Ask the Oracle: Melissa Febos, Elissa Washuta, and Quenton Baker
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 Melissa Febos, author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart, and the forthcoming essay collection, Abandon Me (Bloomsbury, 2017); Seattle-based writer Elissa Washuta, author of the genre-defying memoir, My Body Is a Book of Rules (Red Hen Press); and former Made at Hugo House fellow (2015-16), poet, and educator, Quenton Baker, author most recently of the incredible debut collection, This Glittering Republic (Willow Books).
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).
Melissa Febos is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press 2010) and the forthcoming essay collection, Abandon Me (Bloomsbury 2017). Her work has been widely anthologized and appears in publications including Tin House, Granta, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Glamour, Guernica, Post Road, Salon, The New York Times, Hunger Mountain, Portland Review, Dissent, The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, Bitch Magazine, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Drunken Boat, and Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York. The recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, she is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Monmouth University and MFA faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA)
Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and the author of two books, Starvation Mode and My Body Is a Book of Rules, named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her work has appeared in Salon, The Chronicle of Higher Education, BuzzFeed, and elsewhere. Elissa currently serves as the undergraduate adviser for the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington and a nonfiction faculty member in the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is a faculty advisor for Mud City Journal and former Saturday editor for The Rumpus. She lives in Seattle. @misswashuta.
Quenton Baker is a poet and teacher. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in anthologies such as Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and It Was Written: Poetry Inspired by Hip-Hop. He has a chapbook, Diglossic in the Second America from Punch Press, and is the author of This Glittering Republic (Willow Books). He has an MFA in Poetry from the University of Southern Maine, and he writes poetry reviews for Poet by Poet.
