VIRTUAL ONLY – Clarion West Summer Reading Series

Featuring Carmen Maria Machado with Amber Flame

This event has already occurred

Date:: Tuesday, July 23
Time:: 6:00 pm PDT

Note: Carmen Maria Machada’s in-person appearance at Town Hall has been cancelled, and our presenting partner Clarion West will host a free online Zoom webinar in its place. The webinar has an adjusted start time of 6:00 PM Pacific.

Attendees must complete a quick registration for the Zoom webinar to access the stream. Click the button above for more info and to register.

Headshots of Carmen Maria Machado (with light skin, short brown hair, eyeglasses) and Amber Flame (with tan skin and chin-length curly black hair)

Arts & Culture

Acclaimed essayist, poet, and critic Carmen Maria Machado discusses her literary repertoire and process.

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, among others. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, The Believer, Guernica, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Amber Flame is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, activist and educator, garnering residencies with Hedgebrook, Baldwin for the Arts, and more. Flame’s work appears in diverse publications, and her first poetry collection, Ordinary Cruelty, published in 2017 through Write Bloody Press. Flame’s second book, apocrifa, a love story told in verse, launched 2023 from Red Hen Press. She serves as Program Director of Hedgebrook while working on a third poetry collection, singing with her band, Last of the RedHot Mamas, making art, writing essays, and raising her awesome kid. Amber Flame is a queer Black dandy mama who falls hard for a jumpsuit and some fresh kicks.

The Clarion West Summer Reading Series will be held in person and streamed live in a hybrid session each week during the Six-Week Workshop.

Clarion West supports emerging and underrepresented voices by providing writers with world-class instruction to empower their creation of wild and amazing worlds. Through conversation and public engagement, they bring those voices to an ever-expanding community. Read more about their work here.

This reading series has been made possible by King County 4Culture, the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, the Sherman Family Foundation, the Seattle Public Library, Hugo House, Third Place Books, and the Elliott Bay Book Company.

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and Clarion West.