A Blog of Seattle Arts & Lectures
By Ruth Dickey, SAL Executive Director I read most of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko on a plane, back when we flew on planes and had the sensation of the whole world condensed to our single seat, the luxury of hours focused on a single book. It’s a special sort of reading time that’s hard to […]
Hyphenated Identity Crisis And the American war machine takes on the motherland And I finally am no longer A hyphenated identity crisis See the words Ethiopian-American Imply me a patriot for the casualty of war they make out of my birthplace We diaspora longed to find home on the winning Side, in exchange our […]
My Wishes I wish I had my new heart and could leave the hospital. I wish all my friends would not be sick or hurt or bullied or punched. I wish I didn’t have what I have right now. I wish no animals would get hurt. I wish no one would do crimes or heists […]
By Ruth Dickey, SAL Executive Director Two years ago, Seattle Arts & Lectures had the pleasure of presenting Luis Alberto Urrea at a conference as part of a panel about place and narrative. The event began with each panelist reading for ten minutes, and Luis was the final one to read. He strolled to the […]
By Gabriela Denise Frank We are sharing a seismic moment. An unprecedented global pause is shifting space-time as we know it. Our struggle with sheltering in place has revealed both tension and gaps in our relationships that require tending. We are forced to stay and listen when we might otherwise leave. This quarantine has also […]
By Alexis Chapman, Public Programs Intern In our latest episode of SAL/on air, our literary podcast featuring talks and readings from across Seattle Arts & Lectures’ thirty years, we hear from Valeria Luiselli, the award-winning Mexican author living in the United States. Luiselli joined us back in April 2019 for a Literary Arts Series discussion […]
Today, February 24, marks a watershed in the #MeToo movement—a Manhattan jury has found former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein guilty of sex crimes. To reflect upon the moment, we’re sharing an essay from Akshaya Ajith, a ninth grader at Overlake High School and a former Writers in the Schools student. Akshaya attended SAL’s Literary Arts […]
By Ruth Dickey, SAL Executive Director On October 7, 2017, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey published the first of several explosive New York Times stories on Harvey Weinstein. From that moment forward, their reporting fundamentally changed the conversation about sexual harassment and shifted a balance of power that had previously seemed intractable. In She Said, […]
By Ruth Dickey, SAL Executive Director A few years ago, everyone I knew began telling me about a book they absolutely adored and that I simply must read. But when I learned the book was about a Count who spends 30 years in a hotel in Moscow, I was first skeptical, and then outright resistant. […]
It’s a mite hard to believe on nights like this that, somewhere, I have friends who aren’t dream-deep and snug in their beds, asleep, but may be dozing off in lecture with pens stuttering on notes; air conditioners humming furious against the peak afternoon heat. Harder still to believe, that while they scribble and we […]