LitPDX seeks to amplify marginalized voices, and welcomes all, their ideas, their events, and their words.

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Chris Hedges in Conversation With Boris Franklin

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

From the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and America: The Farewell Tour comes a haunting and powerfully moving book that gives voice to the poorest among us and lays bare the cruelty of a penal system that too often defines their lives. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges has taught courses in drama, literature, philosophy, and history since 2013 in the college degree program offered by Rutgers University at East Jersey State Prison and other New Jersey prisons. In his first class at East Jersey State Prison, where students read and discussed plays by Amiri Baraka and August Wilson, among others, his class set out to write a play of their own. In writing the play, Caged, which would run for…

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Free

Pamela Paul in Conversation With Ayad Akhtar

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Remember all those ingrained habits, cherished ideas, beloved objects, and stubborn preferences from the pre-Internet age? They’re gone. To some of those things we can say good riddance. But many we miss terribly. Whatever our emotional response to this departed realm, we are faced with the fact that nearly every aspect of modern life now takes place in filtered, isolated corners of cyberspace — a space that has slowly subsumed our physical habitats, replacing or transforming the office, our local library, a favorite bar, the movie theater, and the coffee shop where people met one another’s gaze from across the room. Even as we’ve gained the ability to gather without leaving our house, many of the fundamentally human experiences that have sustained us have disappeared.…

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Free

Shea Serrano / Ticketed Event

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Don't call it a comeback: bestselling author Shea Serrano’s latest book, Hip-Hop (And Other Things) (Twelve), combines the smooth hipness of A Tribe Called Quest, the hellfire of DMX, the quirky brilliance of Missy Elliot, and the sheer, unstoppable flow of Jay-Z into one enlightened compendium of hip-hop greatness. It's a smart, fun, funny, insightful book that spends the entirety of its time celebrating what has become the most dominant form of music these past two and a half decades. Some of the chapters are serious, and some of the chapters are silly, and some of the chapters are a combination of both things. All of them, though, are treated with the care and respect that they deserve. Please note: This is a ticketed event.…

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$27

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in Conversation With Reece Jones

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Whether in political debates or discussions about immigration around the kitchen table, many Americans, regardless of party affiliation, will say proudly that we are a nation of immigrants. In her bold new book, Not "A Nation of Immigrants" (Beacon), historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz asserts this ideology is harmful and dishonest because it serves to mask and diminish the U.S.’s history of settler colonialism, genocide, white supremacy, slavery, and structural inequality, all of which we still grapple with today. She explains that the idea that we are living in a land of opportunity — founded and built by immigrants — was a convenient response by the ruling class and its brain trust to the 1960s demands for decolonialization, justice, reparations, and social equality. Moreover, Dunbar-Ortiz charges that…

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Free

Ahead of His Time: Richard Neuberger, A conversation with Steve Forrester and Chet Orloff

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The title of this conversation is also the title of the chapter written by Steve Forrester in the recently published book Eminent Oregonians. The book’s subtitle is Three Who Matter: Abigail Scott Duniway, Richard Neuberger, Jesse Applegate. Steve Forrester’s chapter focuses on why Neuberger is a forgotten figure in Oregon and national political history. Neuberger was the second Jew elected to the US Senate after the 17th Amendment, which mandated the popular election of senators. This chapter of the book is the first story of his life drawn from primary sources. Prior to moving to Astoria in 1987, Steve Forrester was Washington correspondent for Pacific Northwest newspapers in Washington, D.C., for ten years. He was also the publisher of NorthwestLetter, a political newsletter, and producer/host of…

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Free

Article Club (online)

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

A virtual program to discuss interesting articles from national publications Using Zoom, we will connect and share our thoughts about articles from national publications. Our virtual meeting will last about 30 minutes, and feature discussions on the chosen article. Participants should be ages 18+ and interested in sharing. There is space for up to 10 members, so sign up to receive the Zoom access code for the meeting. For more information, and to sign up, visit the Article Club page. “The Day the Dinosaurs Died” by Douglas Preston The New Yorker, March 29, 2019 Excerpt: If, on a certain evening about sixty-­six million years ago, you had stood somewhere in North America and looked up at the sky, you would have soon made out what appeared to be a star. If…

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Free

Etan Thomas in Conversation With Dave Zirin

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In his new book, Police Brutality and White Supremacy: The Fight Against American Traditions (Edge of Sports), Etan Thomas, an 11-year NBA veteran, weaves together his personal experiences with police violence and white supremacy with multiple interviews of family members of victims of police brutality like exonerated Central Park Five survivor, Raymond Santana, and Rodney King's daughter, Lora Dene King; as well as activist athletes and other public figures such as Steph Curry, Chuck D, Isiah Thomas, Sue Bird, Jake Tapper, Jemele Hill, Stan Van Gundy, Kyle Korver, Mark Cuban, Rick Strom, and many more. Thomas speaks with retired police officers about their efforts to change policing, and white allies about their experiences with privilege and their ability to influence other white people. Thomas also…

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Free

Chuck Klosterman

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The ’90s brought about a revolution in the human condition we’re still groping to understand. Beyond epiphenomena like “Cop Killer” and Titanic and Zima, there were wholesale shifts in how society was perceived: the rise of the Internet, pre-9/11 politics, and the paradoxical belief that nothing was more humiliating than trying too hard. Pop culture accelerated without the aid of a machine that remembered everything, generating an odd comfort in never being certain about anything. It was the last era that held to the idea of a true, hegemonic mainstream before it all began to fracture, whether you found a home in it or defined yourself against it. In The Nineties (Penguin Press), Chuck Klosterman makes a home in all of it: the film, the…

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Free

Consider This with David F. Walker and Douglas Wolk

Alberta Rose Theatre 3000 NE Alberta St, Portland, OR, United States

Oregon Humanities’ 2022 Consider This series, “American Dreams, American Myths, American Hopes,” continues on March 16 with a live conversation on comics, hope, fantasy, history, and myth. We’ll be joined by. The guests for this conversation are David F. Walker, a comic book writer, filmmaker, journalist, and educator whose work includes Bitter Root, Naomi, and The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History, and Douglas Wolk, a pop culture critic and author of Reading Comics and All of the Marvels, for which he read some 27,000 Marvel comic books. Writer Courtenay Hameister will moderate the program. This event will take place on March 16, 2021 at the Alberta Rose Theatre, 3000 NE Alberta St., in Portland. Doors will open at 6:00 p.m. Pacific, and the…

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Free – $15

Jacob Frank in His Time and Ours: Prof. Pawel Maciejko on the Historical Contexts of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The 2022 Lorry I. Lokey Program at Portland State University Presents: Jacob Frank in His Time and Ours: Prof. Pawel Maciejko on the Historical Contexts of Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob  In 2014, the Polish Nobel-prizewinning author Olga Tokarczuk published her epic novel The Books of Jacob about Jacob Frank, a real-life messianic leader in eighteenth-century Poland. Pawel Maciejko is an internationally recognized authority on the history of Jacob Frank. Join us for Prof. Maciejko’s scholarly response to the question: How does history inform Tokarczuk’s novel and our reading of it? There will be a question and answer period following Prof. Maciejko’s talk. Jacob Frank was a religious charismatic who claimed to be the messiah. In 1759 he led his Jewish followers into Catholic…

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