Internationally beloved poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s latest collection, The Tiny Journalist, is a collection inspired by seven-year-old Janna Tamimi, the “Youngest Journalist in Palestine,” who captured videos of anti-occupation protests with her mother’s smartphone.

Malcolm Gladwell is a writer, public speaker, and podcast host whose work deals with the unexpected implications of research in the social sciences. Gladwell’s latest, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about People We Don’t Know (September 2019), is a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news.

Come be inspired by the courage and imagination of our next generation of creative writers.

This event will raise essential funding for SAL’s Writers in the Schools (WITS) program, which matches talented professional writers with local public schools and Seattle Children’s Hospital for year-long writing residencies. Last year, WITS writers helped more than 6,000 students at 27 public schools to build self-confidence, community, and essential writing skills as they learned to tell their unique stories through creative writing.

From the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids and M Train, a profound, beautifully realized memoir in which dreams and reality are vividly woven into a tapestry of one transformative year.

Richard Kenney, a Pacific Northwest poet, is known for his formally ambitious poetry, which employs intricate and playful verse to comment on science, politics, love, and language. His latest book of poems, Terminator (2019), is his first in ten years.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of our most original and perceptive voices on racial identity, systemic racial bias, and white supremacy. The author of the bestselling nonfiction works The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, and Between The World And Me, he can now add novelist to his list of achievements. The Water Dancer, a boldly imagined novel of magic and adventure, is coming out this September.