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!

Mallory Smith: A Reading from her Memoir by Diane Smith

Lewis & Clark - Frank Manor House 0615 SW Palatine Hill Road, Portland, OR, United States

Mallory Smith, who grew up in Los Angeles, was a freelance writer and editor specializing in environmental issues, social justice, and healthcare-related communications. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University and worked as a senior producer at Green Grid Radio, an environmental storytelling radio show and podcast. Her radio work was featured on KCRW, National Radio Project, and State of the Human. She was a fierce advocate for those who suffered from cystic fibrosis, launching the viral social media campaign Lunges4Lungs with friends and raising over $5 million with her parents for CF research through the annual Mallory’s Garden event. She died at the age of twenty-five on November 15, 2017, two months after receiving a double-lung transplant. Mallory’s Legacy Fund has been established…

Free

Song of Myself

Lewis & Clark College 0615 SW Palatine Hill Road, Portland, OR, United States

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s birthday, actor Johnny Stallings will be performing “Song of Myself.” This poem is considered to be one of the greatest utterances in American Literature. It can change your life. Following the performance Professor Rachel Cole and Oregon’s Poet Laureate Kim Stafford and Johnny will talk about Walt Whitman and engage in what promises to be a lively dialogue with audience members. Location: Albany Quadrangle, Smith Hall

Free

A Poetry Reading by Marjorie Welish

Lewis & Clark - Frank Manor House 0615 SW Palatine Hill Road, Portland, OR, United States

Marjorie Welish is the author of The Annotated “Here” and Selected Poems; Word Group; Isle of the Signatories; In the Futurity Lounge / Asylum for Indeterminacy; and So What So That – all from Coffee House Press. The papers delivered at a conference on her writing and art held at the University of Pennsylvania were published as a book in Of the Diagram: The Work of Marjorie Welish (Slought Books). Thanks to Laurie Anderson, Welish’s first solo show of visual art took place at the Whitney Museum Art Resources Center; recently, a joint art exhibition with Olivier Gourvil took place at La Terrasse, in Nanterre, France; and still more recently, her paintings were on view at the American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational 2018. A decade ago Granary Books published Oaths? Questions?, a…

Free

A Poetry Reading by Rosalie Moffett

Lewis & Clark - Frank Manor House 0615 SW Palatine Hill Road, Portland, OR, United States

Rosalie Moffett is the author of Nervous System, (Ecco/Harper Collins) winner of the National Poetry Series. She is also the author of June in Eden (Ohio State University Press). She has been awarded the “Discovery”/Boston Review prize, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and scholarships from the Tin House and Bread Loaf writing workshops. Her poems and essays have appeared in Tin House, The Believer, FIELD, Narrative, Kenyon Review, Agni, Ploughshares, and other magazines, as well as in the anthology Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets. She is a professor at the University of Southern Indiana.

Free

A Nonfiction Reading by Mohamed Asem

Lewis & Clark - Frank Manor House 0615 SW Palatine Hill Road, Portland, OR, United States

Mohamed Asem - July, 2016: Three days after the terror attack on Bastille Day, Mohamed Asem is detained overnight by British immigration officials without cause. In an elegantly digressive, self-interrogative style, Asem describes the boredom and uncertainty of confinement, and how this specific kind of helplessness leads, inevitably, to a self-reckoning. What series of events has led to this moment? Stranger in the Pen examines the burden of being disconnected from one’s homeland, unpacks the emotional toll of racial profiling, and illuminates the quietly surprising ways in which grief can change one’s life. Asem will appear in conversation with his publisher, Michael Heald, of Perfect Day Publishing.

Free

English Alumni Reading: Fiction and Nonfiction

William Aime (’15) David Kroman (’11) return to campus reading from the work they’ve done since graduation. Both Aime and Kroman have had some success – in different ways – in the writing world. They will talk about paying the bills, being newly graduated, and keeping the writing flame going, long after the spark of undergraduate classes has dimmed away. Location: Miller Hall, Room 102

Free

The 2020 Brazilian Literary Spring in the U.S.

Lewis & Clark - Gregg Pavilion 0615 SW Palatine Hill Road, Portland, OR, United States

The Printemps Littéraire Brésilien is part of a research and educational initiative that is also aims to promote Lusophone literatures around the World. This annual colloquium was originally idealized by professor Leonardo Tonus (Sorbonne Université) to promote and to expand the training of students in institutions of higher education. Since its inception in 2014, the event has become an important space for debates on Brazilian literature, fomenting new readings and enriching experiences around the Portuguese language. In the 2020 U.S. edition, readings and panels will take place in several cities across the country between February 16th and April 16th. The event is organized in partnership with universities and cultural organizations: Columbia University, Brown University, Indiana University, University of New Mexico, University of Washighton, Oregon Center…

Free