Presented in partnership with The Seattle Public Library and The Elliott Bay Book Company.  This event takes place at the downtown branch of the Seattle Public Library in the Microsoft Auditorium. Prize-winning and best-selling author Colson Whitehead reads from his new novel, The Underground Railroad, "a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures

Featuring emerging and established poets, Beacon Bards is a laid-back quarterly series that Paul Constant of The Seattle Review of Books has called "Seattle's literary back porch." Tonight, David J.Daniels, Keetje Kuipers, Rachel Moritz, and Tiffany Midge will all grace our stage before the series moves to its newly regular location at Third Place Books

Presented in partnership with the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry Poetry at Sea A discussion of the paradox that for a certain strand of the poetic tradition, language is a complete conflation of the cerebral and the erotic: that it uses the bewilderment of meaning as a seduction strategy; and that this seduction is