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!

Visiting Writers Series: Hanif Abdurraqib

Reed College - Eliot Hall Chapel 3203 SE Woodstock, Portland, OR, United States

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of a New York Times best-selling biography on A Tribe Called Quest called Go Ahead in the Rain (University of Texas Press, February 2019), The Crown Ain't Worth Much (Button Poetry/Exploding Pinecone Press, 2016), nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), named a best book of 2017 by NPR, Pitchfork, Oprah Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Slate, Esquire, GQ, and Publisher's Weekly, among others. He is a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow, a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine, and a member of the poetry collective Echo Hotel with poet/essayist Eve Ewing. Abdurraqib has two forthcoming books including a new…

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Visiting Writers Series: Jos Charles

Reed College - Eliot Hall Chapel 3203 SE Woodstock, Portland, OR, United States

Jos Charles is author of feeld, a National Book Award long-listed finalist and winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series, selected by Fady Joudah (Milkweed Editions) and Safe Space (Ahsahta Press). Charles has poetry published with POETRY, Poem-a-Day, PEN, Washington Square Review, Denver Quarterly, Action Yes, The Feminist Wire, and elsewhere. Charles' writing has been featured on BitchMedia, Entropy, GLAAD, LAMBDA Literary, and elsewhere. In 2016 she received the Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship through the Poetry Foundation. In 2015 she received the Monique Wittig Writer's Scholarship. Jos Charles has an MFA from the University of Arizona. From 2013-2018 she served as the founding-editor for THEM lit, a trans literary journal. She is a PhD student at UC Irvine and currently resides in Long…

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Visiting Writers Series: Hilary Plum

Reed College - Eliot Hall Chapel 3203 SE Woodstock, Portland, OR, United States

Hilary Plum is the author of the novel Strawberry Fields, winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose (2018); the work of nonfiction Watchfires (2016), winner of the 2018 GLCA New Writers Award; and the novel They Dragged Them Through the Streets (2013). She has worked for a number of years as an editor of international literature, history, and politics. She teaches at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA program and is associate director of the CSU Poetry Center. With Zach Savich she edits the Open Prose Series at Rescue Press.

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Visiting Writers Series: She Who Has No Master(s)

Reed College - Eliot Hall Chapel 3203 SE Woodstock, Portland, OR, United States

She Who Has No Master(s) is a project of multi-voiced collectivity, hybrid poetics, encounters, in-between spaces and (dis)places of the Vietnamese diaspora. Through a collaborative art process and social engagement interaction(s), they endeavor to bring into concert the voices of women writers of the Vietnamese diaspora. They define writing as art that has storytelling at its core, but may express itself in hybrid, performance, visual, musical/aural, and interdisciplinary forms. This event includes: Vi Khi Nao, Stacey Tran, and Dao Strom. Vi Khi Nao is the author of the short stories collection A Brief Alphabet of Torture (which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016), and a novel, Fish in Exile. Vi holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University. This Fall 2019, she is BMI Shearing…

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IPRC Visiting Writers Reading

IPRC (Independent Publishing Resource Center) 318 SE Main Street #175, Portland, OR, United States

Please join Certificate Program students, faculty and IPRC Community for an evening of readings from our 2019 Visiting Writers. In conjunction with this reading, printmakers Ryan Brewer, Heather Lane and Timme Lu are designing commemorative broadsides, which will be available by donation at the event. The 2019 Visiting Writers Series was made possible by support from the Multnomah County Cultural Coalition and the Jackson Foundation.

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Visiting Writers Series: Janice Lee

Reed College - Eliot Hall Chapel 3203 SE Woodstock, Portland, OR, United States

Janice Lee is a Korean-American writer, artist, and editor. She writes about the filmic long take, slowness, interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma, and the concept of han in Korean culture, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy? She is the author of KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), a multidisciplinary exploration of cyborgs, brains, and the stakes of consciousness, Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), an experimental novel, Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), a book-length meditation and ekphrasis on the films of Hungarian director Béla Tarr, Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015), a lyrical essay reflecting on the death of Lee’s mother, and most recently, The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016), a collection of travel essays inspired…

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Visiting Writers Series: Mei-mei Berssenbrugge ’69

Reed College - Eliot Hall Chapel 3203 SE Woodstock, Portland, OR, United States

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge '69 was born in Beijing and grew up in Massachusetts. She is the author of 12 books of poetry including Empathy, Four Year Old Girl, I Love Artists and Hello, the Roses. A Treatise on Stars is forthcoming from New Directions Press along with a new edition of Empathy. She has collaborated with artists in the book arts and in theatre, including Frank Chin, Theodora Yoshikami, Richard Tuttle, Kiki Smith, Tan Dun, Davide Balula.  Forthcoming is an album with nature recordings by Rafael Sanchez. She graduated from Reed College in 1969, and her thesis was a book of poems. She lives in New Mexico and New York City.

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CANCELED – Visiting Writers Series: Rivers Solomon

Reed College - Eliot Hall Chapel 3203 SE Woodstock, Portland, OR, United States

Rivers Solomon writes about life in the margins, where they are much at home. Nominated two-years running for the John C. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and a winner of the Firecracker Award, they produce fiction that embraces alterity via queerness, disability, and Blackness. In addition to appearing on the Stonewall Honour List and in numerous best-of-the-year lists, Solomon's debut novel AN UNKINDNESS OF GHOSTS was a finalist for a Lambda, a Hurston/Wright, a Tiptree, and a Locus Award. Their short work appears in or is forthcoming from Black Warrior Review, the New York Times, Guernica, Best American Short Stories, Tor.com, Gay Mag, and elsewhere. Their second book, THE DEEP, a project based on a song of the same title by Daveed Diggs-fronted experimental…

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CANCELED – Visiting Writers Series: sidony o’neal

Reed College - Eliot Hall Chapel 3203 SE Woodstock, Portland, OR, United States

sidony o’neal (b. 1988) is an artist and writer from Sacramento, CA. Previous exhibitions and performances include Fourteen30 Contemporary, Linfield Gallery, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Performance Space New York, and If I Can’t Dance. o’neal’s writings have been published at Arts.Black, Scrolldiving, The Capilano Review, Passages North, BATHHOUSE, SPOOK magazine, and the journal of Women & Performance. sidony is the translator of Prognosis: Descarga Poetica Decolonial (Quilomboarte 2013). Residencies include Literary In(ter)ventions Banff Center, Creative Exchange Lab, Arteles Center, and S1 Synth Library. sidony is an instructor in the Department of Music and Sonic Arts at Portland Community College.

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Visiting Writers Series: Lesley Nneka Arimah

Reed College - Eliot Hall Chapel 3203 SE Woodstock, Portland, OR, United States

Lesley Nneka Arimah was born in the UK and grew up in Nigeria and wherever else her father was stationed for work. Her stories have been honored with a National Magazine Award, an O. Henry Award and the Caine Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, GRANTA and has received support from MacDowell and the United States Artists Fellowship. She was selected for the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 and her debut collection WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY won the 2017 Kirkus Prize, the 2017 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and was selected for the New York Times/PBS book club among other honors. Arimah lives in Minneapolis and is working on a…

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