Our events, classes, and seminars bring the community together to hear, learn, and discuss the most compelling issues and ideas of our day. We hope you will join us in our community space and bookstore at 716 SE Grand Avenue, Portland, OR, online, and at partnering venues across Portland and Oregon.
Stephen Crane lived a short and intense life, and wrote short and intense fiction. Regardless of the genre—he was a muckraking journalist, an author, and a poet—Crane never shied from an ugly truth, never spared his readers’ feelings. Whether depicting the sordid streets of lower Manhattan or fictionalizing his own experience of shipwreck, Crane’s remarkable
The Literary Arts Bookstore is pleased to welcome Chris Kraus to celebrate the release of her latest book, The Four Spent the Day Together! Kraus will be joined in conversation
Sarah Weinman, author of The Real Lolita, returns to Literary Arts with her latest release, Without Consent, a deep dive into the historic case that defined marital rape and consent
Join us for a special harvest write-in at the Literary Arts Bookstore and Cafe! This month we’re celebrating the Three Sisters, as always with a curated playlist and drink special
Slamlandia is a poetry open mic and slam that meets every month at Literary Arts, on the third Thursday. This mic provides a creative, fun, and welcoming space for all literary
Literary Arts with Queer Cute PDX are hosting a Literary Matchmaking Event! Queer Cute is a local organization that hosts social gatherings in the queer community, proceeds go toward supporting
This four-week poetry class will focus on the practice of keeping a commonplace book and how that practice can lead to a more generative poetic life.
Hosted by Kyle Yoshioka and Jessica Meza-Torres, this monthly reading series is intended to prioritize the safety, creativity, and stories of Black people, Indigenous people, and People of Color. The featured readers will
Here is an opportunity to share or listen to one page of work in progress from talented writers from everywhere. Come with a single page of work and sign up
In this 3-hour course, we’ll learn how, where, and with what to begin our memoirs. We’ll discover that our first chapter is more than just the sturdy foundation to a life recorded, it’s a guide for you, the writer—both a map and its key.
This December, The Moth’s anticipated Mainstage season comes to Portland in partnership with Literary Arts. When’s the last time you did something… daring? This Fall, The Moth Mainstage is
Join us at the Literary Arts Bookstore and Cafe for a write-in celebrating 250 years of Jane Austen! We’re channeling our inner Jane and writing the night away. Whether you’re
This four week Delve will focus on two early novels from Barbara Kingsolver. Both of these books take place in a southwest dealing with environmental impacts, poverty, and the choices people make within those contexts.
Come learn the power of making short movies with your own short narrative. Digital storytelling joins the arts of writing and filmmaking to create 3-4 minute films.
Does what you write or how you write it change with the seasons? In these quarterly gatherings we’ll meet to be inspired by the turn of the world.
In this class, we will look anew at our manuscripts or rough drafts. We’ll locate the symmetries that already exist and expand them, push them to their fullest potentials. We’ll find themes and ideas that are intuitively central to our stories and ask whether they’ve been examined enough.
In this Delve seminar we will explore three extraordinary literary lightning bolts that Woolf produced during the later years of her life, from the 1930’s through to the first years of World War II and the Battle of Britian.
Designed for writers who have an idea for a memoir in progress and are hoping to focus on character development, narrative energy and structure. In this six-week intensive, participants will generate 10-15 pages of additional material with a keen eye on the narrative bubbling beneath the surface.
In this 8-week, in-person class, we’ll focus on one of the hardest parts of writing: writing. If you’ve taken Get Writing before, in January 2026 we’ll use all new writing prompts and exercises. If you’ve never taken it, we encourage you to get writing! This class is open to all writers wanting to generate new work and learn more about the craft of writing.
Colm Tóibín appears at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on January 15, 2025 as part of the Portland Arts & Lectures series.
This class is intended to get you started on your novel, get you feedback, and keep you going. We’ll workshop excerpts of novels-in-progress, if you have them, but we’ll also work through low-pressure exercises intended to generate ideas and make narrative sparks fly.
In this workshop, we’ll read the first pages of novels by writers like Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Celeste Ng, Julia Armfield and more. We’ll consider the craft of a novel’s beginning and ways this can fit into the process of writing the full manuscript. Students will workshop their own first pages with each other and receive instructor feedback on up to 25 pages that begin their novels.
Who writes our shared histories? Who gets deemed "unreliable?" Through generative writing exercises and discussion of examples from Brody Parrish Craig's The Patient is an Unreliable Historian, we'll write poems together that challenge truth, combat erasure, and reclaim space for lived experience
Every story emerges from a prompt: a memory, an image, an historical incident, a song, a family tale. Experimenting with a wide array of such prompts can be a great way of discovering and developing stories, especially the ones that you didn’t know you wanted to tell.
In this seminar, you will acquaint yourselves with major writings of W. G. Sebald (1944-2001).
While this course will predominantly take the form of a workshop, it will also feature discussions of published works to explore the “absolutes” that govern the art of fiction and creative nonfiction, as well as to equip students to appreciate how they might bend if not break these rules in service of the stories that they hope to tell.
In this course, we’ll respond to writing prompts that engage the memory and summon the events of our past. By the end of week 8, all students will have a clear and succinct vision for their memoir, a revised outline, and the knowledge of both stories it is telling.
Imani Perry appears at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on February 12, 2026, as part of the Portland Arts & Lectures series.
This online poetry class will focus on the idea of obsession as a driving force for writing poetry - what you, as a poet, are interested in in terms of subject, style, forms, and even research or archival work. We will explore obsession as a poetic concept, and read example poems/poets and interrogate how obsession can be a catalyst for generating writing.
The Literary Arts Bookstore is pleased to welcome Karian LeBlanc to celebrate the release of A Kids Book About Purpose. She wrote this book to inspire kids, especially those who feel different, unseen, or unsure of their path, to believe in their greatness and take small steps toward a bigger purpose.
Thomas Pynchon’s novels are chaotic combinations of ideas, puns, characters, subplots, facts, fictions, and words. Set in the eighteenth century, Mason & Dixon includes all of the above plus a talking dog.
This six-week course is designed to help students finish a draft of a manuscript. We'll read craft essays about drafting a book, set aside time each week to discuss problems we're having with manuscripts, and design a schedule for each student to ensure everyone addresses the issues specific to their draft.
By turns deeply personal and elusively impersonal, lyrically intense yet permeated with allusions and references, The Waste Land has inspired, puzzled and even enraged generations of readers, even as the title itself became permanently established in the popular imagination.
In this workshop, we will ask: what can writing teach us about the ways we move through the world? How can we use our words to dismantle our own biases and the systems that live within us? Through exploration of gender and sexuality in creative texts across genres by TLGBQ+ and gender non-conforming writers, we will cultivate our own texts of interrogation and self-discovery.
Literary Arts is proud to present the culminating event of Multnomah County Library’s Everybody Reads program on March 12, 2026, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert
In this four part class, we will consider the what, why, who, and how of form: what form is, why we might choose to write in an inherited form, alter an inherited form, or write in a made-up form, and how we might go about doing so.
Patrick Radden Keefe appears at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on April 23, 2026, as part of the Portland Arts & Lectures series.
Verselandia! is the annual youth poetry slam championship presented by Literary Arts. It is the Grand Slam for the winners from individual school slams hosted by public high school librarians
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