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!

Tiffany Midge in Conversation With Jacqueline Keeler

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

Why is there no Native woman David Sedaris? Or Native Anne Lamott? Humor categories in publishing are packed with books by funny women and humorous sociocultural-political commentary – but no Native women. There are presumably more important concerns in Indian Country. More important than humor? Among the Diné/Navajo, a ceremony is held in honor of a baby’s first laugh. While the context is different, it nonetheless reminds us that laughter is precious, even sacred. Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s (Bison) is a powerful and compelling collection of Tiffany Midge’s musings on life, politics, and identity as a Native woman in America. Artfully blending sly humor, social commentary, and meditations on love and loss, Midge weaves short, standalone musings into a memoir that stares…

Free

Lise Funderburg With Sallie Tisdale, Kate Carroll de Gutes & Mat Johnson

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

It happens to us all: we think we’ve settled into an identity, a self, and then out of nowhere and with great force, the traces of our parents appear to us, in us – in mirrors, in gestures, in reaction and reactivity, at weddings and funerals, and in troubled thoughts that crouch in dark corners of our minds. In Apple, Tree: Writers on Their Parents (University of Nebraska), edited by Lise Funderburg, 25 writers deftly explore a trait they’ve inherited from a parent, reflecting on how it affects the lives they lead today – and how it shifts their relationship to that parent (sometimes posthumously) and to their sense of self. Funderburg will be joined in conversation by contributors Sallie Tisdale, Kate Carroll de Gutes,…

Free

What’s Your Pronoun?: Beyond He and She

Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd, Beaverton, OR, United States

Like trigger warnings and gender-neutral bathrooms, pronouns are sparking a national debate, prompting new policies in schools, workplaces, even prisons, about what pronouns to use. Far more than a by-product of the culture wars, gender-neutral pronouns are nothing new. Based on linguist Dennis Baron’s own empirical research, What’s Your Pronoun? (Liveright) chronicles the story of the role pronouns have played – and continue to play – in establishing both our rights and our identities.

Free

Book Talk: Do You Have Kids? Life When the Answer is No

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

On the eve of Mother’s Day weekend, please join Kate Kaufmann and Jackie Shannon Hollis for an intimate, respectful, and frank conversation about what it means to be childless or childfree in a society that celebrates motherhood as the ultimate expression of female identity. This is a conversation for all of us--non-parents, parents and those as yet unsure--to explore a different path, whether by choice or circumstance, and to recognize the important role we all play in the lives of the children in our world. Register to join us on Crowdcast: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/book-talk-do-you-have Kate Kaufmann is the author of DO YOU HAVE KIDS? LIFE WHEN THE ANSWER IS NO (https://www.tworiversbooks.com/book/9781631525810), in which she explores topics from the shifting meaning of family to what we leave behind…

Free

Writing the Intersection of Our Identities: Tuesday nights

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Through autobiographical writing about our identities—including race, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and class—we’ll explore where we hold power and privilege and where we have experienced marginalization and oppression. In addition to experimenting with craft techniques such as audience, point of view, research, dialogue, and figurative language, we’ll also discuss how to use our writing in service of reflection, healing, truth-telling, and culture change. By the end of the course, I hope you’ll emerge with several drafts, and that we’ll each emerge with a deeper understanding of what it means to have lived in our individual bodies. Access Program We want our Delves and writing classes to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure can present obstacles for some…

$240

Writing the Intersections of Our Identities: For BIPOC writers

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Through autobiographical writing about our identities—including race, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and class—we’ll explore where we hold power and privilege and where we have experienced marginalization and oppression. In addition to experimenting with craft techniques such as audience, point of view, research, dialogue, and figurative language, we’ll also discuss how to use our writing in service of reflection, healing, truth-telling, and culture change. By the end of the course, I hope you’ll emerge with several drafts, and that we’ll each emerge with a deeper understanding of what it means to have lived in our individual bodies. Please note there is also a section of this class that is open to all. This section is for BIPOC participants only. Access Program We want our Delves and writing…

$240

Premise Course: What makes humans the same and different? King’s Mindful of Race: Transforming Racism from the Inside Out

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

(Learn about Premise classes here: https://www.premiseinstitute.com/premisefaq) Depending on how we identify (race, gender identity, socioeconomic class, etc.), the events of the past year, if not the past five hundred years, have unearthed the ways systems of oppression impact all of us quite differently. Those differences have deepened divides and made connecting authentically more challenging—particularly across lines of racial difference. Some of us are afraid to say the wrong thing or don’t know how to approach conversations about race, while others are tired of doing the emotional labor of educating people about racism. The teachings of Buddhism and the work of Buddhist practitioner Ruth King offer us tools to heal and transform the interactions we have across racial differences. Through understanding the two truths that govern…

$150

Co-Dependencies: On Healing, Remembering, Breathing & Writing Trauma with Janice Lee —Begins June 5th

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Co-Dependencies: On Healing, Remembering, Breathing & Writing Trauma June 5 - July 2, 2022 (Synchronous Zoom sessions Mondays 6/6, 6/13, 6/20, 6/27) ***SOLD OUT! Email Daniel at registration@corporealwriting.com to add your name to the waitlist*** “What really exists is not things made but things in the making.” –William James “How other kinds of beings see us matters. That other kinds of beings see us changes things.” –Eduardo Kohn On han: “A feeling of unresolved resentment against injustices suffered, a sense of helplessness because of the overwhelming odds against one, a feeling of acute pain in one's guts and bowels, making the whole body writhe and squirm, and an obstinate urge to take revenge and to right the wrong—all these combined.” –Suh Nam-dong "Death needs a…

$50

Fariha Róisín

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

Growing up in Australia, Fariha Róisín, a Bangladeshi Muslim, struggled to fit in. In attempts to assimilate, she distanced herself from her South Asian heritage and identity. Years later, living in the United States, she realized that the customs, practices, and even food of her native culture that had once made her different — everything from ashwagandha to prayer — were now being homogenized and marketed for good health, often at a premium by white people to white people. In Who Is Wellness For? (Harper Wave), her thought-provoking new book — part memoir, part journalistic investigation — the acclaimed writer and poet (How to Cure a Ghost) explores the way in which the progressive health industry has appropriated and commodified global healing traditions. She reveals…

Free

A Conversation & Reading with Jackson Bliss and Frances Badalamenti

Rose City Book Pub 1329 NE Fremont, Portland, OR, United States

Come celebrate two great authors (and the launch of a brand new book!) this summer at the illustrious Rose City Book Pub. Jackson Bliss and Frances Badalamenti will be sitting down with each to talk writing as well as the release of DREAM POP ORIGAMI. ABOUT THE AUTHORS Frances Badalamenti was raised in Queens, New York and Suburban New Jersey, but she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and son. Her essays, stories and interviews appear in The Believer Magazine, Longreads, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Entropy and elsewhere. Salad Days is her second novel; her debut novel I Don't Blame You​ released in 2019. Jackson Bliss is the winner of the 2020 Noemi Press Award in Prose and the mixed-race/hapa author of Counterfactual Love Stories…

Free