SAL/on air

In our hectically paced media landscape, the tale of Robin Wall Kimmerer and her beloved book Braiding Sweetgrass is a story of human miracle. First published in 2013, Braiding Sweetgrass joined the best seller list in 2020, having risen into its readers hands person by person, gift by gift, whisper by yell. The book’s subtitle “Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants”...

Sound bites obfuscate intent. Click bait headlines twist the truth. Deep fake videos destroy shared reality. And that makes critical thinkers and clear-eyed observers like M. Gessen all the more needed. Gessen does not talk down to people who are scared, does not suggest you should not believe your eyes as the famous George Orwell quote goes, does not downplay fear. As a journalist living in Mosco...

It is easy to dismiss poetry as being disconnected from the human, the everyday, the useful; to deride it for being uppity, dense, or purposefully confusing. What is difficult is encountering the kind of poetry that makes the world clear. Li-Young Lee is a poet of clarity, even if that clarity is admitting to multiplicity and to wonder at the simplest, most difficult facts of life. Born in Jakarta...

In this episode of SAL/on air we were joined in the studio by Janae Lu and Zackary Mickelson for a conversation about Janae’s experience as the 2024-25 Seattle Youth Poet Laureate, and discussion of her chapbook published by Poetry NW Editions, In All Spaces Liminal. Janae Lu is a writer whose work explores the nuances of transition, identity, and self-discovery through free-verse poetry and creat...

SAL is pleased to support our friends at Hinton Publishing with the premiere episode of their brand-new podcast, Hinton Cast! Hinton Publishing prioritizes amplifying the voices of underinvited communities in the Pacific Northwest. The podcast features Hinton publishers, Marcus Harrison Green & Maggie Block, speaking with the storytellers who are carving a path of creative disruption through t...

What makes a poet’s voice timeless? For more than 40 years, Naomi Shihab Nye has been writing poems, novels, and stories; teaching workshops to adults, children, and incarcerated individuals. Every piece of her work cherishes and honors, be it people or relationships or olive trees, and each of these vivid snapshots create a timeline of her work that seems to extend forever. In between her poems a...

Ed Yong’s bestselling first book, I Contain Multitudes, prompted us to look at ourselves and the microbes we contain as the interconnected, interdependent systems that we are. And his follow-up, An Immense World, was named one of the best books of the year by numerous publications while opening our eyes to the glorious world right before us. Yong visited SAL virtually in 2022, when microbes were i...

As an Indigenous human rights lawyer and writer from Guam, Julian Aguon’s book 'No Country for Eight Spot Butterflies' memorizes grief from family to country and into one of the most difficult, intangible feelings of our time: climate grief. Drawing on his experience with the law and litigation against nuclear-powered countries, Aguon reminds us that no love is ever wasted, and grief is so often a...

As a reporter, Patrick Radden Keefe holds two disparate truths together with unparalleled skill: there are facts, and there is a story. In his work as a staff writer at The New Yorker, Keefe has showcased this talent in long form articles ranging from Anthony Bourdain to the hunt for the drug lord Chapo Guzman, and in his nonfiction books he has entranced a generation of readers. Keefe joined SAL...

At the beginning of the pandemic Charles Yu wrote an essay on the experience, which many noted, had a cinematic slant to it. “Five hundred years ago,” Yu wrote, “What we really mean when we say that this pandemic feels “unimaginable” is that we had not imagined it. Just as imagination can mislead us, though, it will be imagination—scientific, civic, moral—that helps us find new ways of doing thing...

As Chris Abani once stated, “The art is never about what you write about. The art is about how you write about what you write about.” Here, we find Abani’s "how" thick with feeling, braided by nimble and swift metaphors, and shaped by mercurial forms. Imprisoned several times for his political writing, Abani does not shy away from the messy reality of exile, both in geography, culture, and memory....

Nikky Finney is not only a poet but a storyteller, the kind of voice that weaves through the air in a room until every person there feels that much closer together. Her poems travel the world, from her home in South Carolina to the stage at the National Book Awards where she was lauded for her prizewinning book Head Off & Split. The journeys Finney guides her readers on across the page are fil...

In this episode of SAL/on air, two poets from SAL's Youth Poetry Fellowship, Mateo Acuña and Aamina Mughal, talk about access to arts education, finding community in Seattle's literary scene, and about Mateo's forthcoming chapbook, "Dear Spanish." Published by Poetry Northwest Editions, "Dear Spanish" is an inquiry into identity, desire, and belonging to one's self.

For James Tate, comedy and tragedy are inextricably linked within poetry. They appear as dual facets of ordinary life—the mundane and the extraordinary as one. As you’ll hear in this recording from February 2003, this is laugh-out-loud poetry that wanders from the baseball field to the petting zoo and back home. And yet, after the laughter, you’ll often find yourself catapulted into quiet, left to...

The works of Barbara Kingsolver have shaped a generation of readers. From her first novel The Bean Trees and beyond, Kingsolver’s characters speak to us, cradle our faces in their hands and exchange their hearts for ours. We were thrilled to recently welcome Kingsolver back to SAL in October of 2023 for a discussion of her Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece Demon Copperhead.

When Dean Young took the stage in October of 2012 to read from his Copper Canyon Press collection, Bender, we were incredibly fortunate to bear witness to his humorous, irreverent, and fearless poetry. We were deeply saddened to hear of his passing in August 2022, and we continue to treasure his voice as it lives on in his work.

In October of 2003, Sandra Cisneros joined us for an evening 20 years after the publication of her luminous work The House on Mango Street. Now, we have the chance to listen again with reverence, 40 years after that seminal book first came into our lives, and we are reminded more than ever of the importance of spending time with work that not only gratifies us but changes our lives.

In September 2019, Malcolm Gladwell stepped on stage at Benaroya Hall as part of SAL’s Literary Arts Series. That night, he brought us into the complicated layers that underlie our most fraught and violent interactions. Like all of Gladwell’s books, his storytelling is magnetic as he explores cases from Sandra Bland to Amanda Knox to unpack the multiple forces that affect who is believed, who is f...

In A Gentleman in Moscow, the subject of Amor Towles' 2019 SAL lecture, the ever-charming Count Rostov says, “By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every...

Richard Powers’ characters are often both artists and scientists—disciplines he sees as intertwined. In a delicious moment in this March 2008 reading, he describes the commonality between art and science as a state of “bewilderment,” which happens to be the title of his new book, released thirteen years later in September 2021. In this recording, Powers shares a short story called “Modulation.” A...

Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, and Jim Rainey, an award-winning reporter with the Los Angeles Times, spoke with hometown hero Timothy Egan in March of 2019 about the importance of investigative journalism and the path forward for media in this political era. These veteran journalists discuss how investigative reporting has changed over time, and what audiences expect and...

In this talk, recorded in March of 2010, former U. S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove shared poems from her then-new book, Sonata Mulattica. This collection tells the story of George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower. Previously just a footnote in Beethoven’s biography, Bridgetower—who was a Black violinist—had a sonata dedicated to him, and then, after a falling out over a girl, found that same sonata rename...

At the start of this reading, which includes poems in English and Polish, Zagajewski says, “As long as you write new poems, you are alive. It’s the only proof of this.” Zagajewski died this March, but his poems remain with us—proof he was alive and lives still. In a poetic twist of fate, the date of Zagajewski’s passing was the same as the evening he read at Seattle Arts & Lectures—exactly nin...

"I live in a space between," Imbolo Mbue says in this talk. "It is the immigrant's burden to live with a body in one place, and the heart in another." In this episode, recorded on June 7, 2019, at Town Hall Seattle, Imbolo Mbue describes how her in-between began in Cameroon, where she was born, and continued in New York, where she traveled to attend college. She stayed, attended Business School, g...

As with any condition, until we have language for what we are experiencing, until we can name it, we often feel controlled by it. In January of 2019 Soraya Chemaly renamed and redefined anger for us. In a riveting talk based upon her book, “Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger,” Chemaly puts female anger into its societal context, revealing it as a tool of transformation, an untapped resou...