I got into the hospitality industry because I was struck by the power of food to bring people together and its ability to offer an immediate window to the qualities human cultures share with each other. There’s no faster and better way to get to understand a person than to break bread with them. Eventually, …
In The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, my main character, Dorothy, is a poet who describes herself as someone who breaks her own heart for a living. As a novelist, that’s how I’ve always felt. Actually, scratch that. The always part is the heartache that’s been there for as long as I can remember, and …
When I was still small enough to sit on my great grandmother’s lap I wasn’t afraid of anything. I remember trips out to the Olympic Peninsula where my siblings and I slept in tents or beneath the stars. The murmur of adults speaking against the last embers of a fire and the crawl of the …
This fall, I taught an online writing course meant to help poets put together and prepare their first poetry collections for publication. Though I’d designed the course to be about the practicalities of structuring, formatting, and submitting their manuscripts, by the third class meeting, our conversations had diverged to the role of surprise in poetry. …
My mother sat in the very last row of chairs in the author event space at Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon, the day my memoir, Ma and Me, was officially released. She smiled with pride as her gaze skipped across the room, surely taking in the improbability of the moment: her daughter, a …
I keep a spreadsheet that lists every book I’ve read since 2010. It’s the most consistent and representative record of my life that I have—a life spent reading. I can look back and see that I spent the summer of 2015 reading or rereading Jane Austen novels, and the summer of 2016, all of Sarah …
A beautiful story about a family torn apart by war (and some pretty big conflicts) but brought together by love. A queer Khmer story that will upend your assumptions. So beautifully written and a real conversation opener. –Karen, Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA Open a book, open a conversation, open your mind! Find inspiration …
The winners for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association 2023 Northwest Book Awards have been announced. The Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association (PNBA) is a non-profit association of independent bookstores from five Northwest states: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska. Since 1965, the annual Book Awards have recognized such luminary figures in Northwest literature as Ivan Doig, Ursula K. Le Guin, …
