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  • Date: September 11
  • Time: 7:30pm - 9:30pm PT

Hugo Literary Series: Dinaw Mengestu, Alissa Nutting, Sarah Galvin, and the Foghorns

lit series bannerCliché: Beating a dead horse
Meaning: To continue to bring up the same ol’ subject, even though it’s already been concluded and it won’t do any good to debate it further.

The 2015-2016 season begins on with writing based on the cliche “Beating a Dead Horse.” The event features novelist and reporter Dinaw Mengestu; fiction writer Alissa Nutting; and poet and Seattle native Sarah Galvin. The Foghorns, a rock-bluegrass band, will provide the music.


Dinaw Mengestu received a BA from Georgetown University and an MFA from Columbia University. His journalism and fiction have appeared in such publications as the Iowa Review, Granta, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and the Wall Street Journal.


nuttingAlissa Nutting is the author of the novel, Tampa, and the short story collection Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, which won the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction. Her fiction has appeared in The Norton Introduction to Literature, Tin House, Bomb, and Conduit; her essays have appeared in Fence, the New York Times, O: The Oprah Magazine, and other venues.



April wagonSarah Galvin
 is the author of a book of poetry called The Three Einsteins. She is a regular contributor to The Stranger and co-founder of Fashion Hot Dog 225, an art gallery and website (Seattle’s only high fashion, high art, high hot dog art space.) She has an MFA in poetry from University of Washington. In addition to poetry her interests include demolition derbies, bouncy castles, and confetti cannons. She has a recurring nightmare about a sentient house. Her poems and essays can be found in ioPleiadesNew Ohio Review, Dark Sky, Pinwheel, Alive at the Center, and Vice Magazine.


20140118-080000.jpgFor more than a decade, The Foghorns have been presenting their brand of folk blended with punk—playing the streets of Reykjavik Iceland with an acoustic, a bucket, and an overcoat, the clubs of Brooklyn with bluegrass backup, the rowdy bars of the Midwest with a screeching hollowbody. Finally settling in Seattle in 2008, their 2009 release A Diamond as Big as the Motel Six, was featured on KEXP’s Music That Matters. Their follow-up in 2011, To the Stars on the Wings of a Pig, was described by Seattle Weekly as “one of the year’s best albums.” The group, which consists of Bart Cameron, Jason Kopec, Lauren Trew, Ken Nottingham, Colin J Nelson, Matthew Ploszaj and Casey Ruff, will be releasing two albums in 2015.