Award Winning Authors at Seattle Arts & Lectures 2010-11 Series

Seattle Arts & Lectures announces its 2010-11 series featuring 20 of the most outstanding authors, artists and cultural icons writing today.  If you fancy yourself an observer or student of the human experience, you’ll want to pick up tickets to attend one of these series.

Literary/Arts Series:  All events held at Taper Auditorium, Benaroya Hall, 200 University, downtown (map) at 7:30 pm.  Series tickets begin at $100 and are available online.

• September 14th – Jonathan Franzen, National Book Award winner for The Corrections, with another novel out late summer.
• October 19th – Sara Paretsky’s detective V.I. Warshawski revolutionized the mystery/detective genre.  This prolific author is always a popular speaker.
• November 9th – Daniel Handler, as Lemony Snicket, is the author of 13 children’s books in the best selling series “A Series of Unfortunate Events” (also made into a movie).  He also plays a mean accordion.
• December 8th – John Richardson, biographer of Picasso, appears in conjunction with the Seattle Art Museum’s Picasso exhibit.
• January 24th – Elizabeth Strout, a Pulitzer Prize winning author, explores concepts of love, loss and grief.
• April 18th – Joyce Carol Oates, author of 50 novels in addition to dozens of short stories, poetry, drama, and essays, always attracts a crowd.
• May 10th – Richard Ford is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Independence Day, among others.

American Voices Series: All events held at Taper Auditorium, Benaroya Hall, downtown at 7:30 pm.  Series tickets begin at $55 and are available online.

• October 5th – T.R. Reid, foreign correspondent and Washington Post bureau chief, along with author of the bestselling The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care.
• February 8th – Neil Painter, Princeton professor and historian, and author of Creating Black Americans, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol, and The History of White People.
• March 2nd – Tracy Kidder, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner for The Soul of the New Machine.
• May 24th – Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer, is also the author of nearly 50 books of poetry, fiction, and essays about ecological and agricultural responsibility.

Poetry Series: All events, with the exception of Billy Collins (details noted below) are held at the Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya Hall, downtown, 7:30 pm.  Series tickets begin at $110 and are available online.

• October 15th – Robert Pinsky, author of poetry, essays, and translations, is greatly inspired by jazz.  His appearance with collaborate with Earshot Jazz Festival and local musicians at his reading.
• October 28th – Robert Hass, Pulitzer Prize winner and former Poet Laureate, celebrates his most recent book The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems.
• November 22nd – Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate, is laugh-out-loud funny and the recipient of the first Mark Twain Prize for Humor in Poetry.  This event will be held at Town Hall Seattle, 1119 8th Avenue (map).
• January 20th – Lucia Perilo, Olympia author of five books of poetry, the most recent, Inseminating the Elephant (nominated for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize).
• February 15th – Patricia Smith, 4-time individual champion of the Poetry Slam, her most recent book, Blood Dazzler, deals with Hurricane Katrina.
• March 15th – Maria Howe, author of (among others) In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic.
• April 14th – Brian Turner, Major Jackson, and Susan Rich, a diverse trio writing about current topics.

Series tickets are on sale now, but individual tickets are not yet available.

Seattle Arts & Lectures was founded in the hope of connecting people and ideas.  These three series are just one part of their offerings that they hope accomplish this goal.  If you’ve never been to a lecture or lecture series, it’s easy to think that it’s boring or like being back in a classroom.  PIck a topic or author that you enjoy, and I think you’ll discover that it’s anything but boring.

Photo credit: City of Seattle @flickr