You are joyfully invited to celebrate the final stretch of our 2022 Back-to-School Fundraiser for Writers in the Schools! All month long, we’re raising $160,000 to support WITS Writers-in-Residence as they creatively engage thousands of public school students this year. On Friday, September 30, get a glimpse into the WITS experience and toast to all we’ll make possible as a community! Can’t attend? Make a gift to WITS!

Maggie O’Farrell, the Northern Irish author of the “magnificent and searing” novel Hamnet, returns with The Marriage Portrait, an electrifying new tale. Full of the drama and verve with which she illuminated the Shakespearean canvas of Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell brings the world of Renaissance Italy to jewel-bright life and offers an unforgettable portrait of a resilient young woman’s battle for her very survival.

Celeste Ng is the bestselling author of three novels: Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, and her latest work, Our Missing Hearts. In 2020, Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere was adapted into a popular limited series on Hulu, starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. Following its nationwide success, Ng’s latest work, Our Missing Hearts, explores the ways that supposedly civilized communities can pretend to ignore the most searing injustice. Q&A with Danya Kukafka, author of Notes on an Execution and Girl in Snow. Most tickets, with the exception of a limited number of Pay What You Can and complimentary tickets, include a copy of Our Missing Hearts, mailed to the ticket holder’s door.

An Indigenous human rights lawyer and writer from Guam, Julian Aguon is the founder of Blue Ocean Law, a progressive firm that works at the intersection of Indigenous rights and environmental justice. Part memoir, part manifesto, his forthcoming book, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies is a coming-of-age story and a call for justice—for everyone, but in particular, for Indigenous peoples.

John Irving has written some of the most acclaimed books of our time, from The World According to Garp to The Cider House Rules. Irving returns with The Last Chairlift, his first novel in seven years—a ghost story, a love story, and a lifetime of sexual politics, set between Colorado and New England. Q&A with author and playwright Jeff Schwager. This event has moved to an online-only format. Most tickets, with the exception of a limited number of Pay What You Can and complimentary tickets, include a copy of The Last Chairlift, mailed to the ticket holder’s door.  

Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Jon Meacham chronicles the life of Abraham Lincoln in And There Was Light, charting how—and why—he confronted secession, threats to democracy, and the tragedy of slavery to expand the possibilities of America. “Written with wisdom and grace, his story of Lincoln’s complex moral journey to Emancipation mirrors America’s long and troubled quest to live up to its founding ideals,” writes Doris Kearns Goodwin. Q&A with Margaret O’Mara, Professor of History at the University of Washington. Literary Arts Series subscriptions include a copy of And There Was Light, mailed to the subscriber’s door. Please note: complimentary subscriptions and single tickets do not include the book.

The second annual James Welch Prize reading, celebrating two Indigenous poets from the U.S., is presented in partnership with Hugo House and Poetry Northwest, featuring judge Elise Paschen and winners Halee Kirkwood and Melanie Merle.

Hometown hero Rick Steves is a public television host, a best-selling guidebook author, and an outspoken activist who encourages Americans to broaden their perspectives through travel. He has dedicated his career to providing accessible information, helping Americans to have the most stress-free, cost effective, and enlightening travel experiences possible. Steves is a big proponent of “Traveling as a Political Act,” the subject of his SAL talk. Q&A with journalist Enrique Cerna.

Nigella Lawson is an internationally renowned food writer and TV cook whose successful television programs have made her a household name around the world. In her latest book, Cook, Eat, Repeat: Ingredients, Recipes, and Stories, Lawson intertwines essays which explore our relationship with food with more than a hundred new recipes. Q&A with food writer Sara Dickerman.

Join former Obama White House Photographer Pete Souza as he presents rarely-seen photographs and tells stories from his new book, The West Wing and Beyond: What I Saw Inside the Presidency. Following his presentation, Souza will take questions from the audience. Single tickets and Create Your Own Series subscriptions, with the exception of a limited number of Pay What You Can tickets, include a signed copy of The West Wing and Beyond. Encore Series subscriptions do not include the book.  

Patti Smith is a writer, performer, and visual artist. She garnered international acclaim in the 1970s for her revolutionary merging of poetry with early punk and rock and roll. She has released twelve albums, including Horses, which has been hailed as one of the top one hundred debut albums of all time by Rolling Stone. Smith has authored a number of poetry collections, as well as a National Book Award winning memoir, Just Kids. Her latest endeavor is a book of photography entitled A Book of Days, set to be released in November 2022. Smith uses her wildly popular photography to take audiences on an intimate, inspirational journey through an artist’s life. Most tickets, with the exception of Pay What You Can and complimentary tickets, include a copy of A Book of Days, mailed to the ticket holder’s door.

Jenny Xie is a celebrated poet, and author of the National Book Award and PEN Open Book Award finalist, Eye Level: a meditation on the forces that moor us and those that set us in motion. Xie’s soon-to-be-released second collection, The Rupture Tense, explores the reverberant and vexed experiences of diasporic homecoming, intergenerational memory transfer, state-enforced amnesia, public secrecies, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. All Poetry Series, Create Your Own Series, and Super SAL subscribers receive a copy of The Rupture Tense, shipped to their doors by our partner bookstore. Please note: complimentary subscriptions and single tickets do not include the book. Q&A with poet Jane Wong.

Join Sasha and three more Institute of American Indian Arts alumni as they discuss decolonizing Native image in art and pop culture, and the power of representation. Razelle Benally, an Oglala Lakota/Diné film director and writer, is dedicated to creating stories with strong Indigenous female protagonists. Tania Larsson, a Gwich’in and Swedish creator of fine jewelry, uses materials from her home in the Canadian Arctic. Migizi Pensoneau, an Ponca/Ojibwe writer and producer, works on the shows Reservation Dogs, Barkskins, and Rutherford Falls.

Amor Towles is the author of three runaway bestsellers: Rules of Civility, A Gentleman in Moscow, and now, The Lincoln Highway. After working as an investment professional for over twenty years, Towles turned full-time writer, penning massively successful works which deal in historical fiction but are at their core detailed character studies. Lauded as “an exhilarating ride through Americana,” his new novel tells the story of a 1950s road trip gone awry, populated by an eclectic cast of characters, from drifters who make their home riding the rails and larger-than-life vaudevillians to the aristocrats of the Upper East Side.

After incarceration, how do you reenter a society that doesn’t offer open arms? Reginald Dwayne Betts is an award-winning author, poet, lawyer, and outspoken advocate for criminal justice reform, whose work interrogates and challenges our notions of justice. Betts has adapted his celebrated poetry collection, Felon, into a one-man performance piece, which he will perform for this SAL Presents event.

Peabody Award-winning host Krista Tippett presents a live, in-person recording of the wildly popular On Being podcast, featuring guest speaker Isabel Wilkerson. Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, has become a leading figure in narrative nonfiction with The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste. Join these two friends and interpreters of the human condition for a night of incredible conversation.

Kate Baer is an author and poet who garnered acclaim following the publication of her first collection of poetry, What Kind Of Woman. The collection examines the many roles women play in the modern era, as Baer seeks to place the experiences of motherhood, female companionship, and marriage at the heart of what it means to be poetic. Baer’s newest work, And Yet, dives even deeper into themes of friendship, love, loss, and motherhood, displaying Baer’s ever-increasing capacity to explore these topics in rare poetic form.

Jason Reynolds, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen books for young readers. His book, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, a collaboration with Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, and his bestselling stories, such as Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks, All American Boys (with Brendan Kiely), Long Way Down, and Miles Morales-Spiderman make him “one of the most exciting, constantly surprising voices in children’s literature.” Q&A with young adult author Martha Brockenbrough.

Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest, who has garnered acclaim for her ability to integrate issues of science, technology, religion, environmental politics, and global pop culture into unique, hybrid forms. Her latest novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness, tells the story of a young boy who, after the death of his father, starts to hear voices and finds solace in the companionship of his very own book.

Chris Abani is an acclaimed novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright. Born to an Igbo father and English mother, Abani grew up in Afikpo, Nigeria. His experiences in his home country inspire much of Abani’s work, equally informed by his research into African poetics, twentieth century Anglophone literature, Yoruba and Igbo philosophy and religion, and many other areas of study. Abani’s latest work is a book of poetry entitled Smoking the Bible, in which he illustrates the connective geography between harm, regret, and release, as his poems move through landscapes of Nigeria, the Midwestern United States, adulthood, and childhood.

A trenchant observer of democracy, Masha Gessen is the author of twelve books, including the National Book Award-winning The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia and Surviving Autocracy. Their coverage of current political unfoldings in Russia, LGBTQ+ rights, and the rise of autocratic leaders appears regularly in the pages of The New Yorker and the New York Times. Q&A with Margaret O’Mara, Professor of History at the University of Washington.

A graphic novelist, tattoo artist, illustrator, and filmmaker, James Spooner directed the seminal documentary AFRO-PUNK. His graphic novel, The High Desert, weaves in the Black roots of punk rock and a vivid interlude in the thriving eighties DIY and punk scene in NYC’s East Village. He co-founded the Afropunk Festival, which currently boasts audiences in the hundreds of thousands globally.

“One of the most soulful and perceptive writers of our time,” Pico Iyer is a renowned travel writer beloved for his gift of perspective. In a new culminating work, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise, Iyer brings together the outer world and the inner to offer us a surprising, original, often beautiful exploration of how we might come upon paradise in the midst of our very real lives. 

“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—Stolen examines more broadly what it means to be an Indigenous woman in America. Q&A with journalist Wudan Yan.

One of the most acclaimed writers of our time, Louise Penny is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the beloved Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series. With a CWA Dagger and seven Agatha Awards to her name, as well as her reputation as a master plotter, Penny is sure to thrill and delight with her latest release.

One of our most popular events of the year, 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 2023!