Help us tell the story of Seattle's stories!

Photo by Ryan Wilson on Unsplash

You know that Seattle is made of stories—that’s one of the reasons we’re a UNESCO City of Literature. Now it’s time to tell these stories with a literary map of the city.

What people and places do you think should be included?

Some typical examples might be:
- The former residence of a prominent writer
- An event venue that has played an important part in Seattle's literary life
- The location of a deeply significant historical event

We're already considering Seattle's well-known bookstores and libraries, but if you've got a lesser-known suggestion, let us know!

 
Some things to consider as you think of suggestions:

- What has been the long-term impact on the community?
- What has been the long-term impact on Seattle’s profile as a literary city and/or the regional literary scene?
- If suggesting an author, did they reside in Seattle for substantial amount of time? ( In order to keep the list manageable, we’re only considering deceased authors at this time.) 

More Information About the Literary Map Project

Photo by Jay Heike on Unsplash

Community Listening

After extensive interviews with other map creators in our fellow Cities of Literature, in early 2020, Seattle City of Literature convened a group of stakeholders to provide input on people and places to be included in the map. Over the course of several meetings we compiled a preliminary list which you can see here.

We’re grateful for the input of these individuals and organizations:

Frank Abe, Author
Iisaaksiichaa Ross Braine, University of Washington
Jim Cantú, El Centro de la Raza
Claudia Castro Luna, Author
Jill LaPointe, Lushootseed Research
Tim Lennon, LANGSTON
Jolene Haas, The Duwamish Tribe
Elisheba Johnson and Inye Wokoma, Wa Na Wari
Stephanie Johnson-Toliver, Black Heritage Society of Washington
Rosemary Jones, The National Nordic Museum
Karen Maeda Allman, Elliott Bay Book Company
Miguel Maestes, El Centro de la Raza
Christina Roberts, Indigenous Peoples Institute, Seattle University
Jazmyn Scott, Arte Noir

Several additional organizations have agreed to review the map throughout the development process, and we’ll keep updating our contributors list to reflect their input

Format

The map will be made available in both print and digital editions. Due to the constraints of the form, the printed map may include fewer points of interest than the digital.

The People Behind the Map

Designer: Erin Shigaki/Purple Gate Designs

Erin Shigaki was born and raised in Seattle, WA, where she recently returned after many years on the east coast, studying and working in design and art education. Her homecoming has paved a path for public art commissions and grants to create work that is community based and focused on the experiences of communities of color, often the World War II incarceration of her community. Erin is passionate about highlighting similarities between that history, the inhumane detention and family separation immigrants face today, and other systemic violence and injustices black and brown people continue to face. She is keen to explore intergenerational trauma and the emergence of beauty and intimacy despite harsh circumstances. Erin’s work also examines the act of reclamation: of land, language and culture. She believes that using art to tell stories about these moments can educate, redress wrongs, and incrementally heal.

Erin is a community activist, and helps run an annual pilgrimage to Minidoka, the American concentration camp where her family was incarcerated. She is also a part of Tsuru for Solidarity, a nonviolent, direct action project of Japanese American social justice advocates working to end detention and incarceration for all.

Erin holds a B.A. from Yale University and completed additional design and art study at American University and in Brissago, Switzerland, among others. She has exhibited in Seattle, WA at such places as The Wing Luke Museum, Occidental Park, Nihonmachi Alley, Cornish Playhouse, and ARTS at King Street Station. She was a 2018 Artist in Residence at Densho.

Learn more: https://www.purplegatedesign.com/about/

Cartographer: Gregory T. Woolston

Gregory is a graduate student in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he researches relationships between architectural, cartographic, and urban design and racism, as well as social movements working toward spatial justice. He is also a cartographer with a few prints for sale and available for hire.

Learn more: http://gwoolston.me/

Projected Timeline (subject to change):

February 2022: Request community input
December 2022: Draft of Print Map Complete
January 2023: Community Review
February 2023: Print Maps Complete
March 2023: Digital Map Complete

Seattle's Membership Monitoring Report

Every four years, cities within the UNESCO Creative Cities Network each submit a report that details the work of the previous four years and includes an action plan for the forthcoming years. Seattle was excited to submit our first “Membership Monitoring Report” at the end of November 2021.
It was a wonderful opportunity to look back at the accomplishments of our literary community, and to look forward to the work yet to be done.

We thought it would be fun to share the report with all of you as well. Thanks to Stacy Nguyen Creative for the beautiful design. Enjoy!

International Translation Day: Meet Some Seattle Translators

It’s that one day a year when we all light a candle for St. Jerome: International Translation Day! Placed as we are between multiple languages and cultures, Seattle is a natural home for translators, and for cross-cultural exchange. Below are a few people and institutions that are making Seattle an International City of Literature.

The first great resource is the Northwest Translators and Interpreters Society (NOTIS), a regional chapter of the American Translators Association. NOTIS provides a wide range of services, information and events, including – in happier times, anyway – local meetups for translators to get together and share their experiences across language pairs and genres.

The University of Washington – and its Press in particular – have been powerhouses of language research, multilingual archives, and translation for decades, so it’s no surprise that the UW has also started a translation hub, which is meant to knit together a wide range of people and programs, raising the profile of translations, translators, and translation studies. They put on semi-regular events; you can sign up for their newsletter (and subscribe to various social media) here.

Nicholaas Barr

And no surprise, furthermore, that both of our featured translators today are affiliated with the UW! First up is Nicolaas Barr, Director of Study Abroad and lecturer at the UW’s Comparative History of Ideas. A translator from the Dutch, his most recent translation publication is the memoir of Moroccan-Dutch politician Tofik Dibi, titled Djinn, published earlier this year by SUNY Press, as part of their Queer Politics and Cultures series. From the publisher’s description:

“A bestseller upon its publication in Dutch in 2015, it tells the poignant, at times heartbreaking, story of Dibi’s coming-of-age as a gay Muslim man with humor and grace.”

In an interview with the UW News, Barr talks about how the memoir “cuts through the dominant ‘clash of civilizations’ narrative between supposedly tolerant Europe, on the one hand, and minoritized people, especially Muslims, on the other.

“Dibi was born in the Netherlands, speaks Dutch as a first language, and grew up steeped in Dutch culture and institutions, yet like other people of color, he is often treated as a permanent newcomer — or worse, as an unwanted threat. In addressing these themes, “Djinn” offers a compelling counter-narrative, showing how Dibi’s multiple identities are deeply entwined in the country’s distinctive cultural landscape.”

Tofik Dibi. Photo by Lisa Zilver

Our second featured translator is Mary Childs, also at the UW’s Comparative History of Ideas department (probably no accident that many translators have found a home there), where she teaches courses on Environmental Humanities and Post-Soviet studies. She’s been translating from the Georgian since 2007, and her upcoming novel translation is Form 100, by Zviad Kvaratskhelia, due out in October from BookLand Press. Kvaratskhelia is an editor and publisher in Tbilisi, and his short story “Peridé”, also translated by Childs, was featured in Comma Press’ collection The Book of Tbilisi.

Zviad Kvaratskhelia

We asked her to tell us a bit about the experience of translating Form 100, which won a SABA literary prize for Best Novel of the Year in 2016. “The novel was difficult for me when I first started working on it, as it deals with violence against women in the country of Georgia, and the ramifications of that violence in the lives of the perpetrators. I had a few years break between initially translating and then editing for publication, and in this time, I researched more about domestic violence in Georgia, and came to understand the intense taboo of talking about it. When I had the opportunity to polish the translation, I realized that this would be an important occasion for a wider public to hear, and read, some open discussion on the topic. I look forward to hearing and reading more of Zviad Kavaratskhelia's works.”

As do we. Happy International Translation Day, everyone: get out and read a book!

Seattle Writers Selected for Korean Residency Programs

Takami Nieda

Photo by A. Mathiowetz

Autumn landscape of Sangdong Citizen River

Bucheon City Hall

Ojeong Library in Bucheon

Bucheon City

Citizen's Poetry Reading Group

Seattle City of Literature is pleased to announce that two local writers have been selected to participate in writers’ residencies in Korea this fall.

Jeanine Walker was selected as Wonju City’s inaugural writer in residence. She will be in residence at the Toji Cultural Centre for approximately six weeks, while working on her forthcoming novel. 
Takami Nieda was one of two writers selected to be in residence in Bucheon. Her residency in Bucheon will be for approximately four weeks, while working on a translation of Lee Hoesung’s Travelers of a Hundred Years.

Both writers were selected after a competitive application process, and each will participate in local events, give classes and meet with local writers during their stays.

Takami Nieda is a Japanese English literary translator, specialized in translating literature of the Korean diaspora, specifically of writers born and/or living in Japan. Her translation works include Kazuki Kaneshiro’s Go, published in March 2018; and The Color of the Sky is the Shape of the Heart by Chesil, forthcoming from Soho Press in April 2022. Nieda’s translation of Go won the Freeman Book Award in 2019. She is currently working on a translation of Travelers of a Hundred Years, written by zainichi Korean writer Lee Hoesung. This translation was initiated by Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Nieda teaches at Seattle Central College.

 A recipient of fellowships from Artist Trust and the Jack Straw Cultural Center, Jeanine Walker has published poems in Chattahoochee Review, Prairie Schooner, New Ohio Review, and Third Coast, and her debut poetry collection, The Two of Them Might Outlast Me, is forthcoming from Groundhog Poetry Press in fall 2021. She holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston and teaches poetry in public schools through Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools program and at Hugo House. Jeanine also writes, produces, and acts in films with her partner, Steve Mauer.

Bucheon, South Korea was designated a UNESCO City of Literature in 2017. Their residency program aims to increase international exchange and communication, contribute to the mobility of writers, translators, and cartoonists, offer a creative and inspiring environment and provide them an opportunity to introduce their work to Korean readers. For more information about Bucheon UNESCO City of Literature visit https://www.seattlecityoflit.org/citiesoflit.

Wonju, South Korea was designated a UNESCO City of Literature in 2019. This is the first year of their residency program, which was designed to promote understanding and friendship between the UNESCO Cities of Literature. For more information about Wonju UNESCO City of Literature visit https://www.seattlecityoflit.org/citiesoflit.     

Jeanine Walker

National Youth Writing Group, Wonju

Picture Book Reading in Wonju

Wonju's One Book, One City Celebration

“Seattle runs faster than a river and inevitably changes”

Mortada Gzar moved from Iraq to Seattle – via the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa – in search of lost love. His new memoir traces this journey circuitously. To quote Paul Constant’s Seattle Times interview, “As a five-year Capitol Hill resident, Gzar writes beautifully about Seattle at a pre-pandemic moment in which it was growing at a quicker rate than almost any other American city. ‘Seattle runs faster than a river and inevitably changes,’ he writes, adding, ‘there are millions of Seattles that take turns here. I feel this while I walk the amazing streets in the heart of the city or its outskirts. I sense its skin corroding and another skin growing, only to be shed and replaced again.’”

Addressed to unlikely audiences from new roommates to Heraclitus the three-legged dog and Richard Beyers’s clothing-covered statue People Waiting for the Interurban in Fremont, Gzar tells his story to his new city as a means of understanding it himself. From idylls like the brief days he spent falling in love with Morise in Basra to the horrific abuses he suffered as a young gay man growing up in Iraq, the story surprises at every turn, wrenching the heart and delighting the imagination in equal measure.

Seeing Seattle through the eyes of a newly arrived immigrant, I fell in love with it anew – and also cringed with shame about the injustices that prevail here. Leaving Iraq offered freedom of expression, but our wild income inequality, racism, and xenophobia is no utopia. As an author writing from two cultures at once, Mortada Gzar is a human embodiment of UNESCO’s vision of cultural exchange. I’m in Seattle, Where Are You? is an Iraqi memoir – translated from Arabic by award-winner William M. Hutchins – and it is also an American one. From the relative safety of his home in Capitol Hill, Gzar can reveal truths impossible to publish in Iraq, as well as those he faces seeking permanent employment, kinship, and stability here in the Emerald City.

Join Seattle City of Literature on Tuesday, June 22, at 6pm Pacific, for a conversation between Mortada Gzar, translator William Hutchins, and moderator Christopher Merrill director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa . More information and tickets for this free event here.

Gabriella Page-Fort is co-owner and book buyer at Hex Enduction Records & Books in Lake City, Seattle, and Editorial Director of Amazon Crossing, an imprint publishing international writers and the publisher of ’m in Seattle, Where Are You. She is editor-in-chief of the Hex Enduction Quarterly and plays in local bands Dragon, Tissue and Stickers. Gabi is a board member on the Seattle City of Literature board.

Disclosure: Seattle City of Literature is a recipient of an Amazon Literary Partnership grant.