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!

The Trauma Cleaner

Books Around the Corner 40 NW 2nd Street, Gresham, OR, United States

Hello all of you lovely True Crime junkies! Pick up your copy of The Trauma Cleaner and start reading! Then come join us from 3-5, to discuss the book, snack on yummy treats, drink some wine, and talk True Crime shop! If you want to support the gracious host of our little book club that could, please purchase your copy of The Trauma Cleaner from Books Around the Corner. You can even have it shipped to you for just $5.

Free

Echo of Distant Water – JB Fisher

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

Join us for a reading of Echo of Distant Water: The 1958 Disappearance of Portland’s Martin Family by JB Fisher! Echo of Distant Water tells the true and largely forgotten story of Ken Martin, his wife Barbara, and their three young daughters—who vanished while hunting Christmas greens in the Columbia River Gorge on December 7, 1958. Despite one of the largest missing persons searches in Oregon history, the case remains perplexingly unsolved to this day. After discovering a stack of old newspaper articles about the case in his McMinnville garage, author JB Fisher obtained a wealth of first-hand and never-before publicized information including an intriguing trail left in the personal notebooks and papers of Multnomah County criminal detective Walter E. Graven. These provide fascinating insight…

Free

Confessions of a True Crime Addict: James Renner

Curious Comedy Theater 5225 NE MLK Blvd, Portland, OR, United States

James Renner celebrates our obsession with true crime and shares weirdly funny stories about his life hunting serial killers and hosting crime shows. His job often places him in compromising situations - from being scammed into buying crack for his neighbor to accepting rides in cars from strange men at crime scenes. He explores the big questions behind our guilty pleasure, such as why is true crime so popular and whether killers are born bad or made that way. From Serial to Making a Murderer, Renner takes us through the absurd world of popular crime and finds the humor at its heart. James Renner is a journalist from Cleveland, the author of True Crime Addict, and the host of Discover ID's Lake Erie's Coldest Cases.…

$20

True Crime Book Club

Books Around the Corner 40 NW 2nd Street, Gresham, OR, United States

True Crime Book Club meets on Sundays and October's pick is Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt. Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. Available at a 15% discount to order if you plan on attending the book club. Email us to order it or come in!

Free

Jake Brennan

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

From Jake Brennan, creator of the popular rock 'n' roll true crime podcast, Disgraceland, comes an off-kilter, hysterical, at times macabre book of stories from the highly entertaining underbelly of music history. At the center of Disgraceland (Grand Central) is the ever-fascinating music industry – a glittery stage populated by gangsters, drug dealers, pimps, and groupies, with violence, scandal, and pure unadulterated rock 'n' roll entertainment.

Free

True Crime Book Club

Books Around the Corner 40 NW 2nd Street, Gresham, OR, United States

True Crime Book Club meets on Sundays and November's pick is Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann. A twisting, haunting true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history. Available at a 15% discount to order if you plan on attending the book club. Email us to order it or come in!

Free

Reading: JB Fisher

Rose City Book Pub 1329 NE Fremont, Portland, OR, United States

Rose City Book Pub welcomes Portland author J.B. Fisher to read from Echo of Distant Water: The 1958 Disappearance of Portland's Martin Family. In December 1958, Ken Martin, his wife Barbara, and their three young daughters left their home in Northeast Portland to search for Christmas greens in the Columbia River Gorge—and never returned. The Martins' disappearance spurred the largest missing persons search in Oregon history and the mystery has remained perplexingly unsolved to this day. For the past six years, J.B. Fisher (Portland on the Take) has pored over the case after finding in his garage a stack of old Oregon Journal newspaper articles about the story. Through a series of serendipitous encounters, Fisher obtained a wealth of first-hand and never-before publicized information about…

Free

True Crime Book Club

Books Around the Corner 40 NW 2nd Street, Gresham, OR, United States

The True Crime Book Club is led by the true crime aficionado Rachel Newton Cumley. We would like to extend an invitation to all of our mystery and thriller loving customers (RSVP is not required). Our book discussions aim to bring people together to talk about books in a safe and inviting atmosphere. Our meetings are lovely and inclusive; we invite you to attend. Come and enjoy a lively discussion about the chosen book with other readers. Join us for the January meeting of the True Crime Book Club. This month's pick is American Predator by Maureen Callahan. Ted Bundy. John Wayne Gacy. Jeffrey Dahmer. The names of notorious serial killers are usually well-known; they echo in the news and in public consciousness. But most…

Free

True Crime Book Club

Books Around the Corner 40 NW 2nd Street, Gresham, OR, United States

The True Crime Book Club is led by the true crime aficionado Rachel Newton Cumley. We would like to extend an invitation to all of our mystery and thriller loving customers (RSVP is not required). Our book discussions aim to bring people together to talk about books in a safe and inviting atmosphere. Our meetings are lovely and inclusive; we invite you to attend. Come and enjoy a lively discussion about the chosen book with other readers. Join us for the February meeting of the True Crime Book Club. This month's pick is If You Tell by Gregg Olsen. After more than a decade, when sisters Nikki, Sami, and Tori Knotek hear the word mom, it claws like an eagle's talons, triggering memories that have…

Free

Emma Copley Eisenberg in Conversation With Vanessa Veselka

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

In the early evening of June 25, 1980, in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, two middle-class outsiders named Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19, were murdered in an isolated clearing. They were hitchhiking to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering but never arrived; they traveled with a third woman, however, who lived. Emma Copley Eisenberg spent years living in Pocahontas and reinvestigating these brutal acts. In The Third Rainbow Girl (Hachette), Eisenberg follows the threads of this crime through the complex history of Appalachia, forming a searing and wide-ranging portrait of America – its divisions of gender and class, and of its violence. Eisenberg will be joined in conversation by Vanessa Veselka, author of Zazen.

Free