From the best-selling author of These Truths comes We the People, a stunning new history of the U.S. Constitution, for a troubling new era.

The Balanced Ecosystem: Creating and Sustaining a Classroom Community that Celebrates Literacy and Offers Relational and Affirming Teaching Strategies This professional development is designed to combine Indigenous literature and literacies with land-based pedagogy. The intention for this training is to offer practical content and strategies that are suitable for all students and to encourage open discussion about how to meaningfully incorporate Indigenous literacy and tenants of land-based pedagogy in diverse learning settings. Upholding a warm and welcoming space for multi-lingual learning and Indigenous languages is a foundational aspect of this offering. Participants can expect to leave the workshop with a selection of new strategies and prompts, a recursive strategy for classroom use, and suggestions for bringing literature informed by Indigenous languages 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.

Come hear firsthand from and be inspired by students, educators, and WITS writers-in-residence as they speak to the importance of youth arts education. Funds raised from the luncheon supports SAL’s Writers in the Schools (WITS) program as well as SAL’s mission of cultivating spaces of creative expression for the next generation of writers and readers. WITS is a youth program of Seattle Arts & Lectures that connects professional, Seattle-based writers with K-12 public school classrooms to elevate and amplify the voices of over 6,000 students throughout the region. *

In her first nonfiction book in a decade, #1 bestselling writer Elizabeth Gilbert who taught millions of readers to live authentically (Eat Pray Love) and creatively (Big Magic) shows how to break free, joining Community Curated Series director Colleen Echohawk in conversation.

From On Tyranny to On Freedom, Timothy Snyder has delved into how to resist fascism and where we go from here. Literary Arts Series subscriptions, Create Your Own Series subscriptions and SAL Memberships include a paperback copy of On Freedom, shipped to your door by our bookstore partner Queen Anne Book Company.

Acclaimed poet Li-Young Lee—“the poet of rapture and tenderness” (Major Jackson)—offers revelatory volumes of ecstatic poems that search out divine voices in the silences of life, love, and death, most recently with his collection The Invention of the Darling.

A radiant new memoir from beloved artist and writer Patti Smith, author of the National Book Award winner Just Kids. Tickets with “& Book” include a copy of Bread of Angels, shipped to your door by our bookstore partner Elliott Bay Book Company.

Join food expert, television producer, and bestselling author Padma Lakshmi in a trip across the United States in Padma’s All American.

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.

From internationally renowned, award-winning author Salman Rushdie comes a spellbinding exploration of life, death, and what comes into focus at the proverbial eleventh hour of life. Tickets with “& Book” include a copy of The Eleventh Hour, shipped to your door by our bookstore partner Elliott Bay Book Company.

Join us for a celebratory poetry reading featuring SAL’s talented Youth Poetry Fellows.

The Things We Carry: A Professional Development Training for Educators This professional development is designed to offer strategies for critical thinking & deep self inquiry, encourage writing, and foster a sense of resilience by way of writing exercises, idea generators, and utilizing Social constructivist pedagogy as a lens for learning and play. 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.

The Irish writer Colm Tóibín grew up in a home where, he once said, there was “a great deal of silence.” He has since made a career of telling stories—clear and human—to the world through his many volumes of fiction and non-fiction, drama, and poetry, including works like the bestselling, critically acclaimed Brooklyn and its sequel Long Island.

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.

 National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B.

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.

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.

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. 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.

Wit and wisdom are the cornerstones of bestselling author Emma Straub’s fiction—from the time-traveling heroine of This Time Tomorrow to the tight-knit group of college friends in Modern Lovers, Straub writes books “that will make you laugh, make you cry, and make you call the people you love” (Emily Henry). Create Your Own Series Subscriptions and SAL Memberships include a copy of Emma Straub’s forthcoming title, shipped to your door by our bookstore partner Secret Garden Books.

The mastermind of narrative reporting who brought us Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe delves into the mysterious death of a teenager and his family’s search for truth in London Falling. Create Your Own Series subscriptions, Encore Series subscriptions, and SAL Memberships include a copy of London Falling, shipped to your door by our bookstore partner Third Place Books.

Author of the Man Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings and the genre-defying Dark Star trilogy, Marlon James brings myth, magic, and history into the sharp light of our own human desires.

The culmination of a decade of intense engagement with antiquity’s most surpassingly beautiful and emotionally complex poetry, Emily Wilson’s translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey give us a complete Homer for our generation.

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 Pulitzer Prize-finalist and author of the breakout bestseller There There delivers a masterful follow-up to his already classic first novel in Wandering Stars.

Please join us in celebrating the launch of the 2025/26 Seattle Youth Poet Laureate Ahsenti Alfedil’s chapbook. Published by Poetry Northwest Editions,this is the eleventh edition of the Seattle Youth Poet Laureate series. Ahsenti Alfedil will read from the collection alongside other talented poets.