In the follow up to her acclaimed Marbles, Forney writes and draws a survival guide for people with bipolar disorders.Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice From My Bipolar Life is the eagerly awaited sequel/companion book to Forney's 2012 best-selling graphic memoir, Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me. Whereas Marbles was a memoir about her bipolar disorder, Rock Steady turns the focus outward, offering a self-help survival guide of tips, tricks and tools by someone who has been through it all and come through stronger for it."Ellen Forney is an inspiration to me as an artist and as a human being! Let her drawings springboard you into self-acceptance!"- Maria Bamford, Lady DynamiteEllen Forney lives in Seattle, WA, with her partner. She was the 2012 recipient of The Stranger Genius Award for Literature as well as the winner of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis 2013 Gradiva Award.David Schmader is a writer and performer. He's the author of the solo plays "Straight," "Letter to Axl," and "A Short-Term Solution to a Long-Term Problem." Between 1999 and 2015, Schmader served as a writer, editor, and columnist of Seattle's Pulitzer-winning newsweekly "The Stranger." More recently, he's become a spokesmodel for marijuana, writing the book "Weed: The User's Guide" published by Sasquatch Books.

Seattle Civic Poet Anastacia-Renee will host Speak to Me! an intergenerational reading series showcasing emerging and seasons poets. Speak to Me! Volume IV will feature readings by Carolyne Wright, Lee Smith, Jekeva Phillips, Kamari Bright and Tara Hardy.Anastacia-Renee is Civic Poet of Seattle and former 2015-2017 Poet-in-Residence at Hugo House. She is the author of four books: Forget It (Black Radish Books), (v.), (Gramma Press), Answer (Me) (Argus Press), and 26 (Dancing Girl Press), and her poetry, prose and fiction have been published widely.Carolyne Wright's new book is This Dream the World: New and Selected Poems (Lost Horse Press, 2017). Her ground-breaking anthology, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace (Lost Horse, 2015), received ten Pushcart Prize nominations and was a finalist in the Foreword Review's Book of the Year Awards. Photo Credit: Erik RuckerLee Smith's work is the product of Seattle community arts programs. She has attended Path w/ Art classes in writing, Shakespeare, and acting/performance for four years. As a Hugo House scholarship student, Lee works on poetry and composition, and is also writing a major reader's theater piece featuring four characters with stage fright. Jekeva Phillips is a writer, educator, and performer. She is Editor in Chief of Word Lit Zine, a lit quarterly, and owner of Paradise Lost Publishing. Her poetry chapbook, Les Amants, hit the shelves in the fall of 2016, and she currently hard at work on her first novel, Sovereign.Operating with the belief that everything she creates is intended to foster understanding of self and surroundings, Kamari Bright is a St. Louis-born poet focused on introspection and connection from a personal and societal standpoint. She has had work featured in publications, released her first poetry book, Emergence, in 2016, and is a 2018 jack Straw Fellow.Tara Hardy is a working class, Queer, Femme, chronically ill writer, and founder of Bent, a writing institute for LGBTQ people in Seattle. Her most recent book of poems, My, My, My, My, My, won a 2017 Washington State Book Award, and explores the linkages between childhood trauma and chronic illness.

Student loan debt affects millions of Americans and is now the second-largest sector of household debt at more than $1 trillion. In partnership with CENTS and the Attorney General’s Office of Washington, The Seattle Public Library will host a presentation on student loan repayment at the Central Library. The presentation will cover types of loans and how to find out what type you have, payment plans, loan forgiveness options, private student loan issues, collection activity, scams to watch out for, bankruptcy, and resources. Following the presentation, there will be a question and answer session and a limited number of one-on-one attorney/financial professional consults will be assigned on a first come/first served basis to help attendees make a strategy to deal with student loan debt. Please join us for this free session and bring your questions on student loan repayment.Program schedule:2:00 p.m. – 2:40 p.m. Presentation2:40 p.m. – 3:10 p.m. Questions and Answers3:10 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. one-on-one consultations (1st come/1st serve, 10 minutes each)

avery r. young uses his talents to speak stories of turmoil turned to triumph. young is a 3Arts Award winning teaching-artist, composer, and producer whose work spans the many genres of music, performance, visual arts, and literature. He is a Cave Canem Fellow with poems and essays published in The BreakBeat Poets (Haymarket, 2015), The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (University of Arkansas Press, 2017) and also featured in award winning photographer Cecil McDonald's In the Company of BlackI (Candor Arts, 2017). His sound design project culled sign(s) explores myriad concrete poetry forms, and his new full-length release, booker t. soltreyne: a race rekkid (a. r-rah International 2015), was created during his artist residency with the University of Chicago's Arts and Public Life Initiative. He now performs and tours with his band de deacon board, and is a coach for the Rebirth Youth Poetry Ensemble.Artist Bio Based in Chicago, avery has also worked as a teaching artist, mentoring and shaping youth in the craft of creative writing and theatre. He has taught primary and secondary grade levels in education facilities that expand ethnicity, socio-economic characteristics and academic benchmarks. He has written curriculum for Columbia College Chicago, Young Leeds Authors, True Star magazine and Chicago Public Schools Art Integration Department. His curriculum, which spans from "nina (simone) song" to "of mice and gender," has been used in educational systems through the United States and abroad. His curriculum encourages youth to value their voices and assist teachers with various ways to present Language Art lessons. avery is champion for such causes as HIV awareness, eliminating misogyny and sexism against women in arts and media, educational reform, and art integration inside the work space. avery has performed in the Hip Hop Theatre Festival, Lollapalooza, WordStock and has appeared on BET, MTV, ABC and WGN's Morning News.Dubbed "sunday mornin jook joint," young's performance and work in sound design merges spiritual and secular aesthetics with dramatic and comedic sensibilities. avery's aesthetic is indoctrinated with 400+ years of the African-American experience. He melds history, culture and art, blending phonetics, linguistics, hymns, jazz and hip hop in his work. His influences Include James Brown, Nina Simone and Gil Scott Heron. By examining Black American history and culture, his artistry celebrates social justice, equity, queer identity, and body consciousness while challenging misogyny, racism and homophobia. The University of Washington Bothell's ALIVE 2.0 and its related events are co-curated by faculty Anida Yoeu Ali and Jade Power Sotomayor.

From the New York Times bestselling author of "The Empathy Exams," a trans-formative work showing that sometimes the recovery is more gripping than the addiction. With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage, "The Recovering" turns our understanding of the traditional addiction narrative on its head, demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself. All the while, Jamison offers a fascinating look at the larger history of the recovery movement, and at the complicated bearing that race and class have on our understanding of who is criminal and who is ill.At the heart of the book is Jamison's ongoing conversation with literary and artistic geniuses whose lives and works were shaped by alcoholism and substance dependence, including John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Billie Holiday, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, and David Foster Wallace, as well as brilliant lesser-known figures such as George Cain, lost to obscurity but newly illuminated here. Through its unvarnished relation of Jamison's own ordeals, The Recovering also becomes a book about a different kind of dependency: the way our desires can make us all, as she puts it, "broken spigots of need." It's about the particular loneliness of the human experience-the craving for love that both devours us and shapes who we are.For her striking language and piercing observations, Jamison has been compared to such iconic writers as Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, yet her utterly singular voice also offers something new. With enormous empathy and wisdom, Jamison has given us nothing less than the story of addiction and recovery in America writ large, a definitive and revelatory account that will resonate for years to come.Advance Praise for "The Recovering""Jamison turned heads with The Empathy Exams, her 2014 best-selling collection of insightful, Didionesque essays, and this new book, which blends her memoir of recovery with cultural history, can only add to her growing literary reputation."―Paul S. Makishima, The Boston GlobeLeslie Jamison is the author of the essay collection "The Empathy Exams," a New York Times bestseller, and the novel "The Gin Closet," a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and the Oxford American, among others, and she is a columnist for the New York Times Book Review. She teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.Claire Dederer is the author of two critically acclaimed memoirs: "Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning" and "Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses," which was a New York Times bestseller. Poser has been translated into 11 languages, optioned for television by Warner Bros., and adapted for the stage.

In 1985, Anthony Ray Hinton was arrested and charged with two counts of capital murder in Alabama. Stunned, confused, and only twenty-nine years old, Hinton knew that it was a case of mistaken identity and believed that the truth would prove his innocence and ultimately set him free.But with no money and a different system of justice for a poor black man in the South, Hinton was sentenced to death by electrocution. He spent his first three years on Death Row at Holman State Prison in agonizing silence―full of despair and anger toward all those who had sent an innocent man to his death. But as Hinton realized and accepted his fate, he resolved not only to survive, but find a way to live on Death Row. For the next twenty-seven years he was a beacon―transforming not only his own spirit, but those of his fellow inmates, fifty-four of whom were executed mere feet from his cell. With the help of civil rights attorney and bestselling author of Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson, Hinton won his release in 2015. With a foreword by Stevenson, The Sun Does Shine is an extraordinary testament to the power of hope sustained through the darkest times. Destined to be a classic memoir of wrongful imprisonment and freedom won, Hinton's memoir tells his dramatic thirty-year journey and shows how you can take away a man's freedom, but you can't take away his imagination, humor, or joy.About The Sun Does Shine:"Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison for opposing a racist system in South Africa. Anthony Ray Hinton spent 30 years on death row because a racist system still exists in America. Both emerged from their incarceration with a profound capacity to forgive. They are stunning examples of how the most horrendous cruelty can lead to the most transcendent compassion. The Sun Does Shine is both a cautionary tale for all who think that a great nation can easily forget its past and inspiring proof of the inability to condemn a man's capacity for hope, love, and joy. An amazing and heartwarming story, it restores our faith in the inherent goodness of humanity." - Archbishop Desmond Tutu

If the US military is a central institution of war and imperialism in primarily poor countries of color, why is trans inclusion portrayed as a social justice issue? In this panel discussion, different presenters explore how to connect the fight for queer and trans liberation with struggles against militarism in all its forms. Instead of calling for the "right to serve" in the US military, this discussion focuses on exploring the violence of US military enterprises at home and abroad. Panelists will speak from a broad range of organizing experiences--from challenging structural racism to fighting for migrant justice, indigenous sovereignty to prison abolition, anti-war activism to the movement against sexual violence.Doors open at 6:30 p.m. Everyone is welcome.

The House of Broken Angels is, as author Luis Alberto Urrea describes it, "the story of an American family—one that happens to speak Spanish and admire the Virgin of Guadalupe. Imperfect and glorious, messy and hilarious, sometimes heroic." Inspired by the death of his brother, this novel mines his own family history to tell a once-in-a-lifetime tale, simultaneously intimate in its detail and grand in its scope. "In Urrea's exuberant new novel of Mexican-American life, 70-year-old patriarch Big Angel de la Cruz is dying, and he wants to have one last birthday blowout. Unfortunately, his 100-year-old mother, America, dies the week of his party, so funeral and birthday are celebrated one day apart...Taking place over the course of two days, with time out for an extended flashback to Big Angel's journey from La Paz to San Diego in the 1960s, the narrative follows Big Angel and his extended familia as they air old grievances, initiate new romances, and try to put their relationships in perspective. ..Urrea (The Hummingbird's Daughter) has written a vital, vibrant book about the immigrant experience that is a messy celebration of life's common joys and sorrows.-Publishers Weekly. Luis Alberto Urrea has written many books, including poetry collections (Vatos), memoirs (Nobody's Son), works of nonfiction (Across the Wire; Devil's Highway, winner of a Lanaan Literary Award and finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the Kiriyama Prize), short story collections (The Water Museum) and novels (The Hummingbird's Daughter). Hailed by NPR as a "literary badass" and a "master storyteller with a rock and roll heart," Luis Alberto Urrea is a prolific and acclaimed writer who uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore greater themes of love, loss and triumph.

London. A fox makes its way across Waterloo Bridge. The distraction causes two pedestrians to collide―Jean, an American studying the habits of urban foxes, and Attila, a Ghanaian psychiatrist there to deliver a keynote speech. From this chance encounter, Aminatta Forna's unerring powers of observation show how in the midst of the rush of a great city lie numerous moments of connection. Attila has arrived in London with two tasks: to deliver a keynote speech on trauma, as he has done many times before; and to contact the daughter of friends, his "niece" who hasn't called home in a while. Ama has been swept up in an immigration crackdown, and now her young son Tano is missing. When, by chance, Attila runs into Jean again, she mobilizes the network of rubbish men she uses as volunteer fox spotters. Security guards, hotel doormen, traffic wardens―mainly West African immigrants who work the myriad streets of London―come together to help. As the search for Tano continues, a deepening friendship between Attila and Jean unfolds. Meanwhile a consulting case causes Attila to question the impact of his own ideas on trauma, the values of the society he finds himself in, and a grief of his own. Aminatta Forna is the author of the novels Ancestor Stones, The Memory of Love, and The Hired Man, as well as the memoir The Devil That Danced on the Water. Forna's books have been translated into sixteen languages. Her essays have appeared in Granta, The Guardian, The Observer, and Vogue. She is currently the Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University."Aminatta Forna expertly weaves her characters' stories, past and present, in and out of the larger story of London, which becomes as rich a character as the human beings and, indeed, the foxes; and she makes us care deeply about them all, the foxes, the people and the city. A terrific novel."―Salman Rushdie, author of The Golden House"From the understated and inexorable pull of plot and emotion to the luxuriousness of the details of varied ways of living and being to the tidal pull of language, Happiness is a great accomplishment." ―Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer and The Refugees

Please Join NW Children's Fund and the Seattle Public Library for a free screening and panel discussion of Resilience, a short film that chronicles the beginning of a national movement to prevent childhood trauma, treat toxic stress, and greatly improve the health of future generations. The film screening will be followed by a panel conversation focused on how equity and inclusion strategies can be incorporated into community interventions that build resilience amongst families of color and low-income communities.Childhood experiences such as living with an incarcerated parent, homelessness, sexual abuse, and historical trauma have been conclusively linked to physical and mental health problems later in life. Recent studies have shown that these Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs, have a profound neurological impact on the developing brains of children. However, as experts and practitioners profiled in the film are proving, what’s predictable is preventable. These physicians, educators, social workers, and communities are daring to talk about the effects of ACEs and they're using cutting-edge science to help the next generation break the cycles of adversity and disease.This program is made possible with support from The Seattle Public Library Foundation with media partnership from ParentMap. Co-presenters include: Sound Discipline