A Blog of Seattle Arts & Lectures
Bookstore workers and owners have been absolute essential workers during this pandemic—heroes on the frontlines of our mental health. After those first months when reading felt really hard, when the doom-scrolling kept us in our lizard brains, books were there waiting for us in all their analog selves. Books, as one 2020 Summer Book Bingo player said, […]
Bookstore workers and owners have been absolute essential workers during this pandemic—heroes on the frontlines of our mental health. After those first months when reading felt really hard, when the doom-scrolling kept us in our lizard brains, books were there waiting for us in all their analog selves. Books, as one 2020 Summer Book Bingo player said, […]
Akshaya Ajith, a high school student doing a remote internship with the Writers in the Schools program at SAL, attended SAL’s Journalism Series event with Lawrence Wright, investigative journalist for The New Yorker and author of the pandemic thriller The End of October, on February 9, 2021. Read on to hear her reflections. By Akshaya […]
By Gabriela Denise Frank Writing serves many purposes for Writers in the Schools (WITS) Intern Akshaya Ajith. “It’s a tool and a gateway for people to connect and to understand and open doors to mutual respect,” she said. “Writing can be an exploration, but it can also be like going into battle, whether that’s with […]
Bookstore workers and owners have been absolute essential workers during this pandemic—heroes on the frontlines of our mental health. After those first months when reading felt really hard, when the doom-scrolling kept us in our lizard brains, books were there waiting for us in all their analog selves. Books, as one 2020 Summer Book Bingo player said, […]
By Gabriela Denise Frank Talking with the writer Kip Greenthal who, with SAL Founder Sherry Prowda, launched the Writers in the Schools (WITS) program, brought to mind a quote by Grace Paley: “Every story is two stories. The one on the surface and the one bubbling beneath. The climax is when they collide.” In pop […]
By Rebecca Hoogs, SAL Associate Director Toi Derricotte is the author of six collections of poetry, including “I”: New and Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2019. She is also the beloved co-founder, with Cornelius Eady, of Cave Canem, which was established to remedy the under-representation and isolation of […]
In appreciation of our local indies who have reinvented their processes and protocols over and over again in the service of getting the just-right book to the just-right hands, we are launching Bookshop Superheroes, a new blog series on our bookstore partners. Over the course of the winter and spring, we will feature a bookstore, […]
By Gabriela Denise Frank Sherry Prowda, the founder of Seattle Arts & Lectures (SAL), never used the word synchronicity when she unfolded SAL’s origin story for me, but it hovered over our conversation. Instead, she spoke of fortune and luck, gifts and generosity, even signs from the gods. When I asked how SAL began, she […]
As we approach the anniversary of the start of the pandemic in our region, we are reflecting back on the year that has passed. And we know this for sure: bookstore workers and owners have been absolute essential workers—heroes on the frontlines of our mental health. After those first months when reading felt really hard, […]