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  • Date: May 21
  • Time: 7:00pm - 7:00pm PT

Writers Get to the PowerPoint

PowerPointPens, paper, Microsoft Word—these are the typical tools of a writer.

Tonight, an intrepid herd of writers, Bill Carty, Kathleen Flenniken, Matt Gano, Rachel Kessler, Arlene Kim, Erin Malone, Sierra Nelson, David Schmader, Greg Stump, and Anastacia-Renee, puts down the pen and clicks up the PowerPoint, presenting brand-new slideshows inspired by the PechaKucha format.

The event is free, and the bar will be open.

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About the Writers

Originally from a small town in coastal Maine, Bill Carty moved to Seattle after receiving a BA from Dartmouth College and an MFA from University of North Carolina-Wilmington. His poems are published in numerous local and national journals, including Sixth Finch, Diagram, Floating Bridge Review, Cirque, New Orleans Review, Transom, Blue Mesa Review and Page Boy. His chapbook “Refugium” was recently published by alice blue books. Bill’s first full-length manuscript, “Tomahawks,” has been named a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Four Way Books Intro Award and Saturnalia Books. In 2010, he participated in the Jack Straw Writers Program.

Kathleen Flenniken is the 2012-2014 Washington State Poet Laureate. Her first book, Famous (University of Nebraska, 2006), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association and a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, The Writer’s Almanac, Poetry Daily, American Life in Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. Her second collection, Plume, selected by Linda Bierds for the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, was published in Spring 2012 by University of Washington Press.

Matt Gano has been writing and teaching professionally since 2004. In 2011, he was invited to lecture as a guest speaker for The Juilliard School in NYC and performed as a featured poet for “Page Meets Stage,” at the Bowery Poetry Club. He was Writer-in-Residence at the Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity in Hong Kong in 2009, and led creative writing workshops the previous year for the Youth Creativity Summit in Seoul, Korea. He has represented Seattle at the National Poetry Slam multiple years and is the 2008 Seattle Grand-Slam champion. Matt is currently an Artist-in-Residence with Seattle Arts and Lectures, Writers in the Schools and is the author of Suits for the Swarm, a poetry collection with MoonPath Press.

Rachel Kessler is a writer, educator, and performance artist. She is a senior Writer in Residence at several elementary, middle and high schools through Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools program. An avid collaborator, she is a founding member of the literary performance art groups The Typing Explosion and the Vis-à-Vis Society. For the past 14 years, these critically acclaimed groups have been writing collaborative poetry and presenting their work in the form of text-based art installations and interactive multi-media shows and collaboratively written handmade books. Her collaborative poems have appeared in Tin House, TATE, and USA Today. She has written about eating, hair removal and book reading for Seattle’s premier alternative weekly The Stranger, and the Bay Area’s Urban View. She spent last winter writing a statistical musical and Scientific Method sestinas.

Arlene Kim is the author of the poetry collection “What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?” published by Milkweed Editions, and her work has appeared in diode, Blackbird, DIAGRAM, Terrain.org, SPLIT, Cha, DMQ Review, cant, Switched-on Gutenberg and on Seattle’s NPR station as part of the KUOW Presents show. In 2012, Poets and Writers selected Arlene as part of their annual debut poets series. Arlene received a BA in literature from Brown University and an MFA in poetry from the University of Minnesota where her work won the 2007 Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize. Currently, she is the associate poetry editor for DMQ Review.

Erin Malone’s newest poems appear in Poetry Northwest, The Monarch Review, and Field. Her chapbook, What Sound Does It Make, won the Concrete Wolf Award in 2007. Recipient of grants from King County’s 4Culture, Washington State’s Artist Trust, and the Colorado Council on the Arts, she has taught poetry writing at Richard Hugo House, University of Colorado, University of Washington, and in Rome, Italy. Currently she works with elementary school students through Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools.

Sierra Nelson has been writing, teaching and performing in Seattle for over 14 years and earned her MFA in Poetry from University of Washington in 2002. Her recent books include the lyrical choose-your-own-adventure collaboration with visual artist Loren Erdrich “I Take Back the Sponge Cake” (Rose Metal Press, 2012), chapbook “In Case of Loss” (Toadlily Press, 2012); her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, City Arts Magazine, Crazyhorse, DIAGRAM and Forklift Ohio, among others. Nelson is a MacDowell Colony fellow, a 2011 Hackney Literary Award winner and co-founder of local literary performance art groups The Typing Explosion and the Vis-à-Vis Society.

David Schmader is a writer and performer who’s been living and working in Seattle since 1991. His solo plays include “Straight” and “Letter to Axl,” which he’s performed in Seattle and across the U.S. Since 1999, he’s been an editor and staff writer for the Seattle newsweekly The Stranger, writing the pop culture-and-politics column “Last Days.” In January 2012, Schmader premiered a new solo play, “A Short-Term Solution to a Long-Term Problem,” at Richard Hugo House.

Greg Stump has been working as a writer, artist, and teacher in Seattle for more than a decade. He is the creator of the weekly strip Dwarf Attack, the graphic novel Disillusioned Illusions, and the co-creator (with David Lasky) of the comic book series Urban Hipster, which was nominated for a Harvey and an Ignatz award. His comics and illustrations have appeared in The Stranger, The Comics Journal, City Arts, and The Portland Mercury and have been exhibited at SOIL and Bumbershoot. In 2010 he was named Illustrator of the Year by Cartoonists Northwest.

Anastacia-Renee is a writer, Cave Canem Fellow, Hedgebrook Alumna, EDGE Professional Writers Graduate, VONA alum, creative writing workshop facilitator, documentarian, and playwright. She is the recipient of the San Diego Journalism Press Club Award for the article “War Torn.” She is writer, co-director, and co-producer of GOTBREAST? Documentary (2007): a documentary about the views of women regarding breast and body image. Her poetry, fiction and nonfiction have been published or is forthcoming in: WomenArts Quarterly, Specter Magazine, Crab Creek Review, Everyday Other Things, Women Writers in Bloom, Saltwater Quarterly, The Poetry Breakfast, Things Lost, Midnight Tea Book, Reverie, Alehouse Journal, Women. Period., The Drunken Boat, Torch, Clamor Magazine, Cave Canem XI, Check the Rhyme, An Anthology of Female Poets & Emcees (Nominated for the 2007 NAACP Award), I Woke Up and Put My Crown On: 76 Voices of African American Women, Essence Magazine, Number One Magazine, Chicken Bones Journal, The Nubian Chronicles, Hair Piecez, San Diego City Beat, The Pitch Weekly, and The Source Magazine.