A Blog of Seattle Arts & Lectures
At our 2017/18 Poetry Series event with A.E. Stallings, folk songwriter Jaspar Lepak dazzled our ears with an original song as part of the Bushwick Book Club program — it’s on repeat at the SAL offices right now! Below, listen to Jaspar’s song, which asks, “Why should the Devil get all the good tunes?” and read the […]
Tomorrow, Tuesday, November 14th, scholar of religions Reza Aslan will give an original, multi-media presentation on his new book, God: A Human History, an interfaith exploration of how different ideas of God have both united and divided us for millennia, as part of our 2017/18 SAL Presents Series. Tickets are still available here! In anticipation of Reza’s […]
When Ta-Nehisi Coates took the stage in 2015 to discuss his breakout memoir, Between the World and Me, as part of SAL’s Literary Arts Series, local folk musician and Bushwick Book Club artist Reggie Garrett was inspired to write a song based on the book, which has been called “a searing meditation on what it means […]
All You Ever Wanted Was A Semyon To Hold After Anastacia Reneé All you ever wanted was a Semyon to hold Why do you always have to be there for your little sister? Why did you get yourself into this? Don’t you dare be transgender Don’t you dare get hurt because you care Don’t you […]
By Kelly Froh, WITS Writer-in-Residence I had an idea to engage my middle-schoolers with a series of curated exercises that would magically entwine, crossover, and accelerate their understanding of the comics form, and that these students would turn out incredible comic pages for a final printed project. It did not occur to me that some […]
By Erin Langner The first review I ever wrote was of the soundtrack for Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. It was for Jefferson Junior High School’s Patriot newspaper in 1997. To say I was obsessed with the movie is a dramatic understatement. It’s still the only film I’ve seen in the theater three times. The […]
By Anastacia-Renee Tolbert, WITS Writer-in-Residence Lately, I’ve been reading a host of fiction and nonfiction from writers who have come before me, thinking about my mortality and the current state of the world as a woman of color writing, teaching and mothering. So recently, I asked high school students to write editorial essays. To begin with, some […]
Open Books: A Poem Emporium, Seattle’s beloved poetry-only bookstore, has been celebrating National Poetry Month like mad all April. If you’ve missed the first three weeks of contests, prompts, parties, and displays, you have one more week – and so many ways – to celebrate National Poetry Month alongside them and to support this local, independent treasure. […]
ON THE ROAD AGAIN by Ann Teplick, WITS Writer-in-Residence Oh, the hours I’ve spent behind the wheel of a Volkswagen bus, a Subaru, a Datsun, a Honda, from Seattle to Banff to San Francisco to Glacier National Park to D.C. to Montreal to Yellowstone to Austin to Philly. Oh, the hours with the windows rolled […]
By Kathleen Flenniken, WITS Writer-in-Residence A friend of a friend was looking for a poem her fifth-grade son could memorize for a class project. The question came to me and I made a couple of suggestions. The boy chose “Eating Poetry” by Mark Strand. His mother sent a photo of him studying the poem with […]