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 Karen Finneyfrock, Amy Hirayama, Cypress Manning, and Ankober Yewondwossen! 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)
Karen Finneyfrock is a poet and novelist. She is the author of two young adult novels: The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door and Starbird Murphy and the World Outside, both published by Viking Children’s Books. She is one of the editors of the anthology Courage: Daring Poems for Gutsy Girls, and the author of Ceremony for the Choking Ghost, both released on Write Bloody press. She is a former Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House.
Amy Hirayama is a Hapa writer and educator from Seattle, Washington. She works as the residential workshop administrator for Clarion West, a speculative fiction writer’s workshop. She is also one of the founders of Beam Pedagogy, which provides workshops and retreats focused on educator wellness and changing systems that lead to burnout. Food, family, humor and nature are her favorite things, so she writes about them a lot, sometimes all at once.
Cypress Manning is a queer trans writer, artist, and educator from Taos, New Mexico. They received their MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College in 2019, and are current Hugo House Fellow (2022-2023). For Cypress, writing is a process of self-making, a way of engaging with/in community, and a powerful practice of embodiment for all people, young and old. They are in a two-person cribbage league with their mom, and live in Seattle with their partner.
Ankober Yewondwossen is an Ethiopian first-gen fortunate to be born in Seattle & creatively raised by the Seattle Hip Hop scene at the height of its renaissance. Surrounded by a milieu of ingenious, burgeoning artist-groups from Hella Dope to theeSatisfaction; it was Hip Hop, and the Hidmo, which cultivated her pedagogy for community & critical race theory, while grounding her in the ultimate tenet of the art form—being true to oneself. A legacy student of Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina; she studied non-fiction writing while pursuing a self-designed major in Womanist Spiritual Quest—melding her love for Plato’s Republic with Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf”. Previous apprentice roles include a Monastic Apprenticeship in the Garifuna populated region of Honduras where, while living in a Quaker nunnery, she surveyed and studied the intersections of writing & spirituality. Ankober believes writing, in its highest form, is prayer, and, as Paulo Freire once said “there is, in fact, no teaching without learning”. You can find her 11 year old poetry blog at ankober.wordpress.com and her essays on Medium.com.