Thursday, October 23
7-7:45PM & 8-8:45pm
We are delighted to welcome back the annual Lit Crawl Seattle event to The Project Room! This year, two of the evening's program will take place at TPR in conjunction with our current "Transformation" topic. For the complete listing of all Lit Crawl activities, go here.
7PM: Hedgebrook Presents: Past Lives featuring Emily White, Lisa Halpern, Kate Willette, and Janet Yoder, with Sonora Jha
8PM: Superheroes vs. Fairy Tales featuring Angela Jane Fountas, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Michael Schmeltzer, and Maya Sonenberg, with Evan J. Peterson
More info:
7PM: Hedgebrook Presents: Past Lives: Hedgebrook alumnae Emily White, Lisa Halpern, Kate Willette, and Janet Yoder read work on ghosts, gods, grief, and native tongues. Hosted by Sonora Jha (Foreign).
About Hedgebrook:
Hedgebrook is a global community of women writers and people who seek extraordinary books, poetry, plays, films and music by women. A literary nonprofit, our mission is to support visionary women writers whose stories and ideas shape our culture now and for generations to come. We offer writing residencies, master classes and salons at our 25-year-old retreat on Whidbey Island, and public programs that connect writers with readers and audiences around the world. Learn more at https://www.hedgebrook.org/
About the Readers:
Emily White is a writer of both fiction and nonfiction. She has published two books of nonfiction with Scribner: Fast Girls, Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut and You Will Make Money In Your Sleep, a biography of a con man who was also a close friend. Her short stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, The Greensboro Review, The Sonora Review and Black Clock. Her articles - about topics like teenagers, con artists, military recruiters and gaming addicts - have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Stranger and Seattle Metropolitan among others. She has been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, as well as Editor in Chief of The Stranger. Recently she was invited to speak at the Harvard - Berlin dialogues about the persistence of the Slut archetype in American high schools. She teaches in the low residency MFA program at Queens College in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Award-winning writer/director/producer Lisa Halpern recently worked with Marta Kauffman (co-creator FRIENDS) to develop Lisa’s screenplay adaptation of the best-selling novel ‘Broken For You’. Lisa is a two time Hedgebrook alumni, and is a member of the Seattle Repertory Theatre’s Writers Group. Her first play ‘Flying Through Blue’ was a 2011 PlayPenn Finalist and was selected for staged readings at the Great Plains Theater Conference (Playlab) 2013, Uprooted Theater’s Playwrights Festival in Milwaukee 2013 and the Northwest Playwright’s Alliance 2014. Intiman Theatre commissioned Lisa to write ‘Metanoia: A Change of Mind’ which recently had a staged reading at the Seattle Repertory Theater. For more info go to: www.thirdeyeproductions.org
Kate Willette is a 2003 Hedgebrook alumna. She has published short literary fiction (“Evidence,” Best of Writers at Work 1994), memoir (Some Things Are Unbreakable) and narrative non-fiction (Working 2 Walk 2012). She holds a variety of degrees and certificates from the University of Washington and the Seattle School of Psychology and Theology.
From her home in Bellevue, Kate is currently working on two projects: one is a novel about an unusual church run by a young atheist pastor, and the other is a manual for lay people interested in the science of spinal cord injury and its cure. She’s married to artist/musician/geek/pun-lover Bruce Hanson, with whom she’s raised a pair of insanely wonderful daughters.
Janet Yoder lives with her husband on their Seattle houseboat, the floating nation of Tui Tui. Her writing has appeared in Raven Chronicles, Bayou, Porcupine, Passager, The MacGuffin, North Dakota Quarterly, The Evansville Review, The Massachusetts Review, Pilgrimage, River Teeth, Chautauqua, and Signs of Life. She is currently at work on a collection of personal essays inspired by her friendship with Skagit tribal elder, the late Vi Hilbert.
Sonora Jha is a novelist and a professor of journalism. She was born in India and had a successful career as a journalist in Mumbai, Bangalore, and Singapore before moving to the United States to earn a PhD in Political Communication. She is now Associate Professor of Journalism at Seattle University. Her debut novel, Foreign, exploring both Seattle and the suicide of farmers in the villages of contemporary India, has met with much critical acclaim and brings together her work as a journalist, an academic, and a creative writer. She is now writing a memoir.
8PM: Superheroes vs. Fairy Tales: Drawn to Marvel contributors Jeannine Hall Gailey (Becoming the Villainess) and Michael Schmeltzer (Floating Bridge Review) battle fairy tale writers Maya Sonenberg (Learning to Paint) and Angela Jane Fountas (Fairy Tale Review). Hosted by Minor Arcana Press editor-in-chief Evan J. Peterson.
About the readers:
Jeannine Hall Gailey recently served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She is the author of four books of poetry: Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, and The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, out in 2015 from Mayapple Press. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review and Prairie Schooner. Her web site is www.webbish6.com.
Michael Schmeltzer earned an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop. His honors include six Pushcart Prize nominations, the Gulf Stream Award for Poetry, and the Blue Earth Review’s Flash Fiction Prize. He has been a finalist for the Four Way Books Intro and Levis Prizes as well as the OSU Press/The Journal Award in Poetry. He helps edit A River & Sound Review and has been published in PANK, Rattle, Natural Bridge, and Mid-American Review, among others.
Maya Sonenberg has been playing with fairy tales since she was 10 and wrote a story about a doll who was also a princess and also a fairy. Her more recent fiction—much of it fairy tale based—has appeared in two collections—Cartographies (winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize) and Voices from the Blue Hotel, and in numerous literary journals, including Fairy Tale Review, Web Conjunctions, and DIAGRAM. The Cupboard will publish a pamphlet of her fiction, with pictures, in 2015. She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Washington—Seattle.
Angela Jane Fountas is a former Hugo House Writer-in-Residence and Jack Straw Writer. Her work has appeared in Fairy Tale Review, Quick Fiction, Diagram, and elsewhere. She has been awarded an Artist Trust Fellowship and grants from the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture and 4Culture. She also serves on the board at Lit Crawl Seattle.
Evan J. Peterson is the author of Skin Job (2012 Minor Arcana Press) and The Midnight Channel (2013 Babel/Salvage Press), as well as volume editor of the 2014 Lambda Award finalist Gay City 5: Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam (Gay City Anthologies & Minor Arcana Press). His poetry, fiction, journalism, and criticism have appeared in Weird Tales, The Stranger, The Rumpus, Assaracus, Nailed, Court Green, and Aim for the Head: An Anthology of Zombie Poetry, from which his poetry was excerpted in The New York Times. He is the new Editor-in-Chief of Minor Arcana Press, recipient of a smART Ventures grant from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and publisher of the anthology Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books.