Internationally beloved poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s latest collection, The Tiny Journalist, is a collection inspired by seven-year-old Janna Tamimi, the “Youngest Journalist in Palestine,” who captured videos of anti-occupation protests with her mother’s smartphone.

Come celebrate the publication of the annual WITS Anthology, featuring the very best creative writing by K-12 students from last year’s Writers in the Schools (WITS) program. Young writers will read original works of poetry, prose, comics, and memoirs in a powerful display of youth voices.

Single tickets are sold out, but Malcolm Gladwell’s event is still available via our 6-part Literary Arts Series subscription.

Come be inspired by the courage and imagination of our next generation of creative writers. This event will raise essential funding for SAL’s Writers in the Schools (WITS) program, which matches talented professional writers with local public schools and Seattle Children’s Hospital for year-long writing residencies.

A writer, musician, and visual artist, Patti Smith rose to fame in the 1970s for her singular blend of poetry and rock music. In The Year of the Monkey, Smith embarks on a year of solitary wandering, taking us from the Santa Cruz coast, to the Arizona desert, to a Kentucky farm. This haunting memoir blends fact and fiction, illustrated by Smith’s signature Polaroid photographs.

Richard Kenney, a Pacific Northwest poet, is known for his formally ambitious poetry, which employs intricate and playful verse to comment on science, politics, love, and language. His latest book of poems, Terminator (2019), is his first in ten years.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of our most original and perceptive voices on racial identity, systemic racial bias, and white supremacy. The author of the bestselling nonfiction works The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, and Between The World And Me, he can now add novelist to his list of achievements. The Water Dancer, a boldly imagined novel of magic and adventure, is coming out this September.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and music critic born and raised in Columbus, Ohio—he is the author of A Fortune For Your Disaster, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, and Go Ahead In the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest.

Local Voices presents a unique opportunity to eavesdrop on the works of SAL’s Writers in the Schools resident writers.

Single tickets are sold out, but Amor Towles’ event is still available via our 6-part Literary Arts Series subscription.

Known for her light-handed concision, her strange imagination, and her ability to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, Wave poet and essayist Mary Ruefle has published over ten collections of poetry, including the highly anticipated Dunce (2019).

Single tickets to see Lindy West are sold out, but you can still purchase tickets to her event with a 3-part Women You Need to Know (WYNK) Series subscription, also featuring Carmen Maria Machado and Maira Kalman. WYNK Subscribers receive a complimentary copy of West’s new essay collection, The Witches Are Coming (except Student/U25). Click the “View Subscription Options” above to subscribe.

Local Voices presents a unique opportunity to eavesdrop on the works of SAL’s Writers in the Schools resident writers.

Adam Davidson is the founder of NPR’s Planet Money podcast and a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he covers economics and business. Previously, he was an economics writer for The New York Times Magazine. He has won many of journalism’s most prestigious awards, including a Peabody for his coverage of the financial crisis.

Carmen Maria Machado’s short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, has been called “beautifully atmospheric and weird, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking—and full of knife-sharp commentary on living as a woman in the world” (Electric Literature). It was a finalist for the National Book Award and has since been optioned by FX. Her memoir, In the Dream House, will be released in the fall of 2019.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters who broke the news of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment and abuse for the New York Times, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, comes She Said (October 2019), the thrilling untold story of their investigation and its consequences for the #MeToo movement.

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are the first husband and wife to share a Pulitzer Prize for journalism. The authors of the acclaimed, best-selling Half the Sky now issue a plea in their new book, Tightrope—told through the lives of real Americans—to address the crisis in working-class America, while focusing on solutions to mend a half century of governmental failure.

Paisley Rekdal is a Seattle-born poet whose latest work radically rewrites and contemporizes many of the myths central to Ovid’s epic, The Metamorphoses, examining personal transformation with intensity and a lyric sensibility.

Local Voices presents a unique opportunity to eavesdrop on the works of SAL’s Writers in the Schools resident writers.

Min Jin Lee is the author of Pachinko, a sweeping, four-generation epic celebrated as the first novel written for an adult audience in English that focuses on Japanese-Korean culture. A finalist for the 2017 National Book Award in fiction, Pachinko is “a beautifully crafted story of love, loss, determination, luck, and perseverance” (Library Journal).

Rick Barot is an award-winning Tacoma poet. His latest book of poems, The Galleons (2020), is in part about the centuries-long colonial structure that sustained Spanish control over Latin and South America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines.

Carol Anderson is one of the premier scholars of black American history. Anderson’s viral op-ed for the Washington Post explored the concept of “white rage” after Ferguson, Missouri erupted in 2014. Her subsequent book, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Her latest book, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy (2018), is a startling history of voter suppression in America.

Elizabeth Kolbert, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Sixth Extinction, has traveled from Alaska to Greenland, visiting top scientists to get to the heart of the debate over global warming. Join us on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day for Kolbert’s exploration of environmental journalism.

Local Voices presents a unique opportunity to eavesdrop on the works of SAL’s Writers in the Schools resident writers.

The illustrator, author, and designer behind The Principles of Uncertainty, And the Pursuit of Happiness, and many a New Yorker illustration, Maira Kalman’s multi-faceted projects are filled with a sense of wonder, humor, and beauty.

Natalie Diaz is the author of two poetry collections: When My Brother Was an Aztec, which centers on her brother’s addiction to crystal meth, and Postcolonial Love Poem, forthcoming in 2020. Adrian Matejka calls When My Brother Was an Aztec “a spacious, sophisticated collection, one that puts in work addressing the author’s divergent experiences—whether it be family, skin politics, hoops, code switching, or government commodities.”

Each Moth Mainstage features simple, old-fashioned storytelling, by five wildly divergent raconteurs who develop and shape their stories with The Moth’s directors. Theme and storytellers to be announced in Spring 2020.

Hailed by NPR as a “master storyteller with a rock and roll heart,” Luis Alberto Urrea is a prolific and acclaimed best-selling poet, novelist, and essayist who uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore greater themes of love, loss, and triumph.

Join us for an extraordinary evening of literary talent with the Pulitzer Prize-winning voices of the future! Student writers from schools throughout the Puget Sound region and Seattle Children’s Hospital will share original poems, short stories, and memoirs created during their residencies with the Writers in the Schools (WITS) program in the 2019/20 Season.

Join us for an extraordinary evening of literary talent with the Pulitzer Prize-winning voices of the future! Student writers from schools throughout the Puget Sound region and Seattle Children’s Hospital will share original poems, short stories, and memoirs created during their residencies with the Writers in the Schools (WITS) program in the 2019/20 Season.