Reading Through It

Host

Katie Lee Ellison is a writer of essays and memoirs. She was born in New York City, grew up in Los Angeles, and calls Seattle home. She’s the founder, curator, and host of Nonfiction for No Reason, a teacher, and wrote a children’s book about Bob Marley for Penguin Random House. She holds a BA in English Lit from Wellesley College and an MFA from the University of Idaho. She’s a 2016-2017 Hugo House Fellow, a 2018 fellow at the Yiddish Book Center, and attended the Tin House Summer Workshop in 2020.

Readers

Juan Carlos Reyes is the author of the short story collection Three Alarm Fire published by Hinton Publishing in October 2024. He has published short stories and essays with The Under Review, Yellow Medicine Review, West Branch, Moss, and Waccamaw, among others. He has received fellowships from PEN, Jack Straw Writers, and the Washington State Artist Trust. He serves as an associate professor of creative writing at Seattle University and has formerly served as board president at Seattle City of Literature and as executive editor of Big Fiction magazine. He was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and lives with his wife and children in Seattle, WA.

Angela Garbes is a writer and speaker based in Seattle, Washington, where she lives with her family on Beacon Hill. She’s the author of the national bestseller Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, called “a landmark and a lightning storm, a gift that will be passed hand to hand for years,” by The New Yorker. Her first book, Like a Mother—a narrative nonfiction book exploring the emerging science and cultural myths of pregnancy—was an NPR Best Book of 2018 and a finalist for the Washington State Book Award in Nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Cut, New York, Bon Appétit, and featured on Fresh Air and The Daily Show. In a previous life, she was the staff food writer at The Stranger.

Marcus Harrison Green is the founder of Hinton Publishing, the publisher of the South Seattle Emerald, and a columnist with The Stranger. Growing up in South Seattle, he experienced first-hand the impact of one-dimensional stories on marginalized communities, which taught him the value of authentic narratives. After an unfulfilling stint in the investment world during his twenties, Marcus returned to his community with a newfound purpose of telling stories with nuance, complexity, and multidimensionality with the hope of advancing social change. This led him to become a writer and found the South Seattle Emerald. An award-winning storyteller, he was awarded the Seattle Human Rights Commission’s Individual Human Rights Leader Award for 2020 and named the inaugural James Baldwin Fellow by the Northwest African American Museum in 2022.

Jordynn Paz is from the Apsaalooke (Crow) Nation of southeast Montana. Growing up on the reservation, she regularly attended powwows and other cultural/ceremonial events, often with a book in hand. Jordynn received her Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and Native American Studies from the University of Montana. As a journalist, she covered Indigenous issues including the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement, blood quantum, and the complexities of Indigenous identity. Jordynn was a production assistant for the docuseries Murder in Big Horn which covered MMIW cases within her home community.

Rena Priest is an enrolled member of the Lhaq’temish (Lummi) Nation. She served as the 6th Washington State Poet Laureate (2021-2023) and was named the 2022 Maxine Cushing Gray Distinguished Writing Fellow. Priest is also the recipient of an Allied Arts Foundation Professional Poets Award and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Indigenous Nations Poets, Nia Tero, and the Vadon Foundation. Her debut collection, Patriarchy Blues, received an American Book Award. Her second collection, Sublime Subliminal, was published as the finalist for the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. Her most recent book, Northwest Know-How: Beaches, includes poems, retellings of legends, and fun descriptions of 29 of the most beloved beaches in the Pacific Northwest. Priest’s nonfiction has appeared in High Country News, YES! Magazine, Seattle Met, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.  

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha has lived the experiences of first-generation Americans, immigrants, and expatriates. Her heritage is Palestinian, Jordanian, and Syrian and she is fluent in Arabic and English. She has lived in and traveled across the Arab world, and many of her poems are inspired by the experience of crossing cultural, geographic and political borders, borders between languages, between the present and the living past. Lena writes poetry, essays and translations. She is the author of three books of poetry: Water and Salt (Red Hen Press), for which she won the 2018 Washington State Book Award for Poetry, Kaan and Her Sisters (July 2023), the 2022 Editors’ Selection by Trio House Press, and Something About Living (U of Akron Press, 2024), which poet Adrian Matejka chose for the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry. She has also published two poetry chapbooks: Arab in Newsland, the 2016 Two Sylvias Prize winner, and Letters from the Interior (diode editions, 2019). 

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and Hinton Publishing.