Ask the Oracle: Claudia Rowe, Randy Sue Coburn, and JM Miller

Hugo House and Hotel Sorrento team up for this monthly divination series hosted by poet Johnny Horton. Come early, write your most burning questions down, and a panel of writers will divine your fate by choosing a random passage from their respective books.

Tonight’s writer-oracles are award-winning journalist and current Seattle Times staff writer Claudia Rowe, author of the forthcoming literary true crime book, The Spider and the Fly (HarperCollins); journalist, screenwriter, and author of the novels Remembering Jody, A Better View of Paradise, and Owl Island, Randy Sue Coburn; and poet and essayist JM Miller, whose work explores environmental imagination and activism.

Feel free to drop by at 7 pm to write your questions down and have a drink. Divination will begin at 7:30 pm.

Note: This event takes place at Hotel Sorrento in the Fireside Room (900 Madison Street).

Claudia Rowe is an award-winning journalist who has been twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been published in numerous newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Mother Jones, Huffington Post, Woman’s Day, Yes! and The Stranger. Currently, Claudia is a staff writer at the Seattle Times. Her coverage of social issues, race, and violence has been honored by the Society of Professional Journalists, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, and the Journalism Center on Children & Families, which awarded her a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism.

Randy Sue Coburn began her career as a journalist whose essays and articles appeared in numerous national magazines and major newspapers. Her screenplays include Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, the 1994 film about Dorothy Parker that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and won Jennifer Jason Leigh the National Society of Film Critics Award for best actress. Film work and teaching at The University of Washington subsidized the writing of Remembering Jody, (1999, Carroll & Graf), and Randy Sue’s second novel, Owl Island, was published in 2006 by Ballantine, a division of Random House Publishing Group. A Better View of Paradise, also from Random House/Ballantine, was published in 2009.

JM Miller is a poet and essayist whose work explores environmental imagination and activism. She is founder of the anthology Ground Swell, a developing online public forum for literary environmental activism. She teaches poetics at the University of Washington Tacoma. Her work has most recently been published in Written River: A Journal of Eco-Poetics, Tupelo Press (online), and Cimarron Review.