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.

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of bone-chilling novels that include The Only Good Indians, My Heart Is a Chainsaw, I Was a Teenage Slasher, and most recently, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, an instant bestselling historical horror novel tracing the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice. Q&A with Sadie Hartmann.

An electric novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo, taking place at the bedside of an oil company CEO, in the twilight hours of his life, as he is ferried from this world into the next. Q&A with Claire Dederer All Create Your Own Series subscribers and SAL Members receive a copy of Vigil, shipped to their doors by our bookstore partner, Third Place Books.