Lit Jam: A Night of Words & Music

Cooked up during jam sessions at the Centrum Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, and taken on the road for a book fair performance at AWP in Minneapolis, this ensemble began as the JuJu Band and sometimes performs as part of Kim’s troupe, Nonstop Beautiful Ladies.

Kim Addonizio (blues harmonica and jazz flute) is the author of a dozen books, most recently Mortal Trash: Poems (W.W. Norton) and Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life (Penguin). She has two word/music CDs: Swearing, Smoking, Drinking & Kissing (with Susan Browne) and My Black Angel. She performs internationally and teaches poetry workshops online. Visit her at www.kimaddonizio.com.

Samuel Ligon (guitar and vocals) is currently writing and publishing a serial novel—Miller Cane: A True & Exact History—which will appear in fifty installments in Spokane’s weekly newspaper, The Inlander, as well as online, on Spokane Public Radio, and as a podcast. The author of four previous books of fiction, most recently Wonderland, Ligon is co-editor, with Kate Lebo, of Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter & Booze. He teaches at Eastern Washington University, serves as EWU’s Faculty Legislative Liaison in Olympia, and is Artistic Director of the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference.

Gary Copeland Lilley (guitar and vocals) is the author of eight books of poetry, the most recent being The Bushman’s Medicine Show, from Lost Horse Press (2017), and a chapbook, The Hog Killing, from Blue Horse Press (2018). He is originally from North Carolina and now lives in the Pacific Northwest. He has received the Washington DC Commission on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. He is published in numerous anthologies and journals, including Best American Poetry 2014, Willow Springs, The Swamp, Waxwing, the Taos International Journal of Poetry, and the African American Review. He is a Cave Canem Fellow.

Kate Lebo (cowbell) is the author of poetry chapbook Seven Prayers to Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Entre Rios Books) and the cookbook Pie School (Sasquatch Books), and she’s co-editor with Samuel Ligon of Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze. Her writing has been anthologized in Best American Essays and Ghosts of Seattle Past, and her first collection of nonfiction, The Book of Difficult Fruit, is forthcoming from FSG in 2020. Through the Washington Center for Cultural Traditions’ Arts Heritage Apprenticeship program, she is an apprenticed cheesemaker to Lora Lea Misterly of Quillisascut Farm. She lives in Spokane, Washington.

Kristen Millares Young (vocals) is the author of the novel Subduction (Red Hen Press, spring 2020). An essayist and prize-winning journalist, she serves as Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Guardian, New York Times, Crosscut, Hobart, Proximity, Moss, KUOW 94.9-FM, and the anthologies Pie & Whiskey and Latina Outsiders. Kristen was the researcher for the NYT team that produced “Snow Fall,” which won a Pulitzer. Her stories have been recognized by the Society for Features Journalism, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. She teaches at Hugo House, the Seattle Public Library, and the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference.