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!

Six Month Screenwriting Intensive

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

“Screenplays…are primarily a narrative blueprint for cinematic interpretation. They require certain beats, certain layouts, and certain terminology to communicate the visual and audio needs of an eventual production — a production that hundreds of professionals will collaborate on.” – Ken Miyamoto, Screencraft “The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement.” – Raymond Chandler The art and craft of writing for the screen is a skill that all authors would do well to have in their creative arsenals. On one level, prose fiction, memoir, non-fiction, all these forms have been, and will continue to be, sought out by the film industry as foundations for works in…

$1,100

In-Store Reading: Camille Cole: The Midnight Show

Annie Bloom's Books 7834 SW Capitol Hwy, Portland, OR, United States

Annie Bloom's welcomes Portland author Camille Cole for a reading from her memoir, The Midnight Show: Bohemians, Byways & Bonfires. Signed and personalized copies are available for order! Please, please, please include the name for personalization in the order notes; all orders without a name specified in the order notes will be signed only. About The Midnight Show: Hang on for the ride of her life. At times a treacherous high-wire act, Camille's wedding was the final act at the Oregon Country Fair's Midnight Show a long time ago. At 2:00 a.m., Reverend Chumleigh, henchman for the Miraculous Church of the Incandescent Resurrection, was perched on a tightrope wearing a leopard skin leotard. He pronounced Camille and Jim permanent partners till the cows come home,…

Free

Delve Readers Seminar: Language as resistance, words as collage: Don Mee Choi and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Though published many decades apart, these two texts share similarities both in their subject matter and their experimental qualities. Just as Dictee cannot be merely labeled as a memoir and DMZ Colony cannot be labeled purely as a poetry collection, both texts expand our understanding of genre by weaving together prose, poetry and photographs. Moreover, they “hold history accountable” by integrating historical events into the deeply personal, ranging from Japanese colonization of Korea to the Korean War. In doing so, these Korean American writers give voice to feelings and understandings that have often been silenced. By looking at these two texts in tandem, we will examine their use of language to resist power and silencing as well as how their experimental methods seek to give…

$160

Ari Shapiro in Conversation With Thomas Lauderdale / TICKETED EVENT

Revolution Hall 1300 SE Stark St, Portland, OR, United States

In his first book, broadcaster Ari Shapiro — the beloved host of NPR's All Things Considered — takes us around the globe to reveal the stories behind narratives that are sometimes heartwarming, sometimes heartbreaking, but always poignant. He details his time traveling on Air Force One with President Obama, or following the path of Syrian refugees fleeing war, or learning from those fighting for social justice both at home and abroad. As the self-reinforcing bubbles we live in become more impenetrable, Shapiro keeps seeking ways to help people listen to one another; to find connection and commonality with those who may seem different; to remind us that, before religion, or nationality, or politics, we are all human. Shapiro's stirring memoir-in-essays, The Best Strangers in the…

$38.99

Jessica Gigot and Ann Stinson

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

It is always a joy to welcome authors from Oregon State University Press to the store, and tonight we have two of them! Please join us to hear Ann Stinson and Jessica Gigot discussing their most recent books, The Ground at My Feet and A Little Bit of Land, respectively. Ann Stinson grew up on her family’s tree farm in southwestern Washington state, on a ridge above the Cowlitz River. After building a life in New York and Portland, she returned home at the age of fifty, when her brother’s death from cancer left her manager and co-owner of three hundred acres planted in Douglas fir, western red cedar, and ponderosa pine. The Ground at My Feet is a memoir about loss and grief as…

Free

Regan Penaluna

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

As a young woman growing up in small-town Iowa, Regan Penaluna daydreamed about the big questions: who are we and what is this strange world we find ourselves in? In college she fell in love with philosophy and chose to pursue it as an academician — the first step, she believed, toward becoming a self-determined person living a life of the mind. What Penaluna didn’t realize was that the Western philosophical canon taught in American universities, as well as the culture surrounding it, would slowly grind her down through its misogyny, its harassment, its devaluation of women and their intellect. Where were the women philosophers? One day, in an obscure monograph, Penaluna came across Damaris Cudworth Masham’s name. The daughter of philosopher Ralph Cudworth and…

Free

Nicole Chung in Conversation With Lydia Kiesling

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

From the bestselling author of All You Can Ever Know comes a searing memoir of class, inequality, and grief — a daughter’s search to understand the lives her adoptive parents led, the life she forged as an adult, and the lives she’s lost. When Nicole Chung graduated from high school, she couldn’t hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university on the East Coast and no longer the only Korean she knew, she found a sense of community she had always craved as an Asian American adoptee — and a path to the life she’d long wanted. But the middle-class world she begins to raise a family in — where there are big homes…

Free

Jessica Machado Reading

PSU - Lincoln Hall 1620 SW Park Ave, Portland, OR, United States

The PSU Program in Creative Writing is pleased to host a reading by Jessica Machado. The event is cosponsored by the School of Music, and is free and open to the public. Jessica Machado is a graduate of Portland State University's MFA in creative writing program. She is currently an editor at NBC News and was previously a staff editor at Vox, the Daily Dot, and Rolling Stone. Local, a memoir woven with Hawaiian history, is her first book.

Free

Chloé Cooper Jones in Conversation With Lydia Kiesling, Kimberly King Parsons & Casey Parks

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

From Chloé Cooper Jones — Pulitzer Prize finalist, philosophy professor, and Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient — comes an “exquisite” (Oprah Daily) and groundbreaking memoir about disability, motherhood, and the search for a new way of seeing and being seen. “I am in a bar in Brooklyn, listening to two men, my friends, discuss whether my life is worth living.” So begins Easy Beauty (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster), Jones’s bold, revealing account of moving through the world in a body that looks different than most. Jones learned early on to factor “pain calculations” into every plan, every situation. Born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis which affects both her stature and gait, her pain is physical. But there is also the pain…

Free

Constellation #14 (4/11): Kiesling, Patel, Wong

Tin House 2617 NW Thurman Street, Portland, OR, United States

After an amazing and special BIPOC Adoptee showcase at the Armory in March, we're back to our regularly scheduled programming at Tin House/Bishop&Wilde (NW 26th and Thurman)! On Thursday April 11th, we're excited to host local luminaries Lydia Kiesling and Ami Patel and welcome Jane Wong who is traveling from Seattle to be with us.  Lydia Kiesling (she/her) is a novelist and culture writer. Her first novel, The Golden State, was a 2018 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree and a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her second novel, Mobility, a national bestseller, was named a best book of 2023 by Vulture, Time, and NPR, among others. It is a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Her essays and nonfiction have…

Free