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!

Delve Readers Seminar: Haunted Chambers: Piranesi and The Little Stranger

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

Setting is an important aspect of every story, but sometimes it is so integral as to be almost a character in itself. Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi and Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger explore the unsettling power of place and its influence on the human mind. Piranesi lives in the House, a fantastical, dreamlike structure where ocean waves surge through infinite vestibules, clouds float and birds fly through halls decorated with statuary, and human remains lie secreted in niches. Alone except for occasional visits from a man he calls the Other, Piranesi records his daily routines and discoveries in his journal, muses on the Other’s quest for “a Great Secret and Knowledge,” and gradually unravels mysteries that threaten to upend his fragile contentment. In The Little Stranger,…

$240

Oregon Literary Fellowship Reading

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

A reading featuring the 2023 Oregon Literary Fellowship recipients.  

Free

Slamlandia

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

Slamlandia is a poetry open mic and slam that meets every month. This mic provides a creative, fun, and welcoming space for all literary communities in Portland. We encourage poets new and old to come share their work. We strive towards a safer space for poets to read their own poetry, witness others, and participate in community. This event takes place in-person. Please see our Covid-19 guidelines for in-person events at Literary Arts. Hosted by Julia Gaskill. **Slamlandia usually takes place the third Thursday of the month, but will be taking place the second Thursday in April due to some scheduling conflicts. We will resume to third Thursdays after this month. Thanks!** Julia Gaskill Julia Gaskill is a professional daydreamer hailing from Portland, Oregon. Her…

Free

Slamlandia

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

Slamlandia is a poetry open mic and slam that meets every month. This mic provides a creative, fun, and welcoming space for all literary communities in Portland. We encourage poets new and old to come share their work. We strive towards a safer space for poets to read their own poetry, witness others, and participate in community. This event takes place in-person. Proof of Covid-19 vaccine or a negative PCR test is required for admittance. Please see our Covid-19 guidelines for in-person events at Literary Arts. Hosted by Julia Gaskill. Julia Gaskill Julia Gaskill is a professional daydreamer hailing from Portland, Oregon. Her poetry examines the tightrope we sometimes walk of feeling our voices censored and also being unabashedly ourselves. Her poems touch on everyday…

Free

Delve Readers Seminar: Romeo and Juliet

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland is producing two Shakespeare plays this season, Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night—both perennial favorites. OSF tries to make these plays fresh for contemporary audiences with inventive or provocative interpretations. These seminars will help you think through how you might stage the dramas if you were the director. How do we take a written text and imagine it on stage? For live theater, directors must ensure that every line, every gesture, every costume, every set—in short, everything the audience will see and hear—conforms to a consistent interpretation of the play. These seminars are great preparation for your trip to Ashland, and will help you get much more out of the performances. If you read Romeo and Juliet in high…

$125

Verselandia! 2023

Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall 1037 SW Broadway, Portland, OR, United States

Youth Poetry Slam Championship Celebrate Portland’s youth poets during Literary Arts’ annual Verselandia! Youth Poetry Slam Championship. Cheer on students from Portland and East Multnomah County public high schools competing for poetic glory at this energetic and inspiring event. Support provided by: To support this event as a sponsor, please contact Lydah DeBin at lydah@literary-arts.org or call 503-989-7110.  

$10 – $70

Endi Bogue Hartigan & Flávia Rocha in Conversation

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

Join us in celebration of the launch of oh orchid o’clock (Omnidawn Publishing, 2023) by Endi Bogue Hartigan who will introduce her new collection. She will be joined by Brazilian poet Flávia Rocha, who will read from her most recent book Exosfera. Enjoy an evening of lyric investigations into space, time, our time, and orchids, followed by a short discussion and Q&A. This collection speaks the language of the clock as a living instrument, exposing the sensory impacts of our obsession with time. In oh orchid o’clock, lyrics wind through histories like a nervous system through a body. The poems speak to how we let our days become over-clocked, over-transactional, and over-weaponed. With an instrumental sensibility, Endi Bogue Hartigan investigates what it is to be…

Free

Slamlandia

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

Slamlandia is a poetry open mic and slam that meets every month. This mic provides a creative, fun, and welcoming space for all literary communities in Portland. We encourage poets new and old to come share their work. We strive towards a safer space for poets to read their own poetry, witness others, and participate in community. This event takes place in-person. Proof of Covid-19 vaccine or a negative PCR test is required for admittance. Please see our Covid-19 guidelines for in-person events at Literary Arts. Hosted by Julia Gaskill. Julia Gaskill Julia Gaskill is a professional daydreamer hailing from Portland, Oregon. Her poetry examines the tightrope we sometimes walk of feeling our voices censored and also being unabashedly ourselves. Her poems touch on everyday…

Free

Slamlandia

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

Slamlandia is a poetry open mic and slam that meets every month. This mic provides a creative, fun, and welcoming space for all literary communities in Portland. We encourage poets new and old to come share their work. We strive towards a safer space for poets to read their own poetry, witness others, and participate in community. This event takes place in-person. Proof of Covid-19 vaccine or a negative PCR test is required for admittance. Please see our Covid-19 guidelines for in-person events at Literary Arts. Hosted by Julia Gaskill. Julia Gaskill Julia Gaskill is a professional daydreamer hailing from Portland, Oregon. Her poetry examines the tightrope we sometimes walk of feeling our voices censored and also being unabashedly ourselves. Her poems touch on everyday…

Free

graft union reading + open mic #3

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

a monthly event for sharing creative writing, food, drink, and community featuring student writers from PDX academic institutions and beyond! highlighting students + alumni from PSU, UoP, PCC, PNCA, Lewis & Clark University, Reed College + local writers 7-9 pm, Friday, August 16th doors 6:30 @ Literary Arts 925 sw Washington hello! we’re excited to announce our third event (and last of the summer) on Friday, August 16th, 7pm at @literaryarts in Downtown Portland. We hope to see you there + here your words >> use links in bio to sign up as a reader or to get involved in future events >> DM us with any questions, comments, or to get on our ethereal mailing list xo GU

Free