09/16/2026
đź’ś Just... WOW. This past weekend we were absolutely *blown away* by all of your laughter and smiling faces. It's hard for us to express our gratitude with mere words. Seriously, THANK YOU SO MUCH to everyone who had *ANYTHING* to do with the first-ever Romancing Portland! This includes (in no particular order):
- Our sponsors—iroha, Insight Editions, Gameswell, and Libro.fm
- Our official bookstore, Grand Gesture Books (Love you!)
- Our Craft Room operators, Lost & Bound Books
- Our official charity, Friends of the Library, Multnomah County
- Our on-site staff, Mattie, Katie, Steph, and Carolina (Plus Bri!)
- Our collaborators, Geek Week PDX, The Hollywood Theatre, Portland Book Week, Bookstore Romance Day, Rose City Reads, Always Here Books, Parallel Worlds Books, Spoke & Words Books, Jan's Paperbacks, Spokane Renaissance Faire, Freeze Tag Events, DoPDX, Vettix.org, Fae and Scales Visual Fairytales, SheBop, and many more...
- Our other local partners and bookstore friends who posted about us on their social media, hosted giveaways, and/or put our posters and postcards in your businesses
- Our Ambassadors and local content creators, who helped promote the event on their personal platforms
- Our panelists and workshop leaders, who passed on their joy and knowledge to our attendees
- Our Main Stage moderators, Christine Bollow and Shayna Hodge
- Our ball performers, dance instructors, and entertainment: Jonah Scott, Nick Meyer, Raptor Props, Nauti Calypso, Whitney Rowlett, Alex Jacobs, DIY Portland, and Tia Rich (Serenity Witch)
- Our special guest authors: Alexandra Vasti, Alisha Rai, Analeigh Sbrana, Chelsea Cole, Emily Rath, Katee Robert, Kimberly Lemming, Kirstin Cast, P. C. Cast, Rebekah Weatherspoon, S. A. MacLean, Sara Raasch, and Taylor J. LaRue
- Our Audiobook & Audio Content Creator guests, Lost Tapes, Alice, Neondextrose, Nick Meyer, Lance West, Laura Horowitz, and Zura Johnson
- The publishers and representatives of our special guest authors who have been in emails with us for months and helped us attain some incredible swag and ARCs to share
- Our guest of honor—the charming, handsome, and talented Ben Barnes
- The Sentinel Hotel, who gave our Staff, Guests, and attendees a comfy place to rest
- Jake's Catering, who ran around like chickens without heads taking care of us all weekend (especially Katie G., Vesna, Michael, James, and Vanessa)
- The AV Department, who gave us flawless audio and video magic all weekend (especially John, Michael, and Mark)
- Crista Kocher at Travel Portland
- The vendors, who lit up the Grand Ballroom with your wares
- The indie authors, who made our Author Alley truly shine
- The rest of the LFM/Rose City Comic Con team for sparing a few of us to focus primarily on Romancing Portland
- Our contracted weekend Crew, who showed up having no idea what to expect and absolutely crushed it
- The Leap and Epic team + Pam Wang for our frequent ticketing adjustments and help scheduling time slots for our authors and Ben Barnes
- And OF COURSE... to the attendees who trusted a first-year event enough to spend your time and money on us. You filled Romancing Portland to the brim with your positive energy and whimsy, and we are so grateful!
And if we forgot anyone, please know it's not personal and was a total mistake, as we are very tired both physically and emotionally. But please know our hearts are overflowing with gratitude. Creating a new event from scratch is scary. It's a huge undertaking, an expensive risk, and it's riddled with "unknowns", "what-ifs", and "we'll sees". Our team received so much love, positivity, and constructive feedback over the weekend that we can hardly believe it. Was it 100% perfect? No, of course not. But we learned a lot, and we hope we will have the opportunity to return to Portland with an even better event in the future.
đź“ť If you were an attendee and didn't receive the email (or it went to spam), please fill out our survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/romancing26-fan. Your reactions and feedback will be incredibly important and impactful to our future.
đź“ť If you were a vendor or author in our Marketplace or Author Alley, please stand by as your survey is coming to your inbox very soon!
Thank you a thousand times, from the bottom of our hearts.
- Heather, Leslie, Jalitza, & Lauren ✨
