This four-part reading series features acclaimed poets, writers, and comics artists who teach in SAL’s Writers in the Schools program. Tonight’s program will feature Oliver Brickman, Corinne Manning, Sierra Nelson, and Acca Warren! These resident writers come together to read from their own works-in-progress, inspiring the same craft and performance skills they teach in the classroom.
Free (no RSVP necessary; just come)
Oliver Brickman is a writer, performer, and community organizer from Ann Arbor, MI. The winner of the 2015 Split This Rock Poetry Prize, and a five-time member of Seattle slam teams, Oliver has received grants and scholarships from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Yiddish Book Center, 4Culture, and more. A BOAAT Writers Fellow and a Ken Warfel Fellow for Poetry in Community, Oliver’s poems and prose appear in Narrative, Adriot, BOAAT, The Indiana Review, Muzzle, and the anthologies Ghosts of Seattle Past, The Dead Animal Handbook and Courage: Daring Poems for Gutsy Girls. Oliver holds an MFA from the University of Virginia and lives in Seattle, where they teach writing to youth and adults, and parents a cat named Latke.
Corinne Manning is a prose writer and literary organizer whose debut story collection We Had No Rules is forthcoming from Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020. Corinne has been a writer in residence for WITS since 2011. Their essays and stories have been published widely, and most recently anthologized in Toward an Ethics of Activism and Shadow Map: An anthology of Survivors of Sexual Assault. Once upon a time, they founded the James Franco Review, a literary intervention project that addressed implicit bias in the publishing industry.
Sierra Nelson is a poet, co-founder of literary performance art groups The Typing Explosion and Vis-à-Vis Society, and president of Seattle’s Cephalopod Appreciation Society. Her poetry books include The Lachrymose Report (PoetryNW Editions) and two collaborative books made with visual artist Loren Erdrich: I Take Back the Sponge Cake (Rose Metal Press) and artist book ISOLATION. Earning her M.F.A. in poetry from University of Washington, Nelson is a Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the Carolyn Kizer Prize. Her poems have appeared in Seattle Metro buses, at the Seattle Aquarium, in soundboxes along Denny Way, with Nordic runes on lava stones in Iceland, read across the U.S. and Canada on the Wave Books Poetry Bus Tour, and at the Slovenian Natural History Museum, as well as in more traditional literary journals and anthologies. She is currently editing an anthology of cephalopod-inspired poetry and lyrical prose, forthcoming with World Enough Writers.
Acca Warren imagine it written in cursive, a water-wave like palindrome- acca (they/them/y’all) is a trans poet, educator and practitioner of abolitionist values and care work through daily actions and play. They facilitate creative interdependence through art and outdoor time since transitioning from ‘able-bodied’ to ‘no longer living that illusion’. They live into the queer disabled poc legacies of ferocity through tenderness, believe crying is a vital technology and have deep reverence for rest. They bring authenticity, adaptability and responsibility to unwinding our collective bodies into something more free. Our capacity to heal is not in question, it is only the matter of remembering ‘how’ together. and so, they write.