Seattle University’s English Department launches ENCOMPASS, a new quarterly literary series.
The series is free to the public. RSVP online for the first event on February 27 in Wyckoff Auditorium.
This initial reading features Claudia Castro Luna, Washington State Poet Laureate, who will read from her book-length poem One River, a Thousand Voices drawn from her experience with communities along the Columbia River.
She will be joined by Mimi Lok, visiting writer and author of Last of Her Name, a debut short story collection that considers the intimate, interconnected lives of diasporic women and the histories they are born into, a book NPR calls “a gorgeous collection that urges us to do our best to connect with one another.”
This reading is co-sponsored by Seattle University Office of Multicultural Affairs, student organization MEChA, and La Sala, a Seattle-based Latinx arts organization.
About the authors:
Mimi Lok
Mimi Lok is the author of the story collection Last of Her Name, forthcoming from Kaya Press in October 2019. The title story was a finalist for the 2018 Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and an Ylvisaker Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Susan Atefat Arts and Letters Prize for nonfiction. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, Nimrod, Lucky Peach, Hyphen, the South China Morning Post, and elsewhere. Mimi is also the executive director and editor of Voice of Witness, a human rights/oral history nonprofit she cofounded that amplifies marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program.
Claudia Castro Luna
Claudia Castro Luna is Washington State Poet Laureate. She served as Seattle’s Civic Poet, from 2015-2017 and is the author of the Pushcart nominated and Killing Marías (Two Sylvias Press) also shortlisted for WA State 2018 Book Award in poetry and This City, (Floating Bridge Press). She is also the creator of the acclaimed Seattle Poetic Grid. Castro Luna is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, the recipient of individual artist grants from King County 4Culture and Seattle’s Office of Arts and Culture, a Hedgebrook and VONA alumna, and a 2014 Jack Straw fellow, Born in El Salvador she came to the United States in 1981. She has an MA in Urban Planning, a teaching certificate and an MFA in poetry. Her poems have been featured in PBS Newshour, KQED San Francisco, KUOW Seattle and have appeared in Poetry Northwest, La Bloga, Dialogo and Psychological Perspectives among others. Her non-fiction work can be read in several anthologies, among them This Is The Place: Women Writing About Home, (Seal Press) Claudia is currently working on a memoir, Like Water to Drink, about her experience escaping the civil war in El Salvador. Living in English and Spanish, she writes and teaches in Seattle where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children.