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 downtown Literary Arts space, online, and at partnering venues across Portland and Oregon.
This bimonthly reading series is intended to prioritize the safety, creativity, and stories of Black people, Indigenous people, and People of Color. Come listen to our featured readers, or sign
One Page Wednesday is back in-person at our downtown center! Here is an opportunity to share or listen to one page of work in progress from talented writers from everywhere.
Friday, September 9, is the deadline for submission to the 2023 Oregon Book Awards and Special Awards. Books published between September 1, 2021 and August 31, 2022 are eligible. Complete Oregon Book Awards guidelines are here, and guidelines for the Special Awards are here.
It’s all about the relationship! In this workshop you’ll learn when and how to search for an agent, what you need for a powerful query letter, and the nuts and bolts of when to sign, when not to sign, and how to escape from a toxic agent relationship. Access Program We want our writing classes
Literary Arts is thrilled to announce the lineup of authors appearing at this year's Portland Book Festival, presented by Bank of America, which will take place on Saturday, November 5,
This course for dedicated writers is designed to guide you through the writing and/or revising of your novel. It runs from September through May. You’ll read excerpts from published novels by authors including Han Kang, Tommy Orange, Lina Meruane, Mitchell S. Jackson, Deborah Levy, and Susan Steinberg, as well as craft essays by authors including
Incite: Queer Writers Read is a curated, bimonthly reading series for Queer writers. Incite’s hope is to create conversation, connection, and greater understanding both within the Queer community and with other
Can we “chase” our imagination to its source? Where does creativity happen in the mind? These are some of the questions Lynda Barry explores in her book Syllabus, which describes the author’s lifelong investigation of the creative process. Participants will discuss Barry's techniques, and visit their own creative process, and perhaps draft a new story,
This course for dedicated writers is designed to guide you through the writing and/or revising of your novel. It runs from September through May. You’ll read excerpts from published novels by authors including Han Kang, Tommy Orange, Lina Meruane, Mitchell S. Jackson, Deborah Levy, and Susan Steinberg, as well as craft essays by authors including
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
The Alano Club of Portland's Artists in Recovery series and Literary Arts are thrilled to welcome Hanif Abdurraqib, Kaveh Akbar and Leslie Jamison to Portland for a reading and conversation
A reading with Hanif Abdurraqib, poet, essayist, and cultural critic. He is the author of the poetry The Crown Ain't Worth Much and the essay collection They Can't Kill Us
“When I sit down and start writing, I feel the given world recede, and I can just play.” —Sam Lipsyte Remember when you were a little kid, playing on the floor for hours and hours? Our best writing days are often imbued with that same sense of timelessness, freedom, wonder, and escape—in other words, our
When was the last story you read that really changed you? Maybe you thought about it for days, weeks, you’ve re-read it over the years. And maybe you said to yourself, “I wish I could write like that. How’d they do that?” This course is all about the how. In this combination craft and workshop
This event is part of our 38th season of Portland Arts & Lectures. Subscriptions for the five-part lecture series are on sale now. All lectures will be held in person at The Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in downtown Portland, OR. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. on the night of the lecture, with the program beginning
Do you think in lengthy narrative strands, elegantly formed with a beginning, middle and an end? I don’t. I flit from image, to feeling, to recrimination, to joy. Light flickers over my memories, both happy and hard. I call these messy memories ‘stamps,’ events or moments that have imprinted upon me in unshakeable ways. In
This class begins in September, with the goal of finishing a complete draft of a memoir by June. Participants do not need to be published writers; however, they should have some experience with elements of memoir, including character, setting, dialogue and scene, and have a clear project in mind that they will devote nine months
In 1889 Henri Bergson's (1858-1941) bestseller Time and Free Will inaugurated a vast revolution of the understanding of time in world philosophy that was a keystone in the literature, art, and philosophy of the modern world. After an eclipse of his reputation for some decades, Bergson's ideas have returned as one of the most powerful
This 8-week class is focused on holding yourself and your classmates accountable to your writing goals. Each week, plan to share your work-in-progress with the group, set or revise goals for your weekly writing practice, and share successes and challenges with fellow writers. You’ll also learn strategies for keeping focused and staying on track. Occasional
This weekend intensive is designed for writers who have written at least the first two chapters of a novel. Limited to 8 students, each participant will have their work discussed, with feedback from the class and the instructor. Discussions will be focused on character development and plot and how to chart the next steps with
Delve for Writers is a new, occasional Delve series that offers seminars that focus on close readings of narrative, form, and stylistic choices that writers can incorporate into their own writing practice. Creative nonfiction is the perfect place to find voice, ideas and perspective – and nobody does it better Joan Didion and contemporary groundbreaker
“Your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone’s.” -Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, The Poet’s Companion What we know in our personal worlds contain essential truths of the larger world. The challenge we face as poets is how to transform our lived experiences–creatively and imaginatively–into art that can be
One Page Wednesday is back in-person at our downtown center! Here is an opportunity to share or listen to one page of work in progress from talented writers from everywhere.
Literary Arts is proud to invite you to Bookmark: A Benefit for Literary Arts, a showing of essential support for and celebration of the stories in our community and the essential
Searching for a space to create new work with fellow BIPOC writers? This two-hour workshop meets on Zoom. A variety of prompts will be presented as avenues for generating and sharing new work in an informal setting. Open to BIPOC writers at all levels writing in poetry, fiction, or nonfiction. Access Program We want our
The world is a weird place, and we’re just here to document it. This course is for the scribes, the armchair historians, the miners of weird information — all of you aspiring nonfiction writers who aren’t sure what to do with your ideas, or budding freelance journalists looking to turn your ideas into sellable stories.
If a story leads exactly where you would expect it to go, then both the writer and the reader have discovered nothing. How do we expand our well-behaved, satisfying stories to fully burst into the mystery and unpredictability of human experience? This discussion class will give participants the tools to examine great stories for the
We're all familiar with satisfying story shape, the arc of a story that follows the pattern of jokes and sex—the inciting incident, rising action, crisis and the falling action. Yet sometimes this pattern can leave a story flat, without room for wonder. If a story leads exactly where you would expect it to go, then
Kundiman creates a space where Asian Americans can explore, through art, the unique challenges that face the new and ever changing diaspora. We see the arts as a tool of
Literary Arts and Fishtrap are pleased to announce that the Oregon Book Award Author Tour will travel to Wallowa County on Friday, October 21 at 7:00pm as part of Fishtrap’s
In this seminar we will explore Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, Nights of Plague, an epic narrative which depicts the outbreak of the bubonic plague in the late Ottoman era during the reign of the despotic Sultan Abdülhamid II. The stage of the epidemic is the fictional island Minger in the Levant, and the year is
This course is for all levels of writers and readers; the only requirement is a desire to take a deep dive into the unique art of autofiction (autobiographical fiction). We will read and discuss excerpts from contemporary authors who write within the genre, such as Lucia Berlin, Tao Lin, Edouard Louis, Chris Kraus, Garth Greenwell,
This bimonthly reading series is intended to prioritize the safety, creativity, and stories of Black people, Indigenous people, and People of Color. Come listen to our featured readers, or sign
An unforgettable live multimedia experience. “Sweeping the nation with live performances of human interest stories…like an emotionally intellectual rock concert.”—Playbill Pop-Up Magazine is the acclaimed live magazine show, featuring original and unforgettable true stories, art, music, and performance from the world’s great and emerging storytellers and journalists, accompanied by illustration, animation, film, photography, and an original
Karen Eva Carr and Bonnie Tsui in conversation, moderated by OPB's Paul Marshall.
Visit St. Rita's Amazing Traveling Bookstore and create a page about your Portland community.
Join us at Gallery Go Go from 10am-6pm to see the work of 14 artists make art in response to books.
In this online three-part workshop, participants will explore various methods of using the Tarot and other simple forms of divination as prompts for poems. We will allow ourselves to be
More than forty years after its original publication, A Peculiar Paradise: A History of Blacks in Oregon, 1788–1940, remains the most comprehensive chronology of Black life in Oregon. Join us for the official book launch, hosted by Third Eye Books Accessories and Gifts, Portland’s only black-owned bookstore.
The Argentine genius Jorge Luis Borges explored every facet of the word during his lifetime of writing. From sonnets about dream tigers to stories about detectives in Buenos Aires to
This special book launch event will feature a conversation between Toad editor Naomi Huffman and Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State. This event is cosponsored by Lewis & Clark Special Collections and Archives.
A conversation between Oregon Symphony creative chair Gabriel Kahane and author Karen Russell.
Join us at 6:30 PM at the Cascade Campus of Portland Community College in North Portland (Terrell Hall 122) as we celebrate this fantastic collection by late local poet Carolyn Moore, whose estate gave rise to PCC's Carolyn Moore Writing Residency. Readers will include Oregon Poet Laureate Anis Mojgani; poet Shelley Wong, whose debut As She Appears won the Pamet Prize from YesYes Books and was recently longlisted for the National Book Award; Carolyn Moore Writing resident Baruch Porras-Hernandez; and PCC's 2022-23 HARTS Writer-in-residence, Karah Kemmerly.
Write Around Portland presents Word Play, a community writing frenzy featuring prompts and exercises from our renowned workshop model rooted in respect, writing, and community.
Join the editors of Oregon Humanities magazine for an evening featuring Sallie Tisdale, Daniela Molnar, Paul Susi, and Laura Gibson, and other recent contributors reading essays and poems.
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