A Blog of Seattle Arts & Lectures
2020/21 Youth Poet Digital Engagement Ambassador Victor Xia reads his poem “Party Circa 1952,” which he performed before Ibram X. Kendi’s 2020/21 Literary Arts Series event, presented on the virtual SAL stage.
Seattle Arts & Lectures is excited to announce that we are now accepting applications to the 2021/22 Seattle Youth Poet Laureate Cohort, from now until Friday, April 23, 2021. Program Overview The Seattle Youth Poet Laureate (YPL) program is part of Seattle Arts & Lectures (SAL) with support from Urban Word NYC, Northwest Folklife […]
“There’s a reason Sappho wrote in her complex hexameter.” 2019/20 Youth Poet Laureate cohort member Maeve Kenney reads her poem “Ars Poetica,” which she performed before Madeline Miller’s 2020/21 Literary Arts Series event, presented on the digital SAL stage.
Zoë Mertz is a University of Washington student doing a remote internship with the Writers in the Schools program at SAL. After attending the recent Literary Arts Series event with Yaa Gyasi on November 16, she wrote this reflective piece on attending events pre-Covid and what it’s like to attend online now. Read on to […]
Born from island clay Red and wet, with eyes open Crawl to a garden Place me in a bed of ferns I grow, I am energy. I’ll tell you of my first time talking to a plant. Most was listening. I swam forever Because I could, and I had to. Water carried me. My fear […]
The silence stretches, yawning across the land. Quiet, so quiet. A strange reverie, unbroken by sound. The bombs have stopped. The children, born in a world where the thunder is a part of life, whimper. The elders, so few, so old, raise their heads in disbelief. For they remember, a time when bombs did […]
By Gabriela Denise Frank As our nation’s underpinnings come under greater scrutiny, I’ve been in a parallel process of personal inquiry, digging into generational and cultural foundations that have shaped my writing practice and relationship to art-making, capitalism, and self-worth. You know, easy, light stuff. Months of reflection have revealed how my upbringing isn’t a […]
By Gabriela Denise Frank Poet Aaron Counts, co-founder of Seattle’s Youth Poet Laureate (YPL) program, described the power of poetry to me this way: “A great poem helps you understand yourself and how you fit into the world. It’s like having the recipe for oxygen—it’s a survival skill.” Poetry isn’t frivolous or a luxury, it’s […]
By Gabriela Denise Frank When I watched Bitaniya Giday perform her poem, “Hyphenated Identity Crisis,” I didn’t know I would interview her. The video, which introduced Bitaniya as the 2020/2021 Seattle Youth Poet Laureate, was filmed outside on a breezy day rather than inside a dramatically-lit theater. Bitaniya read from her phone in front of […]
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 […]