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!

Creating Vibrant and Complex Characters

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

This generative workshop will focus on the skills involved in creating and sustaining vibrant and complex characters. Through a series of in-workshop prompts and exercises participants will create and bring to life vivid characters. We will focus on physical description, internal life, setting, scene, action, and dialogue to round out and bring our creations to life. Close attention will be paid to literary and poetic devices. Supportive in-workshop sharing and feedback will be part of the process. Access Program We want our writing classes and Delves to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure can present obstacles for some people. Our Access Program offers writing class and Delve tuitions at a reduced rate. The access program for…

$80

Writing Into Big Questions

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

How do the big questions of our time–from climate change to racism–inhabit the stories of our lives? And what does it look like on the page to tell exquisitely personal stories in ways that gesture toward larger concerns? In this 2-hour workshop, writers will uncover some of the big questions buried in their own narratives, identify research paths that might amplify the intersection between the Self and the World, connect with their own potentially-transformative obsessions, and explore how the stories we choose to tell can change us. Access Program We want our writing classes and Delves to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure can present obstacles for some people. Our Access Program offers writing class and…

$55

Portland Book Festival: Friday Night Book Market

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Beat the crowds! Get early access to our exhibitor fair the night before Portland Book Festival. Click here to view this year’s full author lineup. Day-of Festival schedule will be released in October. Simplify your Portland Book Festival experience by purchasing an all-inclusive Umbrella Pass. The Umbrella Pass includes: General Admission Festival Pass (which includes a $5 book fair voucher and entry into Portland Art Museum), Friday Night Book Market entry, premium reserved seats to the Taylor Jenkins Reid and Selma Blair events (and signed copies of their books) as well as an exclusive Portland Book Festival tote bag. Already have your General Admission Festival Pass? Add on a Friday Night Book Market event ticket here. Portland Book Festival COVID policy: At this time, proof…

$15

Opening Singalong!

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Emily Arrow opens the festival day with a singalong! Portland Book Festival General Admission Passes are required for entry into all events. Passes are $15 in advance and $25 day of Festival. Youth 17 & under, or with a valid high school ID get in FREE. All full-priced General Admission Passes include a $5 book fair voucher and entry into Portland Art Museum. Passes admit attendees to the Festival; individual events are first-come, first-served. More info here. Emily Arrow Emily Arrow creates songs about books! Formerly a K-6 music educator, Emily’s passion for books led her to create music that promotes literacy. Formerly in Tennessee, now based in Texas, Emily brings picture books to life by collaborating with bestselling authors and publishers. Emily’s YouTube Channel is…

Free

Storytime: Arab Arab All Year Long!

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Celebrate the beauty and diversity of life in the Arab diaspora throughout the year. Wrapping grape leaves, playing doumbek, drawing henna tattoos, we’re Arab, Arab, Arab, the whole year through! Yallah! From January to December, join some busy kids as they partake in traditions old and new. There’s so much to do, whether it’s learning to write Arabic or looking at hijab fashion sites while planning costumes for a local comic convention. With details as vivid as the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle perfume (made to remind Mom of Morocco), children bond with friends, honor tradition, and spend loving time with family. Accompanied by buoyant and charming illustrations, this portrait of Arab life and childhood zeal is sure to bring joy all year round. Portland Book Festival…

Free

Storytime: Too Early

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

A gentle, cozy story following a family’s bleary-eyed wake-up routine, a little one who’s eager to start the day, and the quiet magic of early mornings. I wake up very early. Good morning, Sun, on your way at last. You don’t wake up nearly as early as I do. Now the wind is waking. Tickle tickle on my cheeks, rustle rustle through the leaves. Birds untuck and start to coo, Whooo whooo, you wake up too early, yes you doooo . . . In sweet, melodic verse written from the perspective of the earliest riser, Too Early follows a family’s morning routine, exploring both the groggy haze and the everyday magic inherent in the predawn hours of a loving household. Portland Book Festival General Admission Passes are…

Free

Long Live Short Stories: George Saunders & Jess Walter

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

George Saunders (Liberation Day) and Jess Walter (The Angel of Rome and Other Stories) in conversation, moderated by OPB’s Geoff Norcross. Booker Prize winner George Saunders returns with Liberation Day, his first collection of short stories since the New York Times bestseller Tenth of December. The “best short-story writer in English” (Time) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose—wickedly funny, unsentimental, and exquisitely tuned—Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: Here is a collection of prismatic, resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality. Together, these nine subversive, profound, and essential stories coalesce into…

Free

Reimagine Resistance: Harper Glenn & Justina Ireland

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Two novels that reveal truths about our time — about race and power, but also hope and love — through a reimagined past and a speculative future. Harper Glenn‘s debut Monarch Rising finds us in a chilling near-future New United States of America, where Jo Monarch has grown up in the impoverished borderlands of New Georgia. She’s given one chance to change her fate… if she can survive a boy trained to break hearts. And Justina Ireland, the author of the visionary New York Times bestseller Dread Nation, returns in Rust in the Root with another spellbinding historical fantasy set at the crossroads of race and power in America. Moderated by Alicia Tate of Multnomah County Library. Portland Book Festival General Admission Passes are required for entry…

Free

National Anthems: Juhea Kim & Lidia Yuknavitch

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Two girls — one in Korea at the beginning of the twentieth century, one in a fallen American city in the coming late twenty-first century–must forge their destinies against and alongside that of their respective nations. Juhea Kim‘s Beasts of a Little Land is an epic story of love, war, and redemption set against the backdrop of the Korean independence movement, following the intertwined fates of a young girl sold to a courtesan school and the penniless son of a hunter. As rising waters—and an encroaching police state—endanger her life and family, a girl with the gifts of a “carrier” travels through water and time to rescue vulnerable figures from the margins of history in Lidia Yuknavitch‘s newest novel, Thrust. Moderated by Marisa Siegel (Fixed…

Free

Storytime: Friends Are Friends, Forever

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

A picture book based on the author’s own immigration story, the infinite impact of friendship, and passing on love and kindness around the world. On a snowy Lunar New Year’s Eve in Northeastern China, it’s Dandan’s last night with Yueyue. Tomorrow, she moves to America. The two best friends have a favorite wintertime tradition: crafting paper-cut snowflakes, freezing them outside, and hanging them as ornaments. As they say goodbye, Yueyue presses red paper and a spool of thread into Dandan’s hands so that she can carry on their tradition. But in her new home, Dandan has no one to enjoy the gift with—until a friend comes along. Portland Book Festival General Admission Passes are required for entry into all events. Passes are $15 in advance and…

Free