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!

The Unseen: Open for Submissions

Taborspace 5441 SE Belmont St, Portland, OR, United States

The Quiet Crowd is having a huge art show and we are open for submissions! The Unseen is a curated exhibition showcasing marginalized artists in their personal work to freedom and self expression. We are looking for female, non-binary, and LGBTQ artists willing to share their personal journey’s as the Unseen, those who have been shut out or quieted by the greater artistic establishment. Here we may give voice to ourselves. We are looking for visual artists, acoustic performers, spoken word artists, or performance based works. The event will be open to the public and will include a private showing of the first scene of the Quiet Crowd. Have wine, food, and listen to La Vie En Rose with us in the garden. To submit…

Free

The Unseen

Taborspace 5441 SE Belmont St, Portland, OR, United States

The Unseen is a curated exhibition showcasing marginalized artists in their personal work to freedom and self expression. We are looking for female, non-binary, and LGBTQ artists willing to share their personal journey’s as the Unseen, those who have been shut out or quieted by the greater artistic establishment. Here we may give voice to ourselves. We are looking for visual artists, acoustic performers, spoken word artists, or performance based works. The event will be open to the public and will include a private showing of the first scene of the Quiet Crowd. Have tacos, desert, and listen to La Vie En Rose with us in the dining room.

Free

Gabby Rivera in Conversation With Tehlor Kay Mejia

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

Juliet Milagros Palante is a self-proclaimed closeted Puerto Rican baby dyke from the Bronx. Only, she’s not so closeted anymore. Not after coming out to her family the night before flying to Portland, Oregon, to intern with her favorite feminist writer – what’s sure to be a life-changing experience. And when Juliet’s coming-out crashes and burns, she’s not sure her mom will ever speak to her again. In a summer bursting with queer brown dance parties, a sexy fling with a motorcycling librarian, and intense explorations of race and identity, Juliet learns what it means to come out – to the world, to her family, to herself. Juliet Takes a Breath (Dial) is Gabby Rivera’s gutsy coming-of-age story for teens. Rivera will be joined in…

Free

Queer Writing w Wayne Gregory

Attic Institute 4232 SE Hawthorne, Portland, OR, United States

How does being queer shape the stories we write and the way we write them? Does character, plot, or theme make a narrative queer or is it something in the way a queer writer sees the world that colors a narrative? This class will invite writers to explore and express their identity and how it informs what they write and the way they write it.  Whether you are writing fiction or non-fiction, or just writing for yourself this class will help you make connections between who you are becoming and what you are imagining through your writing. Writers with little or a lot of experience are welcome to this workshop-style class. Bring something you’re already working on or start from scratch, but either way our…

$210 – $237

Heaux Stories: Part Deux at Polaris Hall

Polaris Hall 635 N Killingsworth Court, Portland, OR, United States

We invite you to attend what some people anticipate to be the “steamiest night of the year”- Heaux Stories:Part Deux. This show is the sequel to sold-out storytelling showcase Heaux Stories. Heaux Stories is a production that was created as a space for women of color and femmes to gather and share their most intimate sexual truths through the art of storytelling. This event was born with the intention of being as a sex-positive safe space that will foster intimacy within community by centering femmes of color through the empowering act of authentic vulnerability. Due to the overwhelming lack of diverse perspectives in Portland’s local storytelling art scene, this show is a production created out of necessity by renowned storyteller and The Moth Storyhour producer…

$28 – $30

Aiden Thomas in Conversation With Adam Silvera

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In Aiden Thomas’s #OwnVoices LGBT paranormal YA novel, Cemetery Boys (Swoon Reads), a trans boy determined to prove his gender to his family summons a ghost who refuses to leave. Yadriel has summoned a ghost, and now he can't get rid of him. When his traditional Latinx family has problems accepting his true gender, Yadriel becomes determined to prove himself a real brujo. With the help of his cousin and best friend, Maritza, he performs the ritual himself, and then sets out to find the ghost of his murdered cousin and set it free. However, the ghost he summons is actually Julian Diaz, the school's resident bad boy, and Julian is not about to go quietly into death. He's determined to find out what happened…

Free

Queer Bodies/Queer Forms: Leaving Behind the Retrograde w/ Cooper Lee Bombardier

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Queer Bodies/Queer Forms: Leaving Behind the Retrograde A 6-week online workshop STARTS: May 23rd, 2021 COST: $350 (scholarships available - priority to queer/trans POC writers - click here to apply) Cooper Lee Bombardier says: “To me, queer is expansive, queer is hybrid, queer is taking what works and leaves behind the retrograde.” Yes, for many queer is also an identity but you don’t have to identify as queer to benefit from a look at queer forms, or attempting to queer your own work. We’ll look at work that might be considered queer in content as well as form, and will embark on multiple generative writing “experiments” where we try on the forms and constraints studied, enter into conversation with them, become inspired by them, apply them to our…

$350

Trystan Reese in Conversation With Andrew Solomon

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

When Trystan Reese was just a year into his relationship with Biff (now his husband), the couple learned that Biff’s niece and nephew were about to be removed from their home by Child Protective Services. Immediately, Trystan and Biff took in one-year-old Hailey and three-year-old Lucas, becoming caregivers overnight to two tiny survivors of abuse and neglect. From this surprising start, Trystan and Biff built a loving marriage and happy home — learning to parent on the job. They adopted Hailey and Lucas, and soon decided to grow their family biologically with a child that Trystan, who is transgender, would carry. Trystan’s groundbreaking pregnancy attracted media fanfare, and the family welcomed baby Leo in 2017. In How We Do Family: From Adoption to Trans Pregnancy,…

Free

Morgan Thomas in Conversation With Kristen Arnett

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The nine stories in Morgan Thomas’s shimmering debut collection, Manywhere (MCD), witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters determined to find themselves reflected in the annals of history, at whatever cost. As each character traces deceit and violence through Southern tall tales and their own pasts, their journeys reveal the porous boundaries of body, land, and history, and the sometimes ruthless awakenings of self-discovery. A trans woman finds her independence through the purchase of a pregnancy bump. A young Virginian flees their relationship, choosing instead to immerse themselves in the life of an intersex person from Colonial-era Jamestown. A young writer tries to evade the murky and violent legacy of an ancestor who supposedly disappeared into a midwifery bag. And in the uncanny title story, a…

Free

Neil Cochrane

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

Trans sailor Darragh Thorn has made a comfortable life for himself among people who love and accept him. Ten years after his exile from home, though, his sister asks him to reconcile with their ailing father. Determined to resolve his feelings rather than just survive them, Darragh sets off on a quest to find the one person who can heal a half-dead man: the mysterious enchanter who once gave him the magic he needed to become his true self. But so far as anyone knows, no one but Darragh has seen the enchanter for a century, and the fairy tales that survive about em give more cause for fear than hope. In lush and evocative prose, and populated with magical trees and a wise fox,…

Free