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!

powell's city of books

  1. Events
  2. powell's city of books

Events Search and Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

Today

Chantel Prat in Conversation With Andrea Stocco

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

From University of Washington professor Chantel Prat comes The Neuroscience of You (Dutton), a rollicking adventure into the human brain that reveals the surprising truth about neuroscience, shifting our focus from what's average to an understanding of how every brain is different, exactly why our quirks are important, and what this means for each of us. With style and wit, Prat takes us on a tour of the meaningful ways that our brains are dissimilar from one another. Using real-world examples, along with take-them-yourself tests and quizzes, she shows you how to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your own brain, while learning what might be going on in the brains of those who are unlike you. With sections like "Focus," "Navigate," and "Connect," The…

Continue readingChantel Prat in Conversation With Andrea Stocco
Free

Ramona Emerson

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

Shutter (Soho Crime) is Ramona Emerson’s blood-chilling debut set in New Mexico’s Navajo Nation, equal parts gripping crime thriller, supernatural horror, and poignant portrayal of coming of age on the reservation. Rita Todacheene is a forensic photographer working for the Albuquerque police force. Her excellent photography skills have cracked many cases — she is almost supernaturally good at capturing details. In fact, Rita has been hiding a secret: she sees the ghosts of crime victims who point her toward the clues that other investigators overlook. As a lone portal back to the living for traumatized spirits, Rita is terrorized by nagging ghosts who won’t let her sleep and who sabotage her personal life. Her taboo and psychologically harrowing ability was what drove her away from…

Continue readingRamona Emerson
Free

Casey Parks in Conversation With Anna Griffin

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

Part memoir, part sweeping journalistic saga: as Casey Parks follows the mystery of a stranger's past, she is forced to reckon with her own sexuality, her fraught Southern identity, her tortured yet loving relationship with her mother, and the complicated role of faith in her life. When Parks came out as a lesbian in college back in 2002, she assumed her life in the South was over. Her mother shunned her, and her pastor asked God to kill her. But then Parks's grandmother, a stern conservative who grew up picking cotton, pulled her aside and revealed a startling secret. "I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man," and then implored Casey to find out what happened to him. Diary…

Continue readingCasey Parks in Conversation With Anna Griffin
Free

William Deresiewicz in Conversation With Audrey Bilger

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

What is the internet doing to us? What is college for? What are the myths and metaphors we live by? These are the questions that William Deresiewicz has been pursuing over the course of his award-winning career. His new book, The End of Solitude (Henry Holt), brings together more than 40 of his finest essays. Ranging widely across the culture, they take up subjects as diverse as Mad Men and Harold Bloom, the significance of the hipster, and the purpose of art. Drawing on the past, they ask how we got where we are. Scrutinizing the present, they seek to understand how we can live more mindfully and freely, and they pose two fundamental questions: What does it mean to be an individual, and how…

Continue readingWilliam Deresiewicz in Conversation With Audrey Bilger
Free

Rinker Buck

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

Seven years ago, readers around the country fell in love with a singular American voice: Rinker Buck, whose infectious curiosity about history launched him across the West in a covered wagon pulled by mules and propelled his book about the trip, The Oregon Trail, to ten weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Now, Buck returns to chronicle his latest incredible adventure: building a wooden flatboat from the bygone era of the early 1800s and journeying down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. A modern-day Huck Finn, Buck casts off down the river on the flatboat Patience, accompanied by an eccentric crew of daring shipmates. Over the course of his voyage, Buck steers his fragile wooden craft through narrow channels dominated by massive cargo…

Continue readingRinker Buck
Free

Kristin Ohlson in Conversation With Lee van der Voo

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

What if Nature is more cooperative, and less competitive, than we think? In the follow-up to her previous book, The Soil Will Save Us, Kristin Ohlson’s Sweet in Tooth and Claw (Patagonia) extends the concept of cooperation in nature to the life-affirming connections among microbes, plants, fungi, insects, birds, and animals — including humans — in ecosystems around the globe. For centuries, people have debated whether nature is mostly competitive — as Darwin theorized and the poet Tennyson described as “red in tooth and claw” — or innately cooperative, as many ancient and indigenous peoples believed. In the last 100 or so years, a growing gang of scientists have studied the mutually beneficial interactions that are believed to benefit every species on earth. Sweet in…

Continue readingKristin Ohlson in Conversation With Lee van der Voo
Free

Mike Duncan

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

From Mike Duncan, author of The Storm Before the Storm and host of the Revolutions podcast, comes Hero of Two Worlds (PublicAffairs), the thrilling story of the Marquis de Lafayette’s lifelong quest to defend the principles of liberty and equality. Few in history can match the revolutionary career of the Marquis de Lafayette. Over 50 incredible years at the heart of the Age of Revolution, he fought courageously on both sides of the Atlantic. He was a soldier, statesman, idealist, philanthropist, and abolitionist. As a teenager, Lafayette ran away from France to join the American Revolution. Returning home a national hero, he helped launch the French Revolution, eventually spending five years locked in dungeon prisons. After his release, Lafayette sparred with Napoleon, joined an underground…

Continue readingMike Duncan
Free

Kel Mitchell

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

From actor, producer, and comedian Kel Mitchell of Nickelodeon's All That and the film Good Burger, comes a new laugh-aloud novel for kids. Prank Day (Thomas Nelson) follows Chase as he masterminds a series of epic pranks only to discover that they've all become real on April 2nd. When his tricks become reality in hilarious and disastrous ways, Chase must come clean. How will he set the world right again, catch the eye of his crush Zoe, and keep her from getting flattened by the refrigerator running all over town? Preorder a Signed Edition

Free

Wendy Red Star in Conversation With Will Matsuda

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

Delegation (Aperture) is the first comprehensive monograph by Apsáalooke/Crow artist Wendy Red Star, whose photography recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective. Red Star centers Native American life and material culture through imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations. Whether referencing 19th-century Crow leaders or 1980s pulp fiction, museum collections or family pictures, she constantly questions the role of the photographer in shaping Indigenous representation. Including a dynamic array of Red Star’s lens-based works from 2006 to the present, and a range of essays, stories, and poems, Delegation is a spirited testament to an influential artist’s singular vision. Red Star will be joined in conversation by writer and photographer Will Matsuda. Preorder a Signed Edition

Free

Brian Michael Bendis in Conversation With David F. Walker

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

Brian Michael Bendis, co-creator of Miles Morales, Jessica Jones, and Naomi, brings you Phenomena, a brand-new fantasy adventure series starting with The Golden City of Eyes (illustrated by André Lima Araújo) (Abrams ComicArts). Phenomena is the story of a young boy named Bolden and his warrior friend Spike — survivors of a phenomena that took over Earth years ago. Not an apocalypse… something far more interesting. We follow Bolden and Spike as they are forced to team up with another lost orphan of the world, Matilde. The trio of heroes go on a globetrotting adventure that takes them to a magical, mysterious place called the Golden City of Eyes. As they quest across this epically crazy new world looking for answers and purpose, they face…

Continue readingBrian Michael Bendis in Conversation With David F. Walker
Free
Click a category label below to view the calendar with only events in that specific category.