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!

Mike Duncan

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

From Mike Duncan, author of The Storm Before the Storm and host of the Revolutions podcast, comes Hero of Two Worlds (PublicAffairs), the thrilling story of the Marquis de Lafayette’s lifelong quest to defend the principles of liberty and equality. Few in history can match the revolutionary career of the Marquis de Lafayette. Over 50 incredible years at the heart of the Age of Revolution, he fought courageously on both sides of the Atlantic. He was a soldier, statesman, idealist, philanthropist, and abolitionist. As a teenager, Lafayette ran away from France to join the American Revolution. Returning home a national hero, he helped launch the French Revolution, eventually spending five years locked in dungeon prisons. After his release, Lafayette sparred with Napoleon, joined an underground…

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Kel Mitchell

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

From actor, producer, and comedian Kel Mitchell of Nickelodeon's All That and the film Good Burger, comes a new laugh-aloud novel for kids. Prank Day (Thomas Nelson) follows Chase as he masterminds a series of epic pranks only to discover that they've all become real on April 2nd. When his tricks become reality in hilarious and disastrous ways, Chase must come clean. How will he set the world right again, catch the eye of his crush Zoe, and keep her from getting flattened by the refrigerator running all over town? Preorder a Signed Edition

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Wendy Red Star in Conversation With Will Matsuda

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

Delegation (Aperture) is the first comprehensive monograph by Apsáalooke/Crow artist Wendy Red Star, whose photography recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective. Red Star centers Native American life and material culture through imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations. Whether referencing 19th-century Crow leaders or 1980s pulp fiction, museum collections or family pictures, she constantly questions the role of the photographer in shaping Indigenous representation. Including a dynamic array of Red Star’s lens-based works from 2006 to the present, and a range of essays, stories, and poems, Delegation is a spirited testament to an influential artist’s singular vision. Red Star will be joined in conversation by writer and photographer Will Matsuda. Preorder a Signed Edition

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Brian Michael Bendis in Conversation With David F. Walker

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

Brian Michael Bendis, co-creator of Miles Morales, Jessica Jones, and Naomi, brings you Phenomena, a brand-new fantasy adventure series starting with The Golden City of Eyes (illustrated by André Lima Araújo) (Abrams ComicArts). Phenomena is the story of a young boy named Bolden and his warrior friend Spike — survivors of a phenomena that took over Earth years ago. Not an apocalypse… something far more interesting. We follow Bolden and Spike as they are forced to team up with another lost orphan of the world, Matilde. The trio of heroes go on a globetrotting adventure that takes them to a magical, mysterious place called the Golden City of Eyes. As they quest across this epically crazy new world looking for answers and purpose, they face…

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A. M. Homes

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

In her first novel since the Women’s Prize award-winning May We Be Forgiven, A. M. Homes delivers us back to ourselves in a stunning alternative history that is both terrifyingly prescient, deeply tender, and devastatingly funny. The Big Guy loves his family, money, and country. Undone by the results of the 2008 presidential election, he taps a group of like-minded men to reclaim their version of the American Dream. As they build a scheme to disturb and disrupt, the Big Guy also faces turbulence within his family. His wife, Charlotte, grieves a life not lived, while his 18-year-old daughter, Meghan, begins to realize that her favorite subject — history — is not exactly what her father taught her. In a story that is as much…

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Buzz Bissinger

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

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, college football was at the height of its popularity. As the nation geared up for total war, one branch of the service dominated the aspirations of college football stars: the United States Marine Corps. Which is why, on Christmas Eve of 1944, when the 4th and 29th Marine regiments found themselves in the middle of the Pacific Ocean training for what would be the bloodiest battle of the war — the invasion of Okinawa — their ranks included one of the greatest pools of football talent ever assembled: former All-Americans, captains from Wisconsin and Brown and Notre Dame, and nearly 20 men who were either drafted or would ultimately play in the NFL. When the trash-talking between the 4th…

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Candice Carty-Williams in Conversation With Leni Zumas

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

Candice Carty-Williams, the author of the “brazenly hilarious, tell-it-like-it-is first novel” (Oprah Daily) Queenie, returns with another witty and insightful novel about the power of family — even when they seem like strangers. If you could choose your family… you wouldn’t choose the Penningtons. Dimple Pennington knows of her half-siblings, but she doesn’t really know them. Five people who don’t have anything in common except for faint memories of being driven through Brixton in their dad’s gold jeep, and some pretty complex abandonment issues. Dimple has bigger things to think about. She’s 30, and her life isn’t really going anywhere. An aspiring lifestyle influencer with a terrible and wayward boyfriend, Dimple’s life has shrunk to the size of a phone screen. And despite a small…

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Chelsea Martin in Conversation With Kimberly King Parsons

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

"A portrait of the artist as a work-in-progress" (Sharma Shields), Chelsea Martin’s hilarious and incisive coming-of-age novel about an art student from a poor family struggling to find her place in a new social class of rich, well-connected peers is perfect for fans of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot and Weike Wang’s Chemistry. At her San Francisco art school, Joey enrolls in a film elective that requires her to complete what seems like a straightforward assignment: create a self-portrait. Joey inexplicably decides to remake Wes Anderson’s Rushmore despite having never seen the movie. As Martin’s Tell Me I’m An Artist (Soft Skull) unfolds over the course of the semester, the assignment hangs over her as she struggles to exist in a well-heeled world that is hugely…

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Margaret Killjoy in Conversation With Robert Evans

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

Spaceships, man-eating mermaids, swords, demons, ghouls, thieves, hitchhikers, and life in the margins. Margaret Killjoy’s stories have appeared for years in science fiction and fantasy magazines both major and indie. We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow and Other Stories (AK Press) collects the best previously published work along with brand new material. Ranging in theme and tone, these imaginative tales bring the reader on a wild and moving ride where they’ll encounter a hacker who programs drones to troll CEOs into quitting; a group of LARPers who decide to live as orcs in the burned forests of Oregon; queer, teen love in a death cult; the terraforming of a climate-changed Earth; polyamorous love on an anarchist tea farm during the apocalypse; and much more. Killjoy writes…

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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…

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