Dispatches from Solitude

Elliott Bay Book Company presents Conjunctions: 75 Dispatches from Solitude, an evening of readings featuring Conjunctions editor, Bradford Morrow, along with Barbara Tran, Nathaniel Mackey, Sandra Cisneros and Henry Cisneros, and Brandon Hobson. The reading will happen tomorrow, Friday, February 26, 2021, at 5:00pm Pacific. Register here and find out more about Conjunctions here.

new from Elliott Bay Book Company

The Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle has announced a new poetry program: Subtext. Subscribers will receive a specially curated book of poetry every other month along with a letter explaining what makes each title notable. The program encourages subscribers to offer feedback on the selections on Instagram (@elliottbaybookco) and Twitter (@ElliottBayBooks).

silver anniversary reading

Floating Bridge Press is 25 and will celebrate the occasion with release readings from the 2019 Chapbook Competition winner, Katrina Roberts, finalist, Elizabeth Vignali, and the inaugural winner of the Evergreen Award Tour Full-length competition, Jory Mickelson.

Join in the celebration at The Elliott Bay Book Company on Sunday, November 3, 2019, at 3:00pm.

next Friday at Elliott Bay

Mark your calendar for a wonderful evening of poetry as Edward Harkness and Bethany Reid share new and recent work at The Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. Harkness will read from his third full-length collection, The Law of the Unforeseen (Pleasure Boat Studio), and Reid from her second collection of poems, Body My House (Goldfish Press). Join them at 7:00 p.m.

the last Raven

Marking the end of an era that began in 1991, Raven Chronicles, Volume 26: Last Call is the literary journal’s final scheduled printing:

In a bar, “last call” means your last chance to order a drink. This is important, because the next public announcement will be the bar closing and you and your friends heading for the door. Well, this is our last call, at least for the near future. The Raven Chronicles, after chronicling the literary antics of tricksters and dreamers, the under-heard, the underserved (and probably underage), since 1991, will no longer publish a regularly-scheduled, subscription-based magazine. Yes, you read that right: the chronicles part of The Raven Chronicles is subsiding back into the northwest tree pulp from whence it came.

You can help celebrate all that Raven is and has been at a reading on Friday, August 3, 2018, at The Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, with Anna Balint (emcee), Recovery Café’s Safe Place Writing Circle members Cathy Scott, Megan McInnis, and Elliott Villarreal; and Chris Buckley, T. Clear, Joan Fiset, Steve Griggs, Mare Heron Hake, Thomas Hubbard, Paul Hunter, Anna Odessa Linzer, John Mifsud, Jed Myers, Vaibhav Saini (from Farmington, CT), Marianne Weltmann, Carletta Carrington Wilson, and Danae Wright.

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cover photo by Alfredo Arreguín

Love…tonight!

Tonight, Friday, June 8, 2018, at 7:00pm at The Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, Paige Lewis & Kaveh Akbar celebrate their June 9th wedding with this celebratory, pre-nuptial group reading by an amazing array of poets come to witness and celebrate the occasion. Paige Lewis has a first chapbook, Reasons to Wake You (Tupelo), coming this year. Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books) was one of the poetic books of 2017, never mind it also being a debut. Paige Lewis and Kaveh Akbar live in Tallahassee and make the excellent online poetry journal, Divedapper, happen. Thanks to them, they are also making this night happen.

Among those expected to read tonight: Hanif Abdurraqib, Kaveh Akbar, Eloisa Amezcua, Fatimah Asghar, Kelly Butler, Robert Olen Butler, Richard Cardillo, Sumita Chakraborty, Jos Charles, Cortney Lamar Charleston, Safia Elhillo, Kat Finch, Steve Henn, Zaya Henn, Sara Eliza Johnson, Paige Lewis, Zach Linge, Carly Joy Miller, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Jacquelyn Pope, Jayme Ringleb, Don Share, Danez Smith, Melissa Studdard, John Taylor, David J. Thompson, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, R.A. Villaneuva, and Jane Wong. Wow.

Admission is free but there is a suggested $5 donation, all proceeds going to Solid Ground Seattle.

holiday bonus time

Forbes calls him “Publishing’s richest penman.” His online biography says that “he has sold over 350 million books worldwide and currently holds the Guinness World Record for the most #1 New York Times bestsellers.” At the rate of about a dozen books a year, on his own and with co-authors, James Patterson is a writing phenomenon.

But even as he’s creating characters and stories, he’s also finding ways to encourage readers and support literacy. Through the Patterson Family Foundation he awards scholarships to students at 22 different colleges and universities around the country. In the last ten years, he has given away more than a million books to students all over the U.S. and has visited hundreds of schools to advocate for youth literacy. In 2015, Patterson showed his gratitude to independent bookstore employees through a donation of $250,000; in 2016 he is doing the same. Patterson is partnering with the American Booksellers Association to distribute the funds, which are granted as bonuses of $1,000 to $5,000 to individual booksellers.

The holiday bonus winners are nominated locally and selected by Patterson himself. We congratulate this year’s 149 winners, including the following independent bookstore employees at some of our favorite Cascadia-region stores:

• Caitlin Luce Baker, University Book Store, Seattle, WA
• Erin Ball, Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, WA
• Kenny Coble, King’s Books, Tacoma, WA
• Madison Duckworth, Liberty Bay Books, Poulsbo, WA
• Emily Fuggetta, Powell’s Books, Portland, OR
• Kim Hooyboer, The Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA
• Sarah Hutton, Village Books, Bellingham, WA
• Victoria Irwin, Eagle Harbor Book Co., Bainbridge Island, WA
• Ruby Meyers, Annie Bloom’s Books, Portland, OR
• Emma Nichols, The Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA
• Linda Watson, Powell’s Books, Portland, OR

next week in Seattle

Currently a Visiting Writer in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing & Poetics program at the University of Washington Bothell, poet Rae Armantrout will offer a reading from her new collection, Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001 – 2015 (Wesleyan University Press) on Friday, September 16, 2016 – 7:00pm at The Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle.

Awarded a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award and Guggenheim Fellowship, among others, Armantrout is cited most often as a founding member of the West Coast group of Language poets. Ben Lerner (author most recently of The Hatred of Poetry) interviewed Rae Armantrout for the Winter 2011 BOMB.

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two of many things…

1. If you love bookstores, check out today’s interview with The Elliott Bay Book Company (Seattle) in Literary Hub.
2. If you’re curious about how poets seek themselves through selfies, visit Poet Selfies on Literary Hub.

Literary Hub is “a single, trusted, daily source for all the news, ideas and richness of contemporary literary life.” Have a look and consider subscribing.

thinking about poetry

If you’re curious about the ambitions of people writing poetry, it’s instructive to drop in to Kickstarter or Indiegogo. You’ll find funding requests from people creating poetry books, apps, readings, events and assorted other projects. Some get funded; some don’t.

The International Women’s Poetry Exchange is a Kickstarter project with a week to go. The book is underway: Load Poems Like Guns: Women’s Poetry from Herat, Afghanistan (Holy Cow Press!). Edited by Farzana Marie, a Ph.D. candidate in Middle Eastern literature at the University of Arizona, it’s a collection of the writing of eight contemporary Afghan women poets in English translation along with the original Persian Dari text.

The funding request is to bring one of the poets, Somaya Ramesh, to the United States to take part in a series of readings. Happily, her visa was approved and she arrived in time to participate, although they will not receive their funding unless they meet their goal (at this writing, they’re $245 shy of their $2000 goal) in the next week.

If the project sounds interesting, visit International Women’s Poetry Exchange. Even better, the last two readings on the tour are in the Cascadia region: Friday, March 20, 2015, 7:00pm, at The Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, and Sunday, March 22, 4:00pm, at Powell’s Books in Portland. Go!