✨Spend an evening with poet & dream deliverer Mathias Svalina on Thurs. April 4th! Get your tickets here. ✨

Loading Events

Programs & Events

Reading

  • This event has passed.
  • Date: January 9
  • Time: 7:30pm - 8:30pm PT

Ask the Oracle: Steven Barker, Nadine Antoinette Maestas & Lily Ann Baumgart

Hotel Sorrento Fireside Room (900 Madison Street) | free

Join us for Ask the Oracle, a quarterly series where local writers answer your most burning questions through literary divination. Come early, write your questions down, and—if fates allow—our host Johnny Horton will pose your question to the panel of writers, who’ll then choose a passage from their respective work to predict the future.

Tonight’s writer-oracles are Steven Barker, former Made at Hugo House fellow and author of the recent essay collection Now for the Disappointing Part; Nadine Antoinette Maestas; and Seattle Youth Poet Laureate Lily Ann Baumgart, whose first book is forthcoming from Penmanship Books in May of 2018.


Steven Barker is the author of Now for the Disappointing Part: A Pseudo-Adult’s Decade of Short-Term Jobs, Long-Term Relationships, and Holding Out for Something Better (Skyhorse Publishing). He has, in addition to big company temp jobs, worked as a freelance journalist and his essays have appeared in Salon and Split Lip magazine, among others. He lives in Seattle where he cofounded the local reading series Cheap Wine & Poetry and Cheap Beer & Prose. He is the host of the arts and entertainment podcast Ordinary Madness.


Lily Ann Baumgart is Seattle’s 2017-18 youth poet laureate. Before being the youth poet laureate, Lily Ann was in the finalists cohort for the 2016-17 YPL season. She also was a part of the inaugural Jack Straw Young Writers Program 2015-16. She believes that writing is forever changing the lives of writers and readers. Her favorite part of writing is being able to teach poetry and learning from those she works with; for her, poetry is a constant state of growth. She has read and taught around the Seattle area and has a forthcoming book through Penmanship Books in May of 2018.


Johnny Horton is a poet and teacher who directs the University of Washington’s summer creative writing program in Rome. A recipient of a Washington Artist Trust GAP grant, Johnny teaches English at Seattle Central College and his poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Horsethief, Los Angeles Review, Willow Springs, Golden Handcuffs Review, CutBank, and Notre Dame Review. He’s recently had poems selected by Prairie Schooner and for an upcoming Everyman Pocket Poems Anthology on Rome.