aja monet is a Grammy-nominated surrealist blues poet, musician, and cultural worker whose poems sing to us of love, gender, justice, and spirituality. Florida Water, her latest collection, is a vulnerable meditation about the poet’s migration to South Florida in search of love, connection, and belonging.

Join us for a double feature with two genre-defying writers! Cristina Rivera Garza is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Liliana’s Invincible Summer and, most recently, Death Takes Me and Autobiography of Cotton. Javier Zamora is the author of the groundbreaking and bestselling memoir Solito, chronicling his journey from El Salvador to the United States at the age of nine.

James McBride is a New York Times bestselling author, musician and screenwriter. His latest novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, has soared to a global phenomenon with over a million copies sold in the US alone.

Empowering Writing and Voice Through Gamification: A Professional Development Training for Educators This professional development is designed to offer strategies for critical thinking, encourage writing, and foster a sense of joy using the mechanics of Game theory as a vehicle for Social constructivist pedagogy. Participants can expect to leave the workshop with a selection of new methodologies and prompts, a recursive strategy for classroom use, and suggestions for bringing innovative literature into the learning space. This two-hour workshop will fulfill OSPI’s Continuing Education clock hours (2) for all state educators and meets the requirements for ongoing Social Emotional Learning (SEL) for teacher certification. This course will offer free resources and is suitable for teachers and learners of all ages including adult learners. Writers may also find the content useful.

This four-part reading series features acclaimed poets, writers, and comics artists who teach in SAL’s Writers in the Schools (WITS) program. In addition to cultivating the next generation of writers, WITS writers are their own creative forces.

The event will feature a lively reception and delicious multi-course dinner, an engaging program featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Feeding Ghosts & official SAL Doodler Tessa Hulls and Youth Poetry Fellowship cohort member Adisa Grant; and live and silent auctions of unique literary experiences.