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: 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…

Free

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.

Free

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…

Free

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.

Free

2022 Tin House Summer Workshop Reading Series: Megan Giddings, Anis Mojgani, Lidia Yuknavitch

Reed College - Cerf Amphitheater 3203 Southeast Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, OR, United States

We are excited to once again be offering in-person readings as part of our 2022 Summer Workshop programming. Starting at 7:30 pm, these events will take place in Reed College’s Cerf Amphitheater and are free and open to the public. Faculty books will be available for purchase at the Reed Bookstore, with authors signing after the event. Masks are not required in the outdoor amphitheater. Megan Giddings has degrees from University of Michigan and Indiana University. She is a senior features editor at The Rumpus. In 2018, she was a recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial fund grant for feminist fiction. Her novel, Lakewood, was published by Amistad in 2020. It was one of New York Magazine’s 10 best books of 2020, one of NPR’s…

Free

2022 Tin House Summer Workshop Reading Series: Casey Plett, T Kira Madden, Nafissa Thompson-Spires

Reed College - Cerf Amphitheater 3203 Southeast Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, OR, United States

We are excited to once again be offering in-person readings as part of our 2022 Summer Workshop programming. Starting at 7:30 pm, these events will take place in Reed College’s Cerf Amphitheater and are free and open to the public. Faculty books will be available for purchase at the Reed Bookstore, with authors signing after the event. Masks are not required in the outdoor amphitheater. Casey Plett is the author of A Dream of a Woman, Little Fish, A Safe Girl to Love, the co-editor of Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy From Transgender Writers, and the Publisher at LittlePuss Press. She has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, the Winnipeg Free Press, and other publications. A winner of the Amazon First Novel Award, the…

Free

2022 Tin House Summer Workshop Reading Series: Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Book Release for “The Man Who Could Move Clouds”

Reed College - Cerf Amphitheater 3203 Southeast Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, OR, United States

We are excited to once again be offering in-person readings as part of our 2022 Summer Workshop programming. Starting at 7:30 pm, these events will take place in Reed College’s Cerf Amphitheater and are free and open to the public. Faculty books will be available for purchase at the Reed Bookstore, with authors signing after the event. Masks are not required in the outdoor amphitheater. Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor's choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed, Nylon, and Guernica, among others. Rojas Contreras has received…

Free

2022 Tin House Summer Workshop Reading Series: Patrick Cottrell, Sarah Gerard, Ruben Quesada, Lesley Nneka Arimah

Reed College - Cerf Amphitheater 3203 Southeast Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, OR, United States

We are excited to once again be offering in-person readings as part of our 2022 Summer Workshop programming. Starting at 7:30 pm, these events will take place in Reed College’s Cerf Amphitheater and are free and open to the public. Faculty books will be available for purchase at the Reed Bookstore, with authors signing after the event. Masks are not required in the outdoor amphitheater. Patrick Cottrell was born in South Korea and raised in the Midwest. He is the author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace (McSweeney's), which has been translated into French, Italian, Turkish, and Korean. He is the 2018 winner of a Whiting Award in Fiction and a 2017 Barnes and Noble Discover Award. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Granta, Guernica and other places. He served as…

Free

2022 Tin House Summer Workshop Reading Series: Omar El Akkad, R.O. Kwon, Faylita Hicks

Reed College - Cerf Amphitheater 3203 Southeast Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, OR, United States

We are excited to once again be offering in-person readings as part of our 2022 Summer Workshop programming. Starting at 7:30 pm, these events will take place in Reed College’s Cerf Amphitheater and are free and open to the public. Faculty books will be available for purchase at the Reed Bookstore, with authors signing after the event. Masks are not required in the outdoor amphitheater. Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. The start of his journalism career coincided with the start of the war on terror, and over the following decade he reported from Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and many other locations…

Free

2022 Tin House Summer Workshop Reading Series: Saeed Jones, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Paisley Rekdal

Reed College - Cerf Amphitheater 3203 Southeast Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, OR, United States

We are excited to once again be offering in-person readings as part of our 2022 Summer Workshop programming. Starting at 7:30 pm, these events will take place in Reed College’s Cerf Amphitheater and are free and open to the public. Faculty books will be available for purchase at the Reed Bookstore, with authors signing after the event. Masks are not required in the outdoor amphitheater. Saeed Jones is the author of the memoir How We Fight for Our Lives, winner of the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, and the poetry collection Prelude to Bruise, winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award. The poetry collection was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics…

Free