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!

Julia Alvarez in Conversation With Samantha Mabry

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Afterlife (Algonquin Books) is the first adult novel in almost 15 years by Julia Alvarez, the internationally bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. "A stunning work of art that reminds readers Alvarez is, and always has been, in a class of her own." — Elizabeth Acevedo, National Book Award-winning author of the New York Times bestseller The Poet X Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find…

Free

Delve Readers Seminar: The “Middle space between languages”: Julia Alvarez and Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

This seminar will be an exploration of what Ingrid Rojas Contreras so accurately refers to as, “the middle space between languages,” in her essay, Translation as an Arithmetic of Loss. We will discuss the ways in which the characters in the two novels, Afterlife by Julia Alvarez and Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras, as well as the speakers in the additional poems, navigate the in-betweenness of being bilingual. Each text is a discovery of the ways in which people live both within and between two cultures, languages, and often, identities, and how this shapes their stories. We will also read the Rojas Contreras essay to question what is, both lost and gained, for the characters in the novels whose stories are…

$240