$10-15 tickets! Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and music critic born and raised in Columbus, Ohio—he is the author of A Fortune For Your Disaster, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, and Go Ahead In the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest.
The creator of NPR’s Planet Money podcast and award-winning New Yorker staff writer explains our current economy in his latest book, The Passion Economy, laying out its internal logic and revealing the transformative hope it offers for millions of people to thrive as they never have before.
Carmen Maria Machado’s short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, has been called “beautifully atmospheric and weird, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking—and full of knife-sharp commentary on living as a woman in the world” (Electric Literature). Her forthcoming memoir, In the Dream House, is Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse.
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and music critic born and raised in Columbus, Ohio—he is the author of A Fortune For Your Disaster, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, and Go Ahead In the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest.
Amor Towles is the author of AGentleman in Moscow, “a masterly encapsulation of modern Russian history” that tells the story of a count who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel (Kirkus Reviews). Towles is often compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald for his focus on high society and is celebrated by his readers for the elegance of his language and storytelling.
Known for her light-handed concision, her strange imagination, and her ability to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, Wave poet and essayist Mary Ruefle has published over ten collections of poetry, including the highly anticipated Dunce (2019).
Lindy West is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and the author of the bestselling memoir Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman (2016), as well as the upcoming essay collection The Witches Are Coming (2019). In 2018, she adapted Shrill as a half-hour comedy for Hulu, which has received glowing reviews.
Seattle Arts & Lectures champions the literary arts by engaging and inspiring readers and writers of all generations in the greater Puget Sound region.
“Everything is always bits and pieces,” Naomi Shihab Nye writes in I’ll Ask You Three Times: Are You OK? As soon as I saw that sentence, I stopped what I was doing and started reading. It’s a beautiful thing when an author’s words succinctly express a feeling you’ve always had, but have never seen on paper. The book, a collection of vignettes about car rides, is exactly the bits and pieces. It’s the moments, the conversations, the fears, and the mistakes. It’s the thud of emotions that make up a life.
We believe that reading, writing, and creative thinking are indispensable to a curious, engaged, democratic society. Our goal is to make these experiences available to as many people as possible, regardless of economic circumstances—which is why we created our Community Access Tickets (CAT) program.
In the latest episode of our literary podcast, SAL/on air, we hear from Indian-born food and travel writer Madhur Jaffrey, who joined us in November 2013 for a talk on how we become who we are. At the time of her visit, Jaffrey, who is recognized for helping to bring Indian cuisine to the western hemisphere, had written nearly 30 cookbooks and won several James Beard Awards, as well as her critically-acclaimed memoir, Climbing the Mango Trees.
