A resource for the PDX literary community. Produced by Old Pal.
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 Untold Gaze is paintings by Stephen O'Donnell paired with works of prose and poetry that they inspired. What a luscious mixed-media Plonk we have in store for March! Come for the paintings and readings by these dazzlers: Vanessa Veselka (Author page) Bradley K Rosen Kathleen Lane Laura Stanfill Colin Farstad Edie Rylander (read by Stephen O'Donnell)
Writers, escape the solitude of your desk. Readers, come hear great fresh work. Here is an opportunity to share or listen to one page of work in progress from talented Portland writers. Come with a single page of work and sign up to read – or come to listen and prepare to be inspired! Doors open at 6:30. Please, no reading from electronic devices. Hosted by Natalie Serber Featured Readers for April: Aaron Gilbreath is the author of the personal essay collection, Everything We Don’t Know, a finalist for the 2018 Oregon Book Award, and This Is: Essays on Jazz. His next book is titled Through the San Joaquin Valley: The Heart of California. Vanessa Veselka is the author of the novel, Zazen, which won the…
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.
Join the five 2021 Oregon Book Award finalists for the Ken Kesey Award for a reading as part of Springfield Celebrates Authors. Chelsea Bieker is from California’s Central Valley. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award and her fiction and essays have been published in Granta, McSweeney’s, Catapult magazine, Electric Literature, and Joyland, among others. She has been awarded a MacDowell Colony fellowship, and holds an MFA in creative writing from Portland State University. Godshot is her first novel. Purchase Godshot from Broadway Books, one of our Portland-based, independent bookstore partners HERE. Originally from Alabama, Genevieve Hudson earned an MFA from Portland State University and has received Fulbright, MacDowell, and Vermont Studio Center fellowships. She is the author of Pretend We Live Here: Stories, and lives in Portland,…
Karolina Waclawiak’s breakout novel, Life Events (Picador), follows Evelyn, who, at 37, is on the verge of divorce and anxiously dreading the death of everyone she loves. She combats her existential crisis by avoiding her husband and aimlessly driving along the freeways of California looking for an escape — one that eventually comes when she discovers a collective of “exit guides.” Evelyn enrolls in their training course, where she learns to provide companionship and a final exit for terminally ill patients seeking a conscious departure. She meets Daphne, a dying woman still full of life; Lawrence, an aging porn king; and Daniel, who seems too young to die and whom Evelyn falls for, despite knowing better, not to mention the exit guide code. Each client…
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. Lidia Yuknavitch has an unmatched gift for capturing stories of people on the margins — vulnerable humans leading lives of challenge and transcendence. Now, Yuknavitch offers an imaginative masterpiece: the story of Laisve, a motherless girl from the late 21st century who is learning her power as a carrier, a person who can harness the power of meaningful objects to carry her through time. Sifting through the detritus of a fallen city known as the Brook, she discovers a talisman that will mysteriously connect her with a series…
Rules to Win By: Participation and Power in Union Negotiations (Oxford) is a book for anyone who wants to understand how to build the power required to effectively challenge and reverse income inequality and attacks on democracy. Drawing insights from recent hard-won unionization and contract negotiation fights, Abby Lawlor (and co-author Jane McAlevey) uses lessons from some of the toughest fights today — preparing a durable, all-out strike in a union-hostile environment — to provide a master class in participatory social change, indispensable both within and beyond the workplaces where we spend half of our waking lives. In an era of polarization, big lies, and massive legislative setbacks, changemakers in every arena need to learn the skills and lessons honed in pitched battles against experienced…