry: Head Off & Split (2011); The World Is Round (2003); Rice (1995); and On Wings Made of Gauze (1985). The John H. Bennett, Jr. Chair in Southern Letters and Literature at the University of South Carolina, Finney also authored Heartwood (1997), edited The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007), and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets. Finney’s fourth book of poetry, Head Off & Split was awarded the 2011 National Book Award for poetry. Nikky Finney was born in South Carolina, within listening distance of the sea.  A child of activists, she came of age during the civil rights and Black Arts Movements. At Talladega College, nurtured by Hale Woodruff’s Amista murals, Finney began to understand the powerful synergy…

Free

Dao Strom Reading

PSU - Smith Memorial Student Union 1825 SW Broadway, Portland, OR, United States

Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of the poetry collection, Instrument (Fonograf Editions), and its musical companion, Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (Hanoi: AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint Press) and Grass Roof, Tin Roof (Mariner Books). Her work has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, Oregon Arts Commission, NEA, and others. She was a 2020 Oregon Literary Arts Career Fellowship recipient. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder and director…

Free

Write Now Online: The Narrative Triptych w/ videos by Lidia Yuknavitch (Introvert VersionOngoing)

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Write Now: The Narrative Triptych—a 4-week creative incubator Extrovert Version Begins March 13th! A painted or carved triptych typically has three hinged panels, and the two outer panels can be folded in towards the central one. A literary or musical triptych generally consists of three closely related or contrasting themes or parts. Triptych derives from the Greek triptychos ("having three folds"), formed by combining tri- ("three") and ptychē ("fold" or "layer"). Although triptych originally described a specific type of Roman writing tablet that had three hinged sections, it is not surprising that the idea was generalized first to a type of painting, and then to anything composed of three parts. The triptychs most etched on Lidia’s brain are Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, Ruben's Elevation of the Cross, and Bacon's Three Studies for…

$99

Consider This with David F. Walker and Douglas Wolk

Alberta Rose Theatre 3000 NE Alberta St, Portland, OR, United States

Oregon Humanities’ 2022 Consider This series, “American Dreams, American Myths, American Hopes,” continues on March 16 with a live conversation on comics, hope, fantasy, history, and myth. We’ll be joined by. The guests for this conversation are David F. Walker, a comic book writer, filmmaker, journalist, and educator whose work includes Bitter Root, Naomi, and The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History, and Douglas Wolk, a pop culture critic and author of Reading Comics and All of the Marvels, for which he read some 27,000 Marvel comic books. Writer Courtenay Hameister will moderate the program. This event will take place on March 16, 2021 at the Alberta Rose Theatre, 3000 NE Alberta St., in Portland. Doors will open at 6:00 p.m. Pacific, and the…

Free – $15

Book Talk: Fencing With the King | Diana Abu Jaber & Omar El Akkad

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Please join the Middle East Studies Center for our next installment of the Scholarly Lecture Series. Author and Portland State University English Faculty Diana Abu Jaber will be discussing her new novel Fencing With the King with award-winning author Omar El Akkad. Zoom Registration About the Book A mesmerizing breakthrough novel of family myths and inheritances by the award-winning author of Crescent. Amani is hooked on a mystery—a poem on airmail paper that slips out of one of her father’s books. It seems to have been written by her grandmother, a refugee who arrived in Jordan during the First World War. Soon the perfect occasion to investigate arises: her Uncle Hafez, an advisor to the King of Jordan, invites her father to celebrate the king’s sixtieth birthday—and to fence…

Free

Passages Bookshop Open House and Reading/Performance: James Year, David Abel, Mark Owens

Passages Bookshop 1801 NW Upshur, Suite 660, Portland, OR, United States

Passages Bookshop Reopens on April 2 Please join us at an open house on the evening of April 2, with readings & performances by James Yeary, David Abel & Mark Owens. The occasion will also serve as a book launch for continue us, a book of poems designed for your home, neighborhood, and playmates by Marko Whens, with linotype composition and printing by Brian Scott Bagdonas. video of Marko performing at Passages in 2015 Doors will open at 6:00 pm, and remain open until just before the performance begins at 8:00 pm; they will be open again after the performance, at roughly 9:00 pm. Proof of vaccination required for admission, and face coverings required for all. (Readers will be unmasked while performing.) Saturday, April 2,…

Free

Overcoming Rejection for Writers

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

FEATURING: Jami Attenberg Deesha Philyaw Tommy Pico Moderated by Denne Michele Norris Sponsored by GrubStreet's Muse & the Marketplace conference Whether you’re just starting out or a seasoned pro, all writers face rejection—but how we cope with that rejection plays a huge role in shaping our literary future. Rebounding can be tough, but rather than allowing rejection to stop us in our tracks, we can reframe it into a motivational and instructional tool. Some rejections actually make us stronger—as writers, editors, applicants, and people—while others just need to be ignored. Poet and TV writer Tommy Pico (JUNK, Reservation Dogs), memoirist Jami Attenberg (I Came All This Way to Meet You), and award-winning short story writer Deesha Philyaw (The Secret Lives of Church Ladies) will share…

$10

Busting Myths About Parenting and Writing

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

FEATURING: Claire Vaye Watkins Kaitlyn Greenidge Matthew Salesses Moderated by Kelly Luce Sponsored by GrubStreet's Muse & the Marketplace conference The idea that parenthood is a barrier to art creation is outdated, even dangerous—that we create in spite of having children rather than making complex work productively informed by parenthood in all its glory, sorrow, and ambivalence. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought parenting issues to the forefront of the national conversation, and the result has been that the discussions around parenthood specific to writing have evolved, too. Novelists Claire Vaye Watkins (I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness), Kaitlyn Greenidge (Libertie), and novelist and essayist Matthew Salesses (Craft in the Real World) will talk about the struggles, triumphs, stereotypes, and assumptions of writing as parents…

$10