Brilliant Voices: A Benefit to Support Writing Classes for Women Experiencing Incarceration
Join us for an evening of poetry, storytelling, and performance to raise funds for the Golf Pencil Group, a creative community for writers experiencing incarceration. Featured readers include past GPG guest teacher Amber Flame, rapper and performer Julie-C, novelist and journalist Kristen Millares Young, and poets Shelby Handler and Amy Hirayama.
About Golf Pencil Group
Since 2011, the teaching artists of GPG have led weekly writing classes for women incarcerated at King County Jail, focusing on the reflective, empowering, and integrative potential of putting pencil to paper. During COVID lockdowns, GPG was only permitted to work with students via correspondence packets. But now, three years later, we’re returning to our immersive and curated face-to-face workshops!
Thank you for your support in attending Brilliant Voices, our event to raise awareness and secure donations for teacher stipends, student book requests, and class supplies! Attendees who give $20 will receive a copy of Brilliant Voices: a Creative Writing Workbook, a collection of GPG’s best-loved writing lessons, prompts, and activities, featuring art by M Curry Designs.
Golf Pencil Group is a project of Evergreen Social Impact. Learn more and support Golf Pencil Group here.
The House bar will be open to serve alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages.Shelby Handler
Shelby Handler is a writer, translator and educator living in Seattle on Duwamish and Coast Salish land. Recent work has appeared in Poetry, The Journal, and Poetry Northwest, among others.
Amy Hirayama
Amy Hirayama is a UW Bothell Creative Writing and Poetics MFA candidate who is currently working on her thesis. She is a former middle school teacher who worked in South Seattle for seven years. Amy uses writing as a way to explore her mixed-race Hapa identity, imagine spaces of belonging for herself and connect across difference. Born in the Pacific Northwest, she finds inspiration in the beauty of this region. Amy is a 2021-2022 Imagining America PAGE Fellow. Her poetry can be found in the fall/winter 2021 issue of Strait Up magazine as well as the forthcoming chapbook Hariboetry.
Kristen Millares Young
Kristen Millares Young is a journalist, essayist, and author of the novel Subduction, named a staff pick by the Paris Review and called “whip-smart” by the Washington Post, “a brilliant debut” by the Seattle Times, and “utterly unique and important” by Ms. Magazine. Winner of Nautilus and IPPY awards, Subduction was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and named a finalist for two International Latino Book Awards and Foreword Indies Book of the Year in 2020. Her essays, book reviews, and investigations appear in the Washington Post, the Guardian, Literary Hub, and the anthologies Advanced Creative Nonfiction, Latina Outsiders, and Alone Together, winner of a 2021 Washington State Book Award. A former Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House, she is the editor of Seismic: Seattle, City of Literature, a finalist for a 2021 Washington State Book Award. Kristen was the researcher for the New York Times team that produced “Snow Fall,” which won a Pulitzer Prize. She was the 2023 Distinguished Visiting Writer for Seattle University and the University of Washington Bothell Master of Fine Arts program.
Website and Social Media Handles:
www.kristenmyoung.com
@kristenmillares
www.instagram.com/kristenmillares
www.facebook.com/kristen.young.14019
www.twitter.com/kristenmillares
www.linkedin.com/in/kristenmyoung
Amber Flame
Amber Flame is an artist and performer, whose work has garnered artistic merit residencies with Hedgebrook, The Watering Hole, Wa Na Wari, Vermont Studio Center, and Yefe Nof. Flame served as the 2017-2019 poetry Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House in Seattle, and is a queer Black dandy mama who falls hard for a jumpsuit and some fresh kicks.
