Hugo Literary Series: D. A. Powell, Heidi Julavits, Sierra Nelson, and OCNotes

Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 7:30pm

This event has passed.

The new year will begin with “What Goes Around Comes Around” featuring poet D. A. Powell; author and co-editor of The Believer literary magazine Heidi Julavits; and poet and performer Sierra Nelson. OCnotes will provide the music.


D. A. Powell is the author of five collections, including Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. His honors include the Kingsley Tufts Prize in Poetry, the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America and an Arts & Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Critic Stephen Burt, writing in the New York Times, said of D. A. Powell “No accessible poet of his generation is half as original, and no poet as original is this accessible.” A former Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry at Harvard University, Powell has taught at University of San Francisco, Stanford University, Columbia University, the University of Iowa’s Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Davidson College. He lives in San Francisco. In 2014 Graywolf released Repast: Tea, Lunch & Cocktails, a reissue of Powell’s first three collections with an introduction by novelist David Leavitt.


Heidi Julavits is the author of four critically acclaimed novels (The Vanishers, The Uses of Enchantment, The Effect of Living Backwards, and The Mineral Palace) and co-editor, with Sheila Heti and Leanne Shapton, of the New York Times bestseller Women in Clothes. Her most recent book The Folded Clock: a diary, was published in 2015 to widespread acclaim. Her fiction has appeared in Harper's Magazine, McSweeney’s, and The Best American Short Stories, among other places. She's a founding editor of The Believer magazine and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Manhattan, where she teaches at Columbia University. She was born and raised in Portland, Maine.


Sierra Nelson, author of I Take Back the Sponge Cake, has poems in Crazyhorse, DIAGRAM, and Poetry Northwest. She earned her MFA from UW in 2002 and is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, Seattle City Artist Project Grant winner, and Vis-à-Vis Society co-founder.


OCnotes, AKA Otis Calvin III, is a Seattle-based producer/singer/MC/multi/multi/instrumentalist. Find him at ocnotes.net.


Hugo House

1634 11th Avenue
Seattle, WA 98122