You’re invited to a cocktail party!
Monday, July 15, 2019
5:00 – 6:30 PM

Catering: Wine, beer and heavy appetizers

NOTE: 7 PM – A reading follows at the Wheeler Theater featuring Daniel Orozco; Elissa Washuta; Yashika Graham as well as our announcement of the 2019 Centrum Champion

Featured Guests:

Sam Ligon: Port Townsend Writers’ Conference Artistic Director Sam Ligon 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.

Sam is the author of four previous books of fiction, including two novels—Among the Dead and Dreaming and Safe in Heaven Dead—and two collections of stories, Wonderland, illustrated by Stephen Knezovich, and Drift and Swerve. Ligon is co-editor, with Kate Lebo, of Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze. His stories have appeared in Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, and elsewhere. His essays appear in the Inlander. He teaches at Eastern Washington University in Spokane.

Claudia Castro Luna: Washington State Poet Laureate Claudia Castro Luna served as Seattle’s first Civic Poet from 2015-2017 and is the author of This City (Floating Bridge Press). She is a Hedgebrook and VONA alumna, the recipient of a King County 4Culture grant and a Jack Straw Fellow. Born in El Salvador she came to the United States in 1981. She has an MFA in poetry, an MA in Urban Planning and a K-12 teaching certificate. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, La Bloga, City Arts, Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art, among others. Claudia’s non-fiction work can be read in the anthologies, The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the US, (Northwestern University Press); Vanishing Points: Contemporary Salvadoran Narrative, (Kalina Eds) and forthcoming in This Is The Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press). Living in English and Spanish, Claudia writes and teaches in Seattle where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children.