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!

Paulann Petersen

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

Paulann Petersen’s new poetry collection, One Small Sun (Salmon), takes readers from a fur shop in Oregon to a Hyderabadi shrine in India’s subcontinent. Its pages contain a meditation on postmortem photographs, an ode to the female earwig, an elegy for a grandmother’s panache. Tapping deeply into memory, relying on poetry’s ability to bring alive again what is coded into the blood, these poems ultimately form an arc of an aging woman’s life. This collection tells the tales of what she has always realized, is ever learning, but – only through poetry’s vehicle – can truly know.

Free

The Voice of Empathy: John Sibley Williams and Paulann Petersen

The Tiny Theater PDX 3306 SE 65th Ave, Portland, OR, United States

Organized by Portland poet A. Molotkov, The Voice of Empathy is a poetry series that showcases writers whose work investigates the human capacity for compassion and generosity and invites the reader/listener to care deeply for others and the world. Each reading will be followed by a Q&A. May 5 John Sibley Williams Paulann Petersen Limited seating, please arrive early for a guaranteed seat. The Voice of Empathy is a poetry series that showcases writers whose work investigates the human capacity for compassion and generosity and invites the reader/listener to care deeply for others and the world. This description is for the poets’ reference only and does not presume to impose any constraints on the work selected for presentation. There is room for 37-39 poetry lovers.…

Free

Paulann Petersen

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

We welcome Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita Paulann Petersen to read from her new collection of poetry, One Small Sun, published by Salmon Poetry. The poems take readers from a fur shop in Oregon to a Hyderabadi shrine in India's subcontinent. Tapping deeply into memory, relying on poetry's ability to bring alive again what is coded into the blood, these poems ultimately form an arc of an aging woman's life. This collection tells the tales of what she has always realized, is ever learning, but -- only through poetry's vehicle -- can truly know. Petersen was born in Portland and graduated from Franklin High School. She attended college at Pomona College in California and Southern Oregon State College in Ashland, earning a master's degree in Humanities, Fine…

Free

Poetry Reading: Tess Gallagher and Paulann Petersen

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

Annie Bloom's welcomes two wonderful poets, Tess Gallagher and Paulann Petersen, for a joint reading from their latest collections. Tess Gallagher's new collection, Is, Is Not, upends our notions of linear time, evokes the spirit and sanctity of place, and hovers daringly at the threshold of what language can nearly deliver while offering alternative corollaries as gifts of its failures. Tess Gallagher’s poems reverberate with the inward clarity of a bell struck on a mountaintop. Guided by humor, grace, and a deep inquiry into the natural world, every poem nudges us toward moments of awe. How else except by delight and velocity would we discover the miracle within the ordinary? Gallagher claims many Wests—the Northwest of America, the Northwest of Ireland, and a West even…

Free

Monthly Poetry – Andrea Hollander, Paulann Petersen, Chrys Tobey

Another Read Through 3932 N Mississippi Ave, Portland, OR, United States

Join us for our monthly last-Thursday poetry reading! This month we have work from Andrea Hollander, Paulann Petersen, and Chrys Tobey. Blue Mistaken for Sky, Hollander’s fifth full-length poetry collection, reads like a memoir in verse. It explores a mature woman’s life after divorce. The poems are unselfconscious, and they detail with grace the pleasures and difficulties of aging and the evolution of personal relationships through a life. One Small Sun, by Paulann Petersen, takes readers from a fur shop in Oregon to a Hyderabadi shrine in India’s subcontinent. Its pages contain a meditation on post-mortem photographs, an ode to the female earwig, an elegy for a grandmother’s panache. Tapping deeply into memory, relying on poetry’s ability to bring alive again what is coded into…

Free

Michael Dickman + Paulann Petersen

Portland State University, Smith Memorial Student Union, Room 238 1825 SW Broadway, Portland, OR, United States

Michael Dickman was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1975. He received his MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin. His first poetry collection, The End of the West, was published in 2009 by Copper Canyon Press. He is also the author of Green Migraine and the coauthor, with his brother Matthew Dickman, of 50 American Plays. His second collection, Flies, received the 2010 James Laughlin Award. Dickman was awarded the Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University for 2009-2010. He is on the faculty at Princeton University, and lives in New Jersey. Paulann Petersen served from 2010–2014 as Oregon’s sixth Poet Laureate. She is the author of seven poetry collections: The Wild Awake, Blood-Silk, A Bride of Narrow Escape, Kindle, The Voluptuary, Understory, and most recently One Small Sun (2019)…

Free

Live Stream Reading: Marilyn Sewell: In Time’s Shadow

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Annie Bloom's welcomes back Portland author Marilyn Sewell for a live stream reading from her latest book, In Time’s Shadow. She will be in conversation with Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita Paulann Petersen. Live stream registration link: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIqde-gqjIpH9Z8I4tcYQ-WHdVqkbHHk8bG Minister, author, and activist Marilyn Sewell reflects on the everyday, the places we live and work, the thoughts we all have but hardly ever share, though they may carry the most profound of our human concerns. Using a variety of short literary forms—dramatic monologues, vignettes, letters, prose poems, lists, surrealistic tales—Sewell presents quirky, ironic, and compassionate slices of life that will bring laughter and at the same time take you deeper into the mysteries of existence. Sewell pushes for the thin, startling light beneath the confusion and chaos…

Free

Livestream Reading: Lois Ruskai Melina with Paulann Petersen

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Annie Bloom's Books welcomes Portland author Lois Ruskai Melina for a livestream reading from her new book, The Grammar of Untold Stories. She will be in conversation with local poet Paulann Petersen. Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUkcOCrpzIpGtIjz9Ypbp_N1neHXcg-1n0C Lois Ruskai Melina's The Grammar of Untold Stories, sixteen essays––ranging from lyric essays to narrative journalism––address how we make sense of what we cannot know, how we make change in the world, how we heal, and how we know when we are home. Collectively, these essays convey the longing for agency and connection, particularly among women. They will resonate with readers of all ages, but perhaps especially with women in the second half of life, those dealing with aging parents, retirement, illness, and accompanying vulnerabilities. Here readers will find comfort…

Free

The Milwaukie Poetry Series: Paulann Petersen

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Paulann Petersen's poetry reading will be livestreamed on June 9, 2021 on the Ledding Library YouTube Channel. (link is external) Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita, has seven full-length books of poetry, most recently One Small Sun from Salmon Poetry in 2019. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Poetry, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, Willow Springs, Calyx, and the online Poetry Daily. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and the recipient of the 2006 Holbrook Award from Oregon Literary Arts. In 2013 she received Willamette Writers' Distinguished Northwest Writer Award. A flier of the 14th season readings is available here or at the Ledding Library. Thank you to all the volunteers who make this reading possible. For information or questions about the reading and to join the group list, please contact the Series Coordinator…

Free

Final Windfall Reading

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

We are both excited and saddened to be hosting an in-person reading on Wednesday, April 20th, at 6:30 pm, to celebrate Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place, on the occasion of its final issue. Joining co-editors Bill Siverly and Michael McDowell to read on this evening will be Barbara Drake, Eric le Fatte, Charles Goodrich, Marilyn Johnston, Mike Langtry, Elizabeth McLagan, Paulann Petersen, Carlos Reyes, Penelope Scambly Schott, and Dianne Stepp. The first issue of Windfall was published in Fall of 2002. Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place features poetry which captures the spirit of place as part of the essence of the poem. The journal particularly emphasized poetry which is written in the Pacific Northwest and which is attentive to the relationships…

Free