A resource for the PDX literary community. Produced by Old Pal.
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!
DLC open reading, featuring Susanne Antonetta, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Jennifer Bartlett, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Cade Leebron, Raymond Luczak, and Dora Raymaker. This event is free and will be ASL-Interpreted. Contact: DLC
Join us for a dynamic reading sponsored by Lambda Literary + Nat. Brut, hosted by Kay Ulanday Barrett during AWP 2019. Come and enjoy a dynamic night that centers the work for/by Sick, Disabled, Chronic Pain, & Mad Queer writers! We recognize that writing on disability and ability are not mutually exclusive of other trappings of oppression and experience. Here, we want to honor and celebrate writing where Disabled and Sick people take the charge, spoon out, seek solace, amplify craft & care! This reading uplifts Black, Indigenous, & People of Color Queer perspectives so please honor & celebrate this nuance and brilliance. FEATURES INCLUDE: - Natalie Sharp - Cyree Jarelle Johnson - Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes - Zahra Noorbakhsh - Aurielle Marie - Rachel…
Corvallis author George Estreich joins us to talk about his new book from MIT Press: Fables and Futures: Biotechnology, Disability, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves. The book explores how new biomedical technologies require us to imagine who counts as human and what it means to belong. From next-generation prenatal tests, to virtual children, to the genome-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9, new biotechnologies grant us unprecedented power to predict and shape future people. That power implies a question about belonging: which people, which variations, will we welcome? How will we square advances in biotechnology with the real but fragile gains for people with disabilities -- especially when their voices are all but absent from the conversation? The book explores the troubled territory where biotechnology and disability meet. Estreich, an…
The Bigfoot Regional Poetry Slam, in partnership with the Multnomah County Library, presents the (In)Visible Disabilities Mic - a poetry open mic for Disabled and Chronically Ill/in pain poets to come share their experiences. All are welcome to come watch. Event hosted by Doc Luben. This event is free and open to the public as part of the Bigfoot Regional Poetry Slam, a two-day poetry festival and competition happening in Downtown Portland.
Characters with disabilities have been around as long as there have been stories, but often those characters are based on stereotypes that serve as plot shortcuts and end up being harmful to real people with disabilities. Disability is one of humanity’s most shared traits. It is inevitable that to write characters you will write disability. This class will use model texts and generative writing exercises to explore how to go beyond stereotypes such as the one-handed villain, the pitiable cripple, and the inspirational athlete, to write nuanced characters that honor human diversity on the page. Because we live in an able world, discussions and exercises will also touch on writing disabled worlds and how to reveal the often invisible expectations of ablism in our current…
From Chloé Cooper Jones — Pulitzer Prize finalist, philosophy professor, and Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient — comes an “exquisite” (Oprah Daily) and groundbreaking memoir about disability, motherhood, and the search for a new way of seeing and being seen. “I am in a bar in Brooklyn, listening to two men, my friends, discuss whether my life is worth living.” So begins Easy Beauty (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster), Jones’s bold, revealing account of moving through the world in a body that looks different than most. Jones learned early on to factor “pain calculations” into every plan, every situation. Born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis which affects both her stature and gait, her pain is physical. But there is also the pain…