Hugo Literary Series: Lidia Yuknavitch, Tarfia Faizullah, Ijeoma Oluo, and Nick Droz

Fri, May 11, 2018 at 7:30pm

Online ticket sales have ended. Tickets may still be available at the door on a first come, first served basis.

Note: Jami Attenberg was previously scheduled to appear at this event but due to unforeseen circumstances can no longer attend. In her place, Lidia Yuknavitch has graciously stepped in to write and read new work. 

The 2017-2018 Hugo Literary Series coincides with our move to a new and permanent home on the same site where we first opened our doors over 20 years ago. In this same spirit of development and growth, we’ve commissioned new work on themes of real estate—from the pragmatic issues of property value to the more nebulous idea of place.

New York Times bestselling novelist Jami Attenberg; award-winning Bangladeshi-American poet Tarfia Faizullah; Seattle-based writer and Editor-at-Large at The Establishment Ijeoma Oluo; and musician Nick Droz will all present new work on the theme “There Goes the Neighborhood.”

Books will be for sale through Elliott Bay Book Company and Open Books: A Poem Emporium.

Jami Attenberg is the author of a collection of stories, Instant Love, and the novels The Kept Man, The Melting Season, The Middlesteins, Saint Mazie, and All Grown Up. The Middlesteins was a New York Times bestseller, a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and the St. Francis College Literary Prize, and has been optioned by Showtime. Her writing on sex, technology, design, books, television, and urban life appears in The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Lenny Letter, and elsewhere. 

Tarfia Faizullah's first book, Seam, won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her second book, Registers of Illuminated Villages, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in March 2018. Her honors and awards include a Fulbright fellowship, an Associated Writers Program Intro Journals Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, a Copper Nickel Poetry Prize, a Ploughshares' Cohen Award, and a Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Margaret Bridgman Scholarship in Poetry. A Kundiman fellow, she lives in Detroit where she teaches at the University of Michigan and is an editor for the Asian American Literary Review and Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Series. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the Virginia Commonwealth University. 

Ijeoma Oluo is a Seattle-based writer, speaker, and internet yeller. Her work on race, feminism, and other social issues has been featured in The GuardianThe StrangerThe Washington PostTIME Magazine, and more. She is the Editor at Large at The Establishment. Her book, So You Want To Talk About Race, will be published early 2018 with Seal Press. You can find her yelling on Twitter at twitter.com/ijeomaoluo.

Nick Droz is a Seattle-based songwriter and performer who, previous to his move to Seattle three years ago, spent most of a decade writing and playing in Austin, TX. He pens and performs songs frequently with the Bushwick Book Club (Seattle), an organization dedicated to the creation of new music inspired by literature. His writing has led him to a number of collaborations with other local organizations including including Jack Straw Writers, Seattle7Writers, The 1448 Projects, and Seattle Arts and Lectures.

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The Hugo Literary Series presents new writing and songs from a theme, or writing prompt, commissioned by Hugo House. The nights are collages of unexpected styles and different points of view, and the writers and musicians are encouraged to work without a sense of obligation, censorship, or stylistic frame. No one sees or hears the work before it is read or performed at the events for the very first time.

Guest writers for the Literary Series often teach a class before or after the events. These classes require a separate registration. For more information on our classes, visit the class page.


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