Portland Books Through Bars

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Portland Books Through Bars

Portland Books Through Bars is a volunteer run, donation based organization in Portland, Oregon

https://linktr.ee/pdxbooks

Portland Books Through Bars is an all volunteer collective distributing books free of charge to adults in custody.

05/05/2026

We got a shelf system upgrade from and we are THRILLED about it!

If you have attended one of our sessions you know that we have a built in library/overstock component and then also a larger room where we wheel out frequently requested resources and genres.

We were able to purchase from one of our local indie shop partners and now have expanded what we have to be browsable! Look at how excited our resident Librarian is 🤩

Are you interested in getting involved with Books Through Bars? Sessions fill up quickly but we often have other modes and channels where we seek support. Or, ask us about hosting a special session for you and your friends, bookclub, coworkers, and community members!

05/01/2026

it's MAY DAY, it's time to rally, come see us in the park blocks across from Portland Art Museum.

workers and migrants unite!

04/30/2026

Announcing the first PDX Books Through Bars Community Benefit: Bridges to Liberation!

Portland Books Through Bars and Past Lives invite you to join us for an afternoon of community conversation.

📖 hear letters sent to us directly from our incarcerated community members

📖 discover the impact of the Past Lives Prison Outreach Guild

📖 learn how you can advocate for adults in custody to have access to quality, free reading materials in Oregon and across the country

📖 meet with local leaders and community organizers to discuss and understand the impact of incarceration

May 30th
12 - 4 PM
📍Past Lives

💙 Featuring:

prisonoutreachguild

04/24/2026

Tomorrow is Independent Bookstore Day and kicks off our full week of celebrating local, independent bookstores.

How does Indie Bookstore Week work & how can you participate?

1. Buy a book to donate forward to Portland Books Through Bars from the four participating bookstores between Saturday, April 25 - Saturday, May 2

2. For every book purchased at these bookstores, the cost will ALSO be matched as a donation to Portland Books Through Bars for the whole week!

Participating Bookstores:

Featured here are displays set up at Always Here Bookstore and Belmont Books, we're so excited to turn out for support this week!

See you out there, readers of Portland 📖

04/16/2026

If there is one thing about us, it's that we LOVE our local independent bookstores.

The PDX Books Through Bars Indie Bookstore Week is back, where we show support for our local shops and help get quality books to our community of incarcerated readers.

In this book drive, you will choose a title from the wishlist OR genre shelves at the four participating bookstores and purchase that book to donate forward, aiding the PDX BTB library needs!

Not in Portland? You can ALSO support us by purchasing from our Bookshop.org wishlist, where a percentage of purchases will go to support the strike fund 🖤

From April 25 - May 2, visit Always Here Bookstore, Belmont Books, Third Eye Books, and Wallace Books to participate and every purchased title you donate to Books Through Bars will be MATCHED with a financial donation 🙌🏼

03/25/2026

On Wednesday, March 25th at 6pm, we will be opening up the next round of sign ups for our weekly volunteer letter matching sessions.

All sessions for April through June will be released at this time and you will be able to sign up for your first selections of the new year.

Because of how long our wait lists have been getting, we would like to ask you all that in the first day our sessions open for you to only pick TWO sessions per month to attend.

Our hope is that more of you, who have been patiently waiting, will then be able to attend one of our letter matching sessions before the next quarter is up.

After the first 24 hours have passed, then you’re welcome to sign up for as many sessions as you may like!

Want to get this reminder sent to you via email? Join our newsletter (no spam!) and hear about session drops a week in advance!

03/21/2026

AIDNW walked in to visit our partners at requesting donations and their bookseller, Brooke, immediately put the organizers in direct contact with our team.

Within a week we had a scheduled call set up and were working on our collaboration: to get quality books to people being detained by ICE at the Tacoma Northwest Detention Camp.

The literary materials needed and requested are incredibly specific, and we want to meet the need exactly as asked - so we are only accepting book donations through our Bookshop.org wishlist.

Our resident librarian and Board Member has been working directly with the AIDNW team to set the wishlist, diligently researching titles and publications to especially avoid AI-generated "translations" for the novels that have been requested starting with the following languages: Farsi, Punjabi, Spanish, Vietnamese, Kazakh, and Hindi.

When you buy a title through our wishlist, your purchase will be delivered directly to our Books Through Bars team for processing and we will orchestrate hand off to the AIDNW team for delivery

AND

10% of every sale through our affiliate page will also go to the Strike Fund, to aid Local 5 members in the event of a strike.

None of this would have ever been possible if it wasn’t for the sustained support we receive from indie bookstores and our community members in Portland!

f**k ice!!!

02/25/2026

Artist and Board Member Uma has been creating an archive of artwork that has been sent to us over the years from people thanking us for the books they received in the mail.

We keep this artwork in a binder for people to browse and ask our volunteers to make sure to keep any letters they receive that have extra art included!

Uma is also the artist behind our logo and our hand drawn signage for our letter matching sessions and tabling events.

02/18/2026

Pockets, you made our day!

We received this sweet letter and enclosed chapbook zines from an artist and poet in Birmingham, AL named Pockets.

If you ever have similar materials you would like to send our way to share with folks in our community, we love to open letters to these kinds of surprises 💌

02/04/2026

Yesterday, we unpacked a stack of ‘return to sender’ envelopes, which isn’t an unusual thing for us to receive when one of our community members is moved to a new location or is released.

We got through the first 10 or so envelopes alerting us that the letters we sent during our Letters of Light event could not be delivered because that person was no longer at that specific institution.

And then we got to the “mail violations” 🙄

Each of the letters we sent through this campaign we photocopied making sure no ink or crayon or marker or anything would flag in the mail review system + writing “this is a copy” in the top corner of the page even before copying and sending.

Most of the 20+ “violations” circled a drop of rainwater on the edge of the external envelope that had barely leaked into the enclosed letter.

A drop that could have been easily transferred to the letter at the bottom of a mail carrier bag, bottom of a rusty mailbox, transferring mail from a bin to the mail delivery locations, you name it.

A couple of the rejections didn’t have the “violations” even make it through the envelope to the enclosed letter - so they decided our return address stamp was in violation instead drawing an arrow on the front of only SOME of the returns from the same institution.

Rainwater? In Oregon? During the winter? Groundbreaking.

We were immediately frustrated by this, especially after also reading many letter responses that came in yesterday as replies from Letters of Light, thanking our volunteers for helping our community “feel human again” and enclosing artwork and handmade bracelets.

We talk a lot about how we can’t control what gets flagged for rejection from the institutions and how much of it seems very subjective.

This painted that picture particularly clearly for us and we wanted to share with you the types of fiddly, opaque “guidances” we are trying to follow with every package we send.

01/29/2026

We have been seeing many local businesses, individuals, and organizations pouring out necessary support for Minnesota and beyond with a heartening voice against what ICE is doing to people in our country, and in our own back yard, yes, here in Oregon too.

We have also seen many headlines, tweets, threads, and takes speaking about the innocent lives that are being affected by this system.

We are reminded of words by Brit “Red” Schulte in the collection published through AK Press: “Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis” which was edited by Kelly Hayes.

In these moments, we ask you to consider pausing, thinking of how the carceral system is designed to function and the groups that benefit from this system, and joining with us to unlearn the language of “innocence” as we work in daily acts of solidarity, even beyond Friday the 30th, against the forces threatening our community.

Abolish ICE.

Address

Portland, OR

Opening Hours

5pm - 7pm

Website

https://www.pdxbooks.org/

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