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!

Portland State University’s Filament Reading Series

Mother Foucault's Bookshop 523 SE Morrison St, Portland, OR, United States

You won't want to miss Filament's AWP reading at Mother Foucault's! We're delighted to host an exciting line-up of readers. We'll be joined by: Leni Zumas - author of Red Clocks and director of the creative writing program at PSU Christopher Merkner - award-winning short story writer and visiting professor from University of Colorado Denver's English department Kate Jayroe - an alum of PSU's fiction program and short story writer Cynthia Gomez - current student in PSU's nonfiction program and Director of the Cultural Resource Center at PSU Alex Behr - an alum of PSU's fiction program and author of Planet Grim

Free

Filament’s October Reading Featuring Alicia Jo Rabins

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

Join us for Filament's October reading, with special guest Alicia Jo Rabins! We have a new cast of talented MFA readers in addition to Alicia, and we're delighted to be back at the IPRC this autumn. "Alicia Jo Rabins is a writer, musician, composer, performer and Torah teacher. She creates multi-genre works of experimental beauty which explore the intersection of ancient wisdom texts with everyday life. Rabins’ first collection of poetry, Divinity School, won the 2015 APR/Honickman First Book Prize and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Her second collection, Fruit Geode, was published in October 2018 by Augury Books/Brooklyn Arts Press. As a musician and performer, Rabins is the creator and performer of Girls in Trouble, an indie-folk song cycle about the…

Free

LOOP

The Corporeal Writing Center 510 SW 3rd Ave #101, Portland, OR, United States

Join us Saturday, January 25th for the fourth dose of literary salve in the form of a reading. .:LOOP:. is a quarterly reading series created and produced by our bad ass Corporeal Captain, and center manager, Domi Shoemaker. Corporeal Writing Center 510 SW 3rd Avenue, suite 101 Portland, Or. 97204 5-8pm And the lineup is: Daniel Elder Alex Behr Michelle Goodman Evan Knapp Signe Land Juliana O'C Sage Schick Lidia Yuknavitch

Free

WITS Reading: Madison High School

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Writers in the Schools (WITS) has served public high school students with creative writing residencies in Portland, and more recently Gresham, since 1996. Published local writers collaborate with classroom teachers to lead an immersive semester-long workshop series designed to further class themes, curricula, and student interests. Each residency culminates with a public reading, ordinarily held in a local café or bookstore. With distance learning, we look forward to hosting our reading on Zoom and invite you to join us in celebrating these students and their work. This end-of-residency reading will feature students who worked with WITS writers Alex Behr, Damien Miles-Paulson, and Bruce Poinsette. Register in advance for this meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAudeuvqzwsHdU8y9B-SsKNHvBb2PamM132 After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.…

Free

Writers in the Schools End of Year Celebration

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Join Writers in the Schools classroom teachers and writers-in-residence in celebrating the culmination of an incredibly challenging and fruitful 2020-21 school year filled with moments of creativity and community-building. Writers and teachers will take to the mic to share their own words and stories including WITS writers Alex Behr, Ed Edmo, Matt Smith, and Jennifer Perrine, Director of Youth Programs, Emilly Prado, and many more. Hosted by Jules Ohman, WITS Program Specialist. Alex Behr is a writer and editor based in Portland, Oregon. After receiving an MFA in creative writing from Portland State, she’s taught fiction and creative nonfiction at Portland high schools through Writers in the Schools residencies. Her writing has appeared in many online and print publications, including Bitch, Mutha, Propeller, Nailed, Salon, and Tin House. Her debut…

Free

Eno/Ono: Jumping into Risk through Cross-Genre Explorations w/ Alex Behr

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Do we need holes? What wouldn’t you do? Use fewer notes —Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, Oblique Strategies cards TAPE PIECE III Snow Piece Take a tape of the sound of snow falling. This should be done in the evening. Do not listen to the tape. Cut it and use it as string to tie gifts with. Make a gift wrapper, if you wish, using the same process with a phonosheet. 1963 autumn —Yoko Ono, Grapefruit WHAT: A four-part online generative workshop. WHERE: The Corporeal Writing Zoom Room. WHEN: Saturdays, October 2nd, 16th, 23rd & 30th—@1-3PT Note: No meeting October 9th. STRUCTURE: Participants will write during our meetings and in-between, sending in work and explorations to share. We’ll be generating poetry and micro-memoir pieces and…

$225

Manufactured Spaces: Setting

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

In this four-week generative class, we’ll visit one of the basic elements of storytelling – setting –and immerse ourselves in how we craft these spaces. How do we choose which details to include? What can we borrow from cinematographers? From composers? From artists? How do we choreograph complicated scenes? What can we leave out and what can we heighten? What about a character’s interior setting? What can we learn from science writers? Journalists? The classes will involve visualizations, writing inside and outside of our meetings, sharing our work in an exploratory way, movement, and discussion of setting, voice, and tone in works by Tommy Orange, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Barry Lopez, Hanif Abdurraqib, Louise Erdrich, and others. We’ll also look at crowd scenes and landscape…

$200

Stranged Writing Release Reading

The Stacks Coffeehouse 1831 N. Killingsworth St, Portland, OR, United States

The Gravity of the Thing celebrates the release of its first anthology, Stranged Writing: A Literary Taxonomy (bit.ly/3d6z94O) on October 13th. Join us at The Stacks Coffeehouse in Portland, Oregon to hear contributors Joshua James Amberson, Alex Behr, Lucie Bonvalet, Benjamin Kessler, Matt Rebholz, and Eli Ronick read their experimental prose, poetry, and cross-genre works. The event is free to attend, and food, drinks, and Stranged Writing will be available for purchase. About the collection: Stranged Writing is an anthology of defamiliarized creative writing curated according to biological taxonomy (species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, and domain) using word count. Each hardcover edition includes a screen-printed dust jacket that transforms into unique literary organisms or book sculptures, the goal being a dimensional and tactile…

Free