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!
9:00 am – 9:50 am, Vollum Lecture Hall Life of the Story: A Panel on Vision and Revision, with Jamel Brinkley, Danielle Evans, R.O. Kwon, and Karen Shepard, moderated by David Naimon Open to the public for a fee of $10 (Cash and Cards accepted at the door).
8:00 pm, Cerf Amphitheater– Signing to Follow R.O. Kwon, Michelle Tea, Justin Torres, Camille T. Dungy R.O. Kwon is the author of The Incendiaries, published by Riverhead (U.S.) and Virago (U.K.). The Incendiaries is an American Booksellers Association Indie Next #1 Great Read and Indies Introduce selection, and it was named a best book of the year by over forty publications. The novel is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award for Best First Book, Los Angeles Times First Book Prize, and Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Fiction Prize, and is nominated for the Aspen Prize and American Library Association Carnegie Medal. The Incendiaries is being translated into five languages. Kwon’s writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Paris Review, Vice,…
9:00 am – 9:50 am, Vollum Lecture Hall Framing and Perspective in Graphic Storytelling, with Kristen Radtke We use framing and perspective all the time in prose writing, but we probably don’t think about them in the same way. We’ll look at how framing—from the simple way that illustrations are confined, to more complicated shapes—as well as pace, visual silence, visual argument, and interruption. Then we’ll talk about how these tools are employed beyond comics and into prose, poetry, and a myriad of visual storytelling forms. 2:30 pm – 3:20 pm, Vollum Lecture Hall Power and Audience: On Not Writing for White People, with Ingrid Rojas Contreras This lecture will look at the many ways we adopt speaking to address majority cultures, how those corners…
8:00 pm, Cerf Amphitheater– Signing to Follow Garth Greenwell, Terese Marie Mailhot, Patricia Smith Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, it was named a Best Book of 2016 by over fifty publications in nine countries, and is being translated into a dozen languages. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for The New Yorker, the…
9:00 am – 9:50 am, Vollum Lecture Hall The Necessary and Dangerous Differences Between Sense and Sensuality, with Natalie Diaz 2:30 pm – 3:20 pm, Vollum Lecture Hall Spilling the Tea: A Conversation between D. A. Powell and Camille T. Dungy How do ideas become poems and how do poets come up with ideas? Poets Camille Dungy and D. A. Powell talk about the role of conversation, influence, history, form, resistance, improvisation and stubborn independence in their own work and work they admire. Also, how to support and encourage poetry as a living art, an impactful and meaningful interaction between words, space, and humanity. What to listen to and what to shut out. How to address the chronic cruelties of the world with compassion. What…
8:00 pm, Cerf Amphitheater– Signing to Follow Rebecca Makkai, Natalie Diaz, Mitchell S. Jackson Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, as well as the short story collection Music for Wartime. Her short fiction won a 2017 Pushcart Prize, and was chosen for The Best American Short Stories for four consecutive years (2008-2011). The recipient of a 2014 NEA fellowship, Makkai is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University, and she is the Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago. Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila…
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…
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…
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.
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…