Events

Monthly on every third Tuesday

Join us for a monthly Q&A about all things publishing and books!

Join Ali Shaw—co-owner of BOLD Coffee & Books and owner of Indigo: Editing, Design, and More—for an in-person Q&A about the publishing process, the business of writing, and the book world in general. If you have questions about how to start your publishing journey, bring them! If you’ve always wondered about something more obscure, like how to tell if an antique book is a first edition or what librarians do at trade shows, bring those too!

Free and open to the public.

Event cohosted by BOLD Coffee & Books and Indigo: Editing, Design, and More.

Wednesdays every week

Every Wednesday

No more procrastination! Bring your work in progress and join other writers for some dedicated time to get your words down.

Every Wednesday 5:00–5:30 Arrive, get comfortable, meet your fellow writers, and chat about your projects 5:30–6:30 Time to shut up and write!

Cohosted by BOLD Coffee & Books (

https://boldcoffeeandbooks.com

) and Indigo: Editing, Design, and More (

https://www.indigoediting.com

). 

Thursdays every week

Do you love paper crafts? We do too!

This group is for people seeking consistent time to practice paper arts and crafts in a small, low-pressure group setting.

***Space is limited. Please RSVP on Meetup here.***

Every Friday

Join us for a writing/discussion group. This is a co-working meeting. If you are looking for feedback or critique, there are other meetings for that. The format is social chat for 15 minutes, silent write for an hour, chat for 15 minutes, repeat.

Hosted by Rose City Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers at BOLD Coffee & Books.

BOLD is thrilled to host a reading with Dave Markowitz, author of Refuge for the Weary Empath: The Sacred Work of Healing Ourselves and Healing Our World.

Join us for an intimate author reading celebrating empathy, healing, and the lived experience of sensitive souls. This event offers a welcoming space for reflection, connection, and thoughtful conversation.

Refuge for the Weary Empath was written as a soft landing place — a space to rest and rediscover what your sensitivity wants to show you. These pages offer stories, reflections, and gentle guidance to help you trace your exhaustion back to its true source, reconnect with your own steady center, and begin to experience your empathy as a bridge to clarity, belonging, and inner peace.

Dave Markowitz is a Source intuitive, bestselling author, and healing facilitator who has spent over three decades helping empaths transform overwhelm into growth. Drawing from his own journey and client experiences, he offers practical wisdom that supports clarity, resilience, purpose, and personal and collective healing.

Arrive at 6:30 p.m. to grab a snack or drink. The event will start at 7:00 p.m.

*****

Event cohosted by BOLD Coffee & Books and Indigo: Editing, Design, and More.

Do you love stories about kids or animals who save the day? Do you love to dance and color and play? We do too!

Come join Ali Shaw of Bold Coffee & Books for a fun storytime. Hear some stories, make some friends, and leave with art. What an amazing way to spend a Saturday!

Plus, 20% off children's books and $1 off hot chocolate on Saturday mornings.

*****

Event cohosted by BOLD Coffee & Books and Indigo: Editing, Design, and More.

BOLD is thrilled to host a reading with Ilia Epifanov, author of Pale Imitators. 

Pale Imitators, a pulpy alien invasion story, is the first in a series of sci-fi throwbacks to the times when conspiracy theories were fun! Inspired by The Thing and The X-files, the story follows Teddy Money, a patrolman who finds himself in the middle of a government conspiracy and a potential alien invasion. Come join Ilia Epifanov for a reading and signing event! 

Ilia Epifanov is a Portland-based author of sci-fi and horror. New to Oregon, he loves to explore it with his wife and their Pomeranian.

*****

Event cohosted by BOLD Coffee & Books and Indigo: Editing, Design, and More.

Monthly on every last Tuesday

Come meet other writers and enjoy a drink in this fun and informal setting to bond over the written (or still unwritten!) word.

5:00–7:00 p.m.

Drop in at your convenience. We'll be happy to see you and hear about your writing!

Event cohosted by BOLD Coffee & Books and Indigo: Editing, Design, and More.

BOLD is thrilled to host the HWA Oregon x BOLD Books 3rd Annual Halloween Party.

Join us for HWA Oregon's third annual Halloween Party. This night of thrills and chills features readings from local horror authors, a costume contest, games, and prize raffles from local publishers and authors. Come dressed up, eat some candy, and listen in as our authors share otherworldly, supernatural tales. 

H. A. Spector resides in the suburbs of beautiful Portland, Oregon where he serves as the Chair of the Horror Writers Association, Oregon Chapter. He holds a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Commercial Fiction from Southern New Hampshire University. You can find his work published in Dark Harbor Magazine. His advice for his fellow writers would be to do anything they need to in order to find a writing community, even if it means starting one themselves, and to invest in their local bookstores and libraries to ensure readership for all continues to exist for generations to come. 

Nathan Carson was raised on a goat farm in the backwoods of Mid-Valley Oregon but has called Portland home since 1997. He is an accomplished author, music journalist, booking agent, FM radio DJ, founding member of the long-running band Witch Mountain, and a MOTH StorySlam Champion. 

Niyyah R. Haqq writes children and adult speculative fiction, fantasy and horror, with an emphasis on Muslim American and multicultural characters. You can find her short stories in Demagogue Press, Believe in Wonder Publishing, and upcoming by Hayaat House, Bel Esprit, and Weird Fiction Quarterly. By day, she's a healthcare provider and can get really nerdy with you about infectious disease, emergency medicine and toxicology. Prior to her healthcare career she taught ESL in South Korea, Cambodia, and Hungary. She is the medical coordinator for the PCRF Portland chapter, the Portland SCBWI Coffee Coordinator, and Co-Chair for Young Willamette Writers. She is a member of SCBWI and HWA.

Dan Finnegan has written professionally for over fifteen years but is new to the world of fiction. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he discovered his love for punk rock, he now lives in Oregon with his family, spending his free time writing stories, playing guitar, and enjoying the PNW’s natural beauty. He gravitates toward horror and weird fiction in his writing and reading. He also co-hosts a podcast with his partner called Dusk to Dawn: Reading Horror and Weird Fiction.   

Remy Nakamura is a writer of dark and weird fiction. You can find his stories in Escape Pod, Pseudopod, and many anthologies. He is a graduate of the Clarion West Workshop and recently served on the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) Board. He is currently working on an MA in Genre Writing. Remy grew up in Greece, Japan, and the San Francisco Bay Area, but now lives in Portland, Oregon, with his extremely stylish partner and a cat who is more famous than he will ever be. He spends as much time as possible getting cold, wet, and muddy.

Andrew S. Fuller writes dark and strange stories. His fiction appears in magazines, anthologies, a few short films, and the collection Constellations of Ruin (2023, Trepidatio Publishing). Since 1999, he’s served as editor of Three-Lobed Burning Eye Magazine. He resides in the Pacific Northwest near the confluence of two rivers and a conclave of several extinct(?) volcanoes, and remains friends with crows and spiders. 

Vanessa MacLellan is an internationally published poet and author.  She has two mythology-based novels: Three Great Lies, an Egyptian portal fantasy published by Hadley Rille Books, and Awaken, a Norse dark fantasy, as well as a superhero series: the Seeded Saga.  She’s had nine works of short fiction published, including a story in The Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide and the No Sleep Podcast.  A member of SFWA, HWA, and Codex, and a graduate of the Viable Paradise workshop, she writes, studies nature, hikes, camps, and bird watches in the Pacific Northwest, USA.  

Will Boechler is an author from Fargo, North Dakota now living in Portland, Oregon. His work primarily deals with themes of memory and the past reemerging to haunt the present. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Portland State University. He loves ghosts, folk horror, werewolves, and haunted landscapes. He is currently at work penning his first horror novel.

Zachariah O is a writer from the Pacific Northwest who enjoys telling stories with his friends, and thinking about how things work. When not trading his time for money, he can be found at various cafes around town. Proud member of the National Writers Union. 

Arrive at 6:30 p.m. to grab a snack or drink. The event will start at 7:00 p.m.

*****

Event cohosted by BOLD Coffee & Books and Indigo: Editing, Design, and More.

Happy Halloween!

Be sure to check out our spooky book displays for stories to celebrate the season. 

Kiddos get a free hot chocolate and early trick-or-treating candy at storytime today!

We'll be closing early at 4:00 p.m., so caffeine up early, and stay safe out there, folks!

BOLD is thrilled to host a reading with memoirists Jill McCabe Johnson, author of Learning to Spar, Nicola Ranson, author of A Slice of Orange: loving and leaving the Osho/Rajneesh cult, and Shavaun Scott, author of Nightbird.

Was I deceived, deluded or at fault? The price of loving a manipulator can be grief, shame and a profound loss of personal reality. In their bold memoirs, Jill Johnson, Nicola Ranson, and Shavaun Scott explore the personal and systemic challenges of coercion disguised as love. Committed to vulnerability and clarity, they share their journeys through hope and delusion and shed light on what means to heal and reclaim the capacity to love.

Jill McCabe Johnson, Ph.D., is the author of four poetry collections and the memoir, Learning to Spar, about defending herself against a series of predatory men and a broken legal system in the epicenter of what one FBI profiler called America’s Killing Fields. Jill is editor-in-chief of Wandering Aengus Press.

For ten years, Nicola Ranson was a member of the notorious Rajneesh cult. Now a somatic psychotherapist working with survivors from multiple cults, her memoir, A Slice of Orange: loving and leaving the Osho/Rajneesh cult (Unsolicited Press) reveals her life inside the organization that committed poisoning and attempted murder in Oregon.

Shavaun Scott has been a psychotherapist for over 30 years. She has written four books, the most recent is her memoir, Nightbird, which explores her fundamentalist upbringing and subsequent journey into and out of an abusive relationship which ended in tragedy.  She loves sharing stories of unconventional paths and uncommon bravery.

Arrive at 5:00 p.m. to grab a snack or drink. The event will start at 5:30 p.m.

*****

Event cohosted by BOLD Coffee & Books and Indigo: Editing, Design, and More.

Monthly on every first Tuesday

Monthly on every second Tuesday

Remember how great silent reading time was in elementary school? The melting away of distractions while you lost yourself in a great book? Now you can get that as an adult too!

Join us at BOLD for a silent reading party. Bring your book or buy one here. Grab a drink or pastry, and lose yourself in those pages.

Arrive around 5:00 if you want to meet other readers and share about the book you’re reading. The background music switches to classical and the reading begins at 5:30 p.m. More book talk afterwards, at 6:30.

Event cohosted by BOLD Coffee & Books and Indigo: Editing, Design, and More.

BOLD is thrilled to host How to Read a Work of Literature Out Loud: A Workshop with Emmett Wheatfall and Gail Pasternack.

Portland poet Emmett Wheatfall along with writer and storyteller Gail Pasternack present their workshop, “How to Read a Work of Literature Out Loud.” If you want principles that will help you become more effective at reading your work, you should attend this free workshop. 

Both Emmett and Gail are well known in their fields, Emmett for his performative poetry and Gail for her storytelling. Come drink coffee and enjoy learning about the art of reading your work to a listening audience.

Emmett Wheatfall is an American poet, Oregon Poet Laureate nominee, and recipient of the prestigious Oregon Poetry Association Patricia Ruth Banta Award. His poetry has been published in several books, collections, anthologies, and one of them, As Clean as a Bone, was a 2019 Eric Hoffer Award Finalist and a da Vinci Eye award finalist. Emmett has keynoted two Oregon Poetry Association’s Conferences. In 2020, Corban University produced a 9-part series documentary that highlights Emmett’s early life and poetry. Emmett Wheatfall is one of Oregon’s premier poets. 

Gail Pasternack is a writer, educator, and storyteller. She is one of the editors and contributing authors of The Rooster Princess and Other Tales, a feminist collection of re-envisioned Jewish stories. In 2025, Publishers Weekly praised her clever story adaptations. Gail is the President Emeritus of Willamette Writers and served on their Board of Directors for eleven years. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and a masters from Columbia University. A native New Yorker, she now lives with her husband and her dog, Leeta, in Portland, Oregon where she enjoys drinking cocktails, listening to live jazz, and dancing Argentine tango.

Arrive at 1:30 p.m. to grab a snack or drink. The event will start at 2:00 p.m.

*****

Event cohosted by BOLD Coffee & Books and Indigo: Editing, Design, and More.