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!

Summer Five-Minute Reading Marathon

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

Join us for our quarterly series, the Five-Minute Reading Marathon! All afternoon, authors will be sharing five-minute readings from their work. List of authors and line-up to be announced. Join us for our Summer Five-Minute Reading Marathon! Every half an hour or every fifteen minutes, another author will get up on stage and read for five minutes. You'll hear poetry, short stories, essays, and excerpts from longer pieces, with time in between to talk or get up and move around. Our summer event will feature Liz Scott, Katie Guinn, Kalpana Krishnamurthy, Steve Arndt, David Naimon, Lucie Bonvalet, Omar El Akkad, Gail Tupper, Samm Saxby, and Ramiza Koya. Hope to see you there!

Free

Mark Haber in Conversation With David Naimon

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

In a delightfully dense, fast-paced comedy with notes of László Krasznahorkai and Saul Bellow, Jacov and his scribe cross continents in search of the legendary prophet of melancholic philosophy. Jacov’s narcissistic preoccupation with melancholy consumes him, and as he desperately recounts the myth of his journey to his trusted but ailing scribe, hope for an encounter with the lost philosopher who holds the key to Jacov’s obsession seems increasingly unlikely. In Mark Haber’s antic debut, Reinhardt’s Garden (Coffee House), dark satire and skewed history converge. Haber will be joined in conversation by David Naimon, host of the Between the Covers podcast.

Free

Lance Olsen in Conversation With David Naimon

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

Set on a single day in 1927, Lance Olsen’s My Red Heaven (Dzanc) imagines a host of characters – some historic, some invented – crossing paths on the streets of Berlin. Drawing inspiration from Otto Freundlich’s painting by the same name, My Red Heaven explores a complex moment in history: the rise of deadly populism at a time when everything seemed possible and the future unimaginable. Olsen will be joined in conversation by David Naimon, host of the Between the Covers podcast.

Free

WTRLMNS reading!

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

WTRLMNS is a group of Portland poets who meet monthly to share and discuss their work. Join us for a reading by: VANDOREN WHEELER grew up in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He has published poems in fine publications such as Forklift, OH, Conduit, and ratemyprofessor.com. His book The Accidentalist won the Dorothy Brunsman Prize and was published by Bear Star Press. He also creates single-copy art books by defacing children’s picture books. He teaches in Portland. CHRYS TOBEY’s poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, The Minnesota Review, Rattle, New Ohio Review, Verse Daily, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. Her first book of poetry, A Woman is a Woman is a Woman is a Woman, was published in 2017 from Steel Toe Books.  She curates the reading series Women Writers Against Trump with her sister Allison…

Free

David Biespiel in Conversation With David Naimon

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In his new book, A Place of Exodus: Home, Memory, and Texas (Kelson), acclaimed writer David Biespiel tells the story of the rise and fall of his Jewish boyhood in Texas, and his search for the answer to his life’s central riddle: Are we ever done leaving home? Raised in the 1970s in Meyerland, the historic Jewish neighborhood of Houston, Biespiel explores the story of triumph and shame that changed his relationship to the world around him. With cinematic fluidity, he writes of his early years as a teenager who yearns for bold self-invention as he grapples with the enigmas of illness, death, love, and the meaning of faith. Growing up in a family devoted to Jewish identity, Biespiel comes under the tutelage of the…

Free

Katie Holten in Conversation With David Naimon

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

Inspired by forests, trees, leaves, roots, and seeds, The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape (Tin House) invites readers to discover an unexpected and imaginative language to better read and write the natural world around us and reclaim our relationship with it. In her gorgeously illustrated and deeply thoughtful collection, Katie Holten gifts readers her tree alphabet and uses it to masterfully translate and illuminate beloved writing in praise of the natural world. With an introduction from Ross Gay, and featuring writings from over 50 contributors, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Ada Limón, Robert Macfarlane, Zadie Smith, Radiohead, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, James Gleick, Elizabeth Kolbert, Plato, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, Holten illustrates each selection with an abiding love and reverence for the magic…

Free