Poet, scholar, and nonfiction writer Maggie Nelson’s body of work is often described as hybrid and genre-bending; some say it defies classification. The Paris Review pinpoints the nexus of her writing as, “fluidity: gender, pleasure, desire, and the body are questioned with equal rigor as modality, criticality, and theory.” The author of the cult-classic Bluets and, more recently, The Argonauts, a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award, Nelson is back with a new volume that interweaves critical theory, pop culture, and the intimate exchanges of daily living. Her new book, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Restraint, explores how we think, experience, and talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our experience. All Women You Need to Know (WYNK) Series, Create Your Own Series, and Super SAL subscribers (except Student/25 & Under and complimentary subscriptions) receive Nelson’s forthcoming book, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, mailed to the subscriber’s address.

The author of six books of fiction, Lauren Groff has been described as brilliant and hard-working, “a woman of intellect and integrity, generous and warm, and hard to keep up with.” The same could be said of her stunning, glimmering prose. The two-time National Book Award finalist and the New York Times bestselling author returns with an exhilarating new novel called Matrix, her first since the groundbreaking Fates and Furies. In this tale of historical fiction, Groff follows the real-life figure of Marie de France into a violent, sensual world of religious ecstasy and consuming passion—a world that refuses to reconcile itself with Marie’s bold heart and crusading existence. All Literary Arts Series, Create Your Own Series, and Super SAL subscribers (except Student/25 & Under and complimentary subscriptions) receive Groff’s forthcoming book, Matrix, mailed to the subscriber’s address.

How does one recover from addiction without destroying the self-as-addict? Pilgrim Bell, Kaveh Akbar’s newest collection of poems, meditates on this question, taking readers on a spiritual journey through disavowal, divinity, and belonging. With formal virtuosity and ruthless precision, Akbar’s brilliant poems unfold in the empty space where song lives, teasing the sacred out of silence and stillness.

Since 2012, Jelani Cobb has been contributing his deep knowledge of history and masterful journalism to The New Yorker, bringing nuance and clarity around issues of race, politics, history, and culture. Cobb is the Ira A. Lipman Professor of Journalism at Columbia University, specializing in post-Civil War African American history, 20th-century American politics, and the history of the Cold War. Now, with co-editor David Remnick, he’s releasing The Matter of Black Lives, The New Yorker’s groundbreaking anthology on race in America—including work by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hilton Als, Zadie Smith, and more—with a foreword by Cobb. All Journalism Series, Create Your Own Series, and Super SAL subscribers (except Student/25 & Under and complimentary subscriptions) receive Cobb’s forthcoming book, The Matter of Black Lives, mailed to the subscriber’s address.

Social activist Patrisse Cullors is the New York Times bestselling author of When They Call You A Terrorist and the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. Since she began the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, it has expanded into a Nobel Peace Prize-nominated global foundation, supporting Black-led movements in the US, UK, and Canada. Now, in her new book, An Abolitionist’s Handbook, Cullors charts a framework for how everyday activists can effectively fight for an abolitionist present and future. Filled with relatable pedagogy on the history of abolition, a reimagining of what reparations look like for Black lives and real-life anecdotes from Cullors, An Abolitionist’s Handbook offers a bold, innovative, and humanistic approach to how to be a modern-day abolitionist. Cullors will be in conversation with Our Existence Beyond Trauma Series curator, Ijeoma Oluo, for this online-only event, which is co-presented by Langston Seattle.

The inaugural James Welch Prize reading, celebrating two Indigenous poets from the U.S., will be presented in partnership with Hugo House and Poetry Northwest, featuring judge Sherwin Bitsui and winner Kenzie Allen.

The National Book Award-winning author of seventeen novels, Louise Erdrich’s fiction reflects aspects of her mixed heritage: German through her father, and French and Ojibwa through her mother. In her new, powerful, and timely novel, The Sentence, Erdrich explores how the burdens of history, and especially identity, appropriation, exploitation, and violence done to human beings in the name of justice, manifest in ordinary lives today. All Literary Arts Series, Create Your Own Series, and Super SAL subscribers (except Student/25 & Under and complimentary subscriptions) receive Erdrich’s forthcoming book, The Sentence, mailed to the subscriber’s address.

Rita Dove is a celebrated poet, prose writer, editor, musician, and former Poet Laureate of the United States—the youngest to have served in the role. Known for works of lyricism and beauty, Dove applies an unflinching eye to historical and political events. In fact, her tremendous impact on American letters has come not only through her writing but her advocacy work; the Pulitzer Prize-winning author is the only poet honored with both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts. Her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Playlist for the Apocalypse, is Dove’s poignant meditation on injustice: an investigation of the vacillating moral compass guiding America’s—and the world’s—experiments in democracy.

Bernardine Evaristo is the author of the 2019 Booker Prize-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other, and the forthcoming memoir Manifesto, which investigates her long journey as a Black writer in a white-dominated industry. Evaristo’s writing is characterized by experimentation, daring, subversion, and challenging the myths of various Afro-diasporic histories and identities, and her books range in genre from poetry to short story to drama to criticism.

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Minor Feelings is a vulnerable, humorous, and provocative essay collection, whose relentless pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world. Hong will be in conversation with Our Existence Beyond Trauma Series curator, Ijeoma Oluo, for this event, which is co-presented by Langston Seattle.

Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Ed Yong writes about everything that is or was once alive, from the microbes that secretly rule the world to the species disappearing from it. A staff writer for The Atlantic, Yong is the author of the New York Times bestseller I Contain Multitudes, a book about the amazing partnerships between animals and microbes. In examining nature at its most granular, Yong’s writing seeks to change our sense of where humans belong within it.

Charles Yu is the infinitely inventive writer on HBO’s Westworld and the author of four books, including his latest, Interior Chinatown, winner of the 2020 National Book Award. Interior Chinatown is a deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.

Inspired by her popular BuzzFeed piece “37 Difficult Questions from My Mixed-Raced Son,” Mira Jacob’s graphic memoir, Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations is Jacob’s response to timely and pointed questions raised by her six-year-old son, Zakir. At an increasingly fraught time for immigrants and their families, Good Talk delves into difficult conversations about race, sex, love, and belonging that are both unavoidable and necessary. A gifted storyteller, Jacob’s work is earnest, moving, and often laugh-out-loud funny as she weaves together the threads of one American life.

Daniel James Brown is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Indifferent Stars Above, Under a Flaming Sky, and The Boys in the Boat. His latest, Facing the Mountain, is a gripping saga about the contributions and sacrifices Japanese immigrants and their children made during World War II: the courageous Japanese American Army unit that overcame brutal odds in Europe; their families, incarcerated back home; and a young man who refused to surrender his constitutional rights.

The multilayered works of National Book Award-winning translator, poet, and essayist Don Mee Choi are known for holding history accountable. Her most recent book, DMZ Colony is described as “a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts.” As a storyteller, Choi often weaves together poems, prose, photographs, and drawings to create a palimpsest of voices that further intertwine. In these fertile overlaps, Choi creates space for these voices to converse and to question truth, fact, and imagination.

The characters created by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Powers share a certain discomfort with the world. They shift between the impulse to connect and the urge to withdraw—into a novel, a piece of music, a movie house, a museum, even cyberspace. The Overstory, Powers’ sweeping, impassioned paean to the natural world, was a move to unite a cast of iconoclastic activists and resisters, roots to crown. His forthcoming novel, Bewilderment, is a deeply felt study into attachment, loss, and hope: of a grieving father, an extraordinary yet troubled son, and an imperiled planet, each of which is inextricably linked with the others. All Literary Arts Series, Create Your Own Series, and Super SAL subscribers (except Student/25 & Under and complimentary subscriptions) receive Powers’ forthcoming book, Bewilderment, mailed to the subscriber’s address.

World-renowned activist Sonya Renee Taylor is the Founder and Radical Executive Officer of The Body is Not An Apology, a digital media and education company promoting radical self-love and body empowerment as the foundational tool for social justice and global transformation. Taylor is also a former National and International poetry slam champion, the author of two books, including The Body is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love, and an educator who has enlightened and inspired organizations, audiences, and individuals, from board rooms to prisons, universities to homeless shelters, elementary schools to some of the biggest stages in the world.

Author of the novel Queen Sugar, Natalie Baszile has created an immersive, polyphonic examination of Black people’s connection to American land from Emancipation to the present day. We Are Each Other’s Harvest is an anthology of essays, poems, photographs, quotes, conversations, and first-person stories that explore the lives of Black farmers today: why they continue to farm despite systemic discrimination and land loss, how they are building on the legacy of their ancestors, and the challenges they face in seeking to redress food justice, food sovereignty, and reparations.

“There is a crisis of violence in our communities,” says Connie Walker, an award-winning Cree journalist from Okanese First Nation in Saskatchewan. In her podcasts Stolen and Missing & Murdered, Walker investigates cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. In seeking to unravel the mysterious disappearance of Jermain Charlo—a young Indigenous mother who left a bar in Missoula, Montana, in 2018 and was never seen again—Walker’s work examines more broadly what it means to be an Indigenous woman in America.