A Blog of Seattle Arts & Lectures
For anyone who has been paying attention, There are indeed two Americas: There’s an America that’s a world of white racial resentment Where the Confederate flag proudly flies, Where monuments to traitors are to be revered, Where protesting racial injustice is an intolerable act of aggression, Where the words “Black Lives Matter” are considered words […]
By Rebecca Hoogs, Executive Director Every summer, the SAL staff choose a book by an upcoming author in our season to read and discuss together. And it was a special joy last summer, after a year and a half of Zoom, to climb down from the Zoom grid and to gather in a circle, in-person […]
By Rebecca Hoogs, Interim Executive Director It is an honor to welcome Maggie Nelson back to SAL. Maggie Nelson last graced our stage 2012 in our Poetry Series after her book, Bluets, became an instant cult classic. In 2015 she published The Argonauts, a hybrid memoir which was a bestseller and a finalist for the […]
Do you remember when that tickling in our stomachs had a name? It was called God. The flowers bloomed to God’s rhythm and we danced in our underwear. Our families burned weed and bras and incense and dollar bills. They used history as kindling and smoked out the stars. But we didn’t need to misinterpret […]
In April, a group of students from Big Picture High School had a soul-enriching conversation with Robin Wall Kimmerer, in which they discussed writing, attention, and care and nurturing for and from the Earth. SAL’s Spotlight Author visits, held through our Writers in the Schools program, connect young public school writers in WITS classrooms with […]
By Ruth Dickey, SAL Executive Director In one of the essays in Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about remembering the rituals with which her parents began days, saying, “Ceremonies large and small have the power to focus attention to a way of living awake in the world.” And in this sense of ceremony as […]
Until I saw the sea, I did not know how much the sea sparkled and how many animals roamed. Until I saw the sea, I did not know what it felt like to be closed up under the watery bed. But then I felt it: the feeling I wanted to know, that the sea is […]
This essay is part of a series in which Poetry Northwest partners with Seattle Arts & Lectures to present reflections on visiting writers from the SAL Poetry Series. On Friday, September 25, Claudia Rankine read and discussed her work in conversation with Douglas Kearney. Listen to a recording of it on KUOW’s Speakers Forum. Tickets […]
By Ruth Dickey, SAL Executive Director We are here tonight to celebrate the publication of Claudia Rankine’s brilliant new book, Just Us: An American Conversation. Claudia Rankine is an author, poet, playwright, and multi-media artist. Her book Citizen: An American Lyric, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the NAACP Image Award, and […]
Maybe the only genre missing from Carmen Maria Machado’s genre-bending memoir, In the Dream House, is the graphic novel. Luckily for us, Tessa Hulls, “SAL Official Doodler” and author of the forthcoming graphic novel Feeding Ghosts (MCD Books, 2022), was in the audience for Machado’s Women You Need to Know (WYNK) talk. From the crowd, she […]