Join us for Songs & Stories, a celebration of Patti Smith’s new photography book, A Book of Days. Patti Smith is a writer, performer, and visual artist. She garnered international acclaim in the 1970s for her revolutionary merging of poetry with early punk and rock and roll. She has released twelve albums, including Horses, which has been hailed as one of the top one hundred debut albums of all time by Rolling Stone. Smith has authored a number of poetry collections, as well as a National Book Award winning memoir, Just Kids. In her latest, A Book of Days, Smith uses her wildly popular photography to take audiences on an intimate, inspirational journey through an artist’s life. Most tickets, with the exception of Pay What You Can and complimentary tickets, include a copy of A Book of Days, mailed to the ticket holder’s door.

Jenny Xie is a celebrated poet, and author of the National Book Award and PEN Open Book Award finalist, Eye Level: a meditation on the forces that moor us and those that set us in motion. Xie’s soon-to-be-released second collection, The Rupture Tense, explores the reverberant and vexed experiences of diasporic homecoming, intergenerational memory transfer, state-enforced amnesia, public secrecies, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. All Poetry Series, Create Your Own Series, and Super SAL subscribers receive a copy of The Rupture Tense, shipped to their doors by our partner bookstore. Please note: complimentary subscriptions and single tickets do not include the book. Q&A with poet Jane Wong.

This four-part reading series features acclaimed poets, writers, and comics artists who teach in SAL’s Writers in the Schools program. These resident writers come together to read from their own works-in-progress, inspiring the same craft and performance skills they teach in the classroom. Join us in this free event at Hugo House to celebrate the brilliance of the WITS writer cohort on January 18, 2023!

Join Sasha and three more Institute of American Indian Arts alumni as they discuss decolonizing Native image in art and pop culture, and the power of representation. Razelle Benally, an Oglala Lakota/Diné film director and writer, is dedicated to creating stories with strong Indigenous female protagonists. Tania Larsson, a Gwich’in and Swedish creator of fine jewelry, uses materials from her home in the Canadian Arctic. Migizi Pensoneau, an Ponca/Ojibwe writer and producer, works on the shows Reservation Dogs, Barkskins, and Rutherford Falls.

Amor Towles is the author of three runaway bestsellers: Rules of Civility, A Gentleman in Moscow, and now, The Lincoln Highway. After working as an investment professional for over twenty years, Towles turned full-time writer, penning massively successful works which deal in historical fiction but are at their core detailed character studies. Lauded as “an exhilarating ride through Americana,” his new novel tells the story of a 1950s road trip gone awry, populated by an eclectic cast of characters, from drifters who make their home riding the rails and larger-than-life vaudevillians to the aristocrats of the Upper East Side.

After incarceration, how do you reenter a society that doesn’t offer open arms? Reginald Dwayne Betts is an award-winning author, poet, lawyer, and outspoken advocate for criminal justice reform, whose work interrogates and challenges our notions of justice. Betts has adapted his celebrated poetry collection, Felon, into a one-man performance piece, which he will perform for this SAL Presents event. Q&A with Stacy D. Flood.