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 Book Festival: Friday Night Book Market

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Beat the crowds! Get early access to our exhibitor fair the night before Portland Book Festival. Click here to view this year’s full author lineup. Day-of Festival schedule will be released in October. Simplify your Portland Book Festival experience by purchasing an all-inclusive Umbrella Pass. The Umbrella Pass includes: General Admission Festival Pass (which includes a $5 book fair voucher and entry into Portland Art Museum), Friday Night Book Market entry, premium reserved seats to the Taylor Jenkins Reid and Selma Blair events (and signed copies of their books) as well as an exclusive Portland Book Festival tote bag. Already have your General Admission Festival Pass? Add on a Friday Night Book Market event ticket here. Portland Book Festival COVID policy: At this time, proof…

$15

Rachel King in Conversation With Kimberly King Parsons

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

It’s almost a decade after the Great Recession, and in Colorado, St. Anthony Sausage has not recovered. Neither have its employees: a laid-off railway engineer, an exiled computer whiz, a young woman estranged from her infant daughter, an older man with cancer who lacks health care. As these low-wage workers interact under the supervision of the factory’s owner and his quietly rebellious daughter, they come to understand that in America’s postindustrial landscape, although they may help or comfort each other, they also have to do what’s best for themselves. Over the course of twelve interrelated stories in Bratwurst Haven (West Virginia University), Rachel King gives life to diverse, complex, and authentic characters who are linked through the sausage factory and through their daily lives in…

Free

Long Live Short Stories: George Saunders & Jess Walter

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

George Saunders (Liberation Day) and Jess Walter (The Angel of Rome and Other Stories) in conversation, moderated by OPB’s Geoff Norcross. Booker Prize winner George Saunders returns with Liberation Day, his first collection of short stories since the New York Times bestseller Tenth of December. The “best short-story writer in English” (Time) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose—wickedly funny, unsentimental, and exquisitely tuned—Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: Here is a collection of prismatic, resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality. Together, these nine subversive, profound, and essential stories coalesce into…

Free

Reimagine Resistance: Harper Glenn & Justina Ireland

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Two novels that reveal truths about our time — about race and power, but also hope and love — through a reimagined past and a speculative future. Harper Glenn‘s debut Monarch Rising finds us in a chilling near-future New United States of America, where Jo Monarch has grown up in the impoverished borderlands of New Georgia. She’s given one chance to change her fate… if she can survive a boy trained to break hearts. And Justina Ireland, the author of the visionary New York Times bestseller Dread Nation, returns in Rust in the Root with another spellbinding historical fantasy set at the crossroads of race and power in America. Moderated by Alicia Tate of Multnomah County Library. Portland Book Festival General Admission Passes are required for entry…

Free

National Anthems: Juhea Kim & Lidia Yuknavitch

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Two girls — one in Korea at the beginning of the twentieth century, one in a fallen American city in the coming late twenty-first century–must forge their destinies against and alongside that of their respective nations. Juhea Kim‘s Beasts of a Little Land is an epic story of love, war, and redemption set against the backdrop of the Korean independence movement, following the intertwined fates of a young girl sold to a courtesan school and the penniless son of a hunter. As rising waters—and an encroaching police state—endanger her life and family, a girl with the gifts of a “carrier” travels through water and time to rescue vulnerable figures from the margins of history in Lidia Yuknavitch‘s newest novel, Thrust. Moderated by Marisa Siegel (Fixed…

Free

Portland Book Festival!

Broadway Books 1714 NE Broadway, Portland, OR, United States

We're so excited that the Portland Book Festival is back in person this year! Please join us downtown for this marvelous event. We will be in the lobby of the Hatfield Hall (across Main Street from the Schnitz), selling books for authors in the Winningstad and Brunish theaters. Come say hi! Literary Arts will announce the authors appearing at this year’s Portland Book Festival, presented by Bank of America, on Wednesday, September 14, at 5 p.m. Passes to Portland Book Festival will also go on sale at this time.

Free

Storytime: Friends Are Friends, Forever

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

A picture book based on the author’s own immigration story, the infinite impact of friendship, and passing on love and kindness around the world. On a snowy Lunar New Year’s Eve in Northeastern China, it’s Dandan’s last night with Yueyue. Tomorrow, she moves to America. The two best friends have a favorite wintertime tradition: crafting paper-cut snowflakes, freezing them outside, and hanging them as ornaments. As they say goodbye, Yueyue presses red paper and a spool of thread into Dandan’s hands so that she can carry on their tradition. But in her new home, Dandan has no one to enjoy the gift with—until a friend comes along. Portland Book Festival General Admission Passes are required for entry into all events. Passes are $15 in advance and…

Free

Think Out Loud: Somewhere Sisters

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Journalist Erika Hayasaki discusses her riveting new book, Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity, and the Meaning of Family with Dave Miller, host of OPB’s Think Out Loud. More about Somewhere Sisters Identical twins Isabella and Hà were born in Vietnam and raised on opposite sides of the world, each knowing little about the other’s existence, until they were reunited as teenagers, against all odds. The twins were born in Nha Trang, Vietnam, in 1998, where their mother struggled to care for them. Hà was taken in by their biological aunt, and grew up in a rural village, going to school, and playing outside with the neighbors. They had sporadic electricity and frequent monsoons. Hà’s twin sister, Loan, spent time in an orphanage before a…

Free

Storytime: Amah Faraway

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

A delightful story of a child’s visit to a grandmother and home far away, and of how families connect and love across distance, language, and cultures. Kylie is nervous about visiting her grandmother–her Amah–who lives SO FAR AWAY. When she and Mama finally go to Taipei, Kylie is shy with Amah. Even though they have spent time together in video chats, those aren’t the same as real life. And in Taiwan, Kylie is at first uncomfortable with the less-familiar language, customs, culture, and food. However, after she is invited by Amah-Lái kàn kàn! Come see!-to play and splash in the hot springs (which aren’t that different from the pools at home), Kylie begins to see this place through her grandmother’s eyes and sees a new…

Free

Storytime: Mary Had a Little Plan

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Mary had a little plan that sprouted on the spot. It all began the day she passed a drab, abandoned lot.  Fashion-forward Mary is known for adding flair everywhere she goes. When she spots an abandoned lot in her neighborhood, Mary knows she can use her stylish talent to spruce it up. Soon she’s rallying neighborhood shops and calling on her friends to help. With Mary leading the way, this group carries out her little plan that has a big impact on her community! Portland Book Festival General Admission Passes are required for entry into all events. Passes are $15 in advance and $25 day of Festival. Youth 17 & under, or with a valid high school ID get in FREE. All full-priced General Admission Passes…

Free