Eastern Washington University’s annual Get Lit! Festival occurs April 11th-April 14th in various locations around Spokane and Coeur d’Alene, featuring a host of writing workshops, panels, and readings by regionally and nationally celebrated authors. Get Lit! is one of the major vehicles for literature in our city, and has no doubt played a substantial role in making Spokane the town of readers that it is.
I’m overjoyed that Carmen Maria Machado is the headliner this year: She has penned one of my all-time favorite memoirs and also one of my all-time favorite short story collections (no joke!), In the Dream House and Her Body and Other Parties, respectively. She blends genre with astonishing effect, always playing with form and language in surprising, delightful, and moving ways. And, most wonderfully, she’s a truth teller. She’s been called by The New York Times as part of the “New Vanguard” of women writers who are “shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st Century.” I’ll be in conversation with Machado on the 13th at The Bing (this is a ticketed event).
Throughout the day on Friday the 12th, Get Lit! will host several workshops at the Central Library. The ticketed events this day include celebrated Seattle poet Luther Hughes’s “Writing Your History” workshop and award-winning short fiction writer Alma García’s workshop, “That’s Hilarious (Not)! Using Humor in Serious Fiction.” Sign up for these sooner than later, they will likely book early!
Free and open-to-the-public workshops and events at the Central Library include: “Visual-Art-Engagement as Play: Ekphrastic Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction” with the wonderful local writer Janelle Cordero and EWU MFA alum Janée J. Baugher; “The Joy of Writing Animals” with several talented regional writers including Jessica Gigot, Caitlin Scarano, Michelle Eames, Henrietta Goodman, and Ryan Scariano; a live Spokane Public Radio interview with Portland DJ, writer, and educator Emily Prado (conducted by E.J. Iannelli in the podcast room); a Community Open Mic with our new Spokane Poet Laureate Mery Noel Smith; and author Carla Crujido in the Inland Northwest Special Collections discussing her book The Strange Beautiful and geeking out with Archivist Dana Bronson and I about researching iconic Spokane buildings and events.
You can view all of the 2024 Get Lit! Festival Events on their website. And here’s a list of some of the featured Get Lit! titles you can find on Spokane Public Library shelves:
In the Dream House: A Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado
Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado
The Strange Beautiful by Carla Crujido
Killing Marías: A Poem For Multiple Voices by Claudia María Castro Luna
Dispatches from Puerto Nowhere: An American Story of Assimilation And Erasure by Robert Lopez
Impossible Years: Poems by Janelle Cordero
Unexpected Weather Events: Stories by Erin Pringle
American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt And The Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back To Life by Jennifer Lunden
Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under The Influence Of Butter & Booze, Edited by Kate Lebo and Sam Ligon
Leg: The Story Of A Limb And The Boy Who Grew From It / A Memoir by Marshall, Greg (Essayist)
The Angel of Rome: And Other Stories by Jess Walter
