PODCAST · arts
SAL/on air
by Seattle Arts & Lectures
SAL/on air is a literary podcast featuring engaging author talks and readings from neary 40 years of Seattle Arts & Lectures programming. Seattle Arts & Lectures (SAL) is a literary nonprofit. Seattle Arts & Lectures cultivates transformative experiences through story and language with readers and writers of all generations. Get in-person or online tickets to SAL events at lectures.org.
Episodes
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Abdulrazak Gurnah
Leading up to his novel, Afterlives—which won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature—Abdulrazak Gurnah’s books had been out of print in the United States for several decades. Thus, many modern American readers first encountered Gurnah’s prose through the story of Ilyas, a boy stolen from his home by...
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Alexis Nikole Nelson wants you to eat your backyard
You don't have to have the right equipment, or a secret location, or a car to start foraging. Plenty of tasty foraged foods are easier to find than you might think: your backyard, parks, and local trails. SAL is thrilled to share KUOW's episode of "Seattle Eats" taped at our event with Alexis...
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Robin Wall Kimmerer
In our hectically paced media landscape, the tale of Robin Wall Kimmerer and her beloved book Braiding Sweetgrass is a story of human miracle. First published in 2013, Braiding Sweetgrass joined the best seller list in 2020, having risen into its readers hands person by person, gift by gift,...
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M. Gessen
Sound bites obfuscate intent. Click bait headlines twist the truth. Deep fake videos destroy shared reality. And that makes critical thinkers and clear-eyed observers like M. Gessen all the more needed. Gessen does not talk down to people who are scared, does not suggest you should not believe…
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Li-Young Lee
It is easy to dismiss poetry as being disconnected from the human, the everyday, the useful; to deride it for being uppity, dense, or purposefully confusing. What is difficult is encountering the kind of poetry that makes the world clear. Li-Young Lee is a poet of clarity, even if that clarity is...
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Youth Poet Laureate: Janae Lu
In this episode of SAL/on air we were joined in the studio by Janae Lu and Zackary Mickelson for a conversation about Janae’s experience as the 2024-25 Seattle Youth Poet Laureate, and discussion of her chapbook published by Poetry NW Editions, In All Spaces Liminal. Janae Lu is a writer whose…
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Hinton Cast: Reagan E J Jackson, Still True: The Evolution of an Unexpected Journalist
SAL is pleased to support our friends at Hinton Publishing with the premiere episode of their brand-new podcast, Hinton Cast! Hinton Publishing prioritizes amplifying the voices of underinvited communities in the Pacific Northwest. The podcast features Hinton publishers, Marcus Harrison Green &...
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Naomi Shihab Nye
What makes a poet’s voice timeless? For more than 40 years, Naomi Shihab Nye has been writing poems, novels, and stories; teaching workshops to adults, children, and incarcerated individuals. Every piece of her work cherishes and honors, be it people or relationships or olive trees, and each of...
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Ed Yong
Ed Yong’s bestselling first book, "I Contain Multitudes," prompted us to look at ourselves and the microbes we contain as the interconnected, interdependent systems that we are. And his follow-up, "An Immense World," was named one of the best books of the year by numerous publications while…
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Julian Aguon
As an Indigenous human rights lawyer and writer from Guam, Julian Aguon’s book 'No Country for Eight Spot Butterflies' memorizes grief from family to country and into one of the most difficult, intangible feelings of our time: climate grief. Drawing on his experience with the law and litigation...
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Patrick Radden Keefe
As a reporter, Patrick Radden Keefe holds two disparate truths together with unparalleled skill: there are facts, and there is a story. In his work as a staff writer at The New Yorker, Keefe has showcased this talent in long form articles ranging from Anthony Bourdain to the hunt for the drug…
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Charles Yu
At the beginning of the pandemic Charles Yu wrote an essay on the experience, which many noted, had a cinematic slant to it. “Five hundred years ago,” Yu wrote, “What we really mean when we say that this pandemic feels “unimaginable” is that we had not imagined it. Just as imagination can mislead...
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Chris Abani
As Chris Abani once stated, “The art is never about what you write about. The art is about how you write about what you write about.” Here, we find Abani’s "how" thick with feeling, braided by nimble and swift metaphors, and shaped by mercurial forms. Imprisoned several times for his political...
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Nikky Finney
Nikky Finney is not only a poet but a storyteller, the kind of voice that weaves through the air in a room until every person there feels that much closer together. Her poems travel the world, from her home in South Carolina to the stage at the National Book Awards where she was lauded for her...
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Youth Poet Laureate: Mateo Quispe
In this episode of SAL/on air, two poets from SAL's Youth Poetry Fellowship, Mateo Quispe and Aamina Mughal, talk about access to arts education, finding community in Seattle's literary scene, and about Mateo's forthcoming chapbook, "Dear Spanish." Published by Poetry Northwest Editions, "Dear...
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James Tate
For James Tate, comedy and tragedy are inextricably linked within poetry. They appear as dual facets of ordinary life—the mundane and the extraordinary as one. As you’ll hear in this recording from February 2003, this is laugh-out-loud poetry that wanders from the baseball field to the petting…
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Barbara Kingsolver
The works of Barbara Kingsolver have shaped a generation of readers. From her first novel The Bean Trees and beyond, Kingsolver’s characters speak to us, cradle our faces in their hands and exchange their hearts for ours. We were thrilled to recently welcome Kingsolver back to SAL in October of...
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Dean Young
When Dean Young took the stage in October of 2012 to read from his Copper Canyon Press collection, Bender, we were incredibly fortunate to bear witness to his humorous, irreverent, and fearless poetry. We were deeply saddened to hear of his passing in August 2022, and we continue to treasure his...
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Sandra Cisneros
In October of 2003, Sandra Cisneros joined us for an evening 20 years after the publication of her luminous work The House on Mango Street. Now, we have the chance to listen again with reverence, 40 years after that seminal book first came into our lives, and we are reminded more than ever of the...
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Malcom Gladwell
In September 2019, Malcolm Gladwell stepped on stage at Benaroya Hall as part of SAL’s Literary Arts Series to discuss his book Talking to Strangers. That night, his talk brought us into the complicated layers that underlie our most fraught and violent interactions. The Los Angeles Times called...
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Amor Towles
In A Gentleman in Moscow, the subject of Amor Towles' 2019 SAL lecture, the ever-charming Count Rostov says, “By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering...
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Richard Powers
Richard Powers’ characters are often both artists and scientists—disciplines he sees as intertwined. In a delicious moment in this March 2008 reading, he describes the commonality between art and science as a state of “bewilderment,” which happens to be the title of his new book, released…
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Dean Baquet, Timothy Egan, & Jim Rainey
Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, and Jim Rainey, an award-winning reporter with the Los Angeles Times, spoke with hometown hero Timothy Egan in March of 2019 about the importance of investigative journalism and the path forward for media in this political era. These…
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Rita Dove
In this talk, recorded in March of 2010, former U. S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove shared poems from her then-new book, Sonata Mulattica. This collection tells the story of George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower. Previously just a footnote in Beethoven’s biography, Bridgetower—who was a Black...
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Adam Zagajewski
At the start of this reading, which includes poems in English and Polish, Zagajewski says, “As long as you write new poems, you are alive. It’s the only proof of this.” Zagajewski died this March, but his poems remain with us—proof he was alive and lives still. In a poetic twist of fate, the date...
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Wallace Stegner
This talk by celebrated novelist Wallace Stegner, recorded in 1990, is really a master class on the intermingling of life and art. With equal measures of charm and critique, Stegner questions the very nature of storytelling: is it method, perspective, experience, or technique? The writers he...
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Imbolo Mbue
"I live in a space between," Imbolo Mbue says in this talk. "It is the immigrant's burden to live with a body in one place, and the heart in another." In this episode, recorded on June 7, 2019, at Town Hall Seattle, Imbolo Mbue describes how her in-between began in Cameroon, where she was born…
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Maxine Kumin
Maxine Kumin, whom we lost in 2014, once said that, quote, “The garden has to be attended every day, just as the horses have to be tended to. Not just every day, but morning, noon and night. Writing, I think, exerts the same kind of discipline. I think of myself as a Jewish Calvinist. You know:...
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Soraya Chemaly
As with any condition, until we have language for what we are experiencing, until we can name it, we often feel controlled by it. In January of 2019 Soraya Chemaly renamed and redefined anger for us. In a riveting talk based upon her book, “Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger,” Chemaly...
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Barry Lopez
When Barry Lopez died at the age of 75 this past December, we knew we had lost one of the greats. His writings have frequently been compared to those of Henry David Thoreau, as he brought a depth of erudition to the text by immersing himself in his surroundings, deftly integrating his…
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Rick Barot
“Every generation has to reiterate, rewrite what those genres are and what they mean in the vocabulary of the moment. So the elegy is not a set genre, it's not a set form. We each have to re-write that thing when we write. That's our job, in a way.”—Rick Barot On May 15, 2020, Rick Barot—the...
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Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Have you ever had a slice of cake that had been soaked in a sort of syrup? Maybe rose-syrup? Maybe lemon? Dense and rich at the same time—soaked in joy—it’s almost not cake anymore. Every one of Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s poems, read at SAL’s May 2018 Poetry Series reading, was like that for us.…
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Ijeoma Oluo
As our annual reading program, Summer Book Bingo wrapped up, we asked readers to reflect on their favorite reading experience of the summer. One of you wrote: “My favorite reading experience was reading So You Want to Talk About Race. It forced me to explore my white privilege and challenged me…
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Jericho Brown
Almost exactly a year ago, on May 21, 2019, we closed our Poetry Series with a reading by Jericho Brown, followed by a conversation with Copper Canyon editor and poet Elaina Ellis. It was a riveting and joy-filled evening in celebration of Jericho’s third book, The Tradition. That book went on to...
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Eavan Boland
Four weeks after her passing in her hometown of Dublin, we want to celebrate the ways Eavan Boland drew up a new science of cartography for Irish poetry—one that included women in their everyday lives. One that depicted children, the routines of the suburbs, marriage, and then radically, that…
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Ross Gay
In a time like this, where do you look to for joy? In a recent episode of Krista Tippett’s podcast, On Being, poet Ross Gay recently said, “It is joy by which the labor that will make the life that I want, possible. It is not at all puzzling to me that joy is possible in the midst of difficulty.”...
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Valeria Luiselli
What drives storytelling? What is the story—who gets to tell it—and how? In a twist on the American road trip genre, Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive explores these tensions. As an artist couple and their children embark on trip from New York to Arizona, wrestling with their family’s...
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Adam Davidson
What the 20th century economy typically required of Americans who wanted success was to step away from their passions and embrace sameness. Now, in this new century—amidst concerns about our jobs being stolen by computers, about the middle class vanishing, and about the super-rich getting richer,...
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Rachel Maddow
When Rachel Maddow, host of the Emmy Award-winning Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, set out to research her latest book, "Blowout," she wasn’t necessarily looking to write about the oil and gas industry. Instead, the question she was asking was this: At a time when democracy is falling and...
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Wendell Berry
Port Royal in Henry County, Kentucky has a population of less than a hundred. And it’s there that farmer, novelist, poet, and cultural critic Wendell Berry—whose family farmed Kentucky land for 7 generations—has been writing for much of his life. With work like The Unsettling of America: Culture...
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Barbara Kingsolver
What happens when your world shifts, and you have to come to terms with a whole new reality? Barbara Kingsolver – the bestselling author of The Poisonwood Bible, The Lacuna, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and more – has some idea. In October 2018, SAL’s Executive Director, Ruth Dickey, sat down with...
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
Why write about slavery in 2019? And when you write about, how do you defy the popular conceptions about slavery that readers have in their heads? How do you make the subject new? It took Ta-Nehisi Coates – author of the bestselling nonfiction works The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in...
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Madhur Jaffrey
In this episode, we hear from Indian-born food and travel writer Madhur Jaffrey, who joined us in November 2013 for a talk on how we become who we are. At the time of her visit, Jaffrey, who is recognized for bringing Indian cuisine to the western hemisphere, had written nearly 30 cookbooks and…
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Ada Limón
In this episode, we hear from poet Ada Limón, who joined us in October 2016 at McCaw Hall for a reading from her collection Bright Dead Things. Named a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle, Bright Dead Things follows a female speaker’s…
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Tom Hanks
In our latest episode of SAL/on air, we hear from actor and filmmaker Tom Hanks, who joined us at McCaw Hall in December of 2017. Seattle’s beloved librarian, Nancy Pearl, was in conversation with Hanks, who shared with us how he came to write his first book, the short story collection "Uncommon...
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Azar Nafisi
In 2003, Azar Nafisi electrified readers worldwide with "Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books," which went on to become a long-running #1 New York Times bestseller. A modest professor of English literature, Nafisi taught at the University of Tehran as the Islamic Revolution raged around…
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Jane Hirshfield
In this episode, we hear from poet Jane Hirshfield, who joined us in March 2009 at Benaroya Hall for a reading spanning across her career, and for a discussion on the importance of inviting the intimacies of poetry and finding ways to say “yes” to the difficult. Described by The New Yorker as...
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Viet Thanh Nguyen
In this special Thanksgiving episode, we hear from Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer and The Refugees, who joined us at Benaroya Hall in May 2018. He is introduced by Ruth Dickey, SAL Executive Director, and is interviewed after his talk by Jamie Ford, celebrated author of Hotel on the...
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Frank McCourt
In this episode, we hear from Frank McCourt, who joined us in November 2006 for a lively talk about committing his youth to paper in his phenomenally popular memoir series, beginning with Angela’s Ashes. At the conclusion of McCourt’s talk, Margit Rankin, then-Executive Director of Seattle Arts &...
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Lucie Brock-Broido
When Lucie Brock-Broido, poet of the witching hour, sadly passed away in March 2018, we released audio of her reading "Infinite Riches in the Smallest Room," a title that's an apt description of her entire body of work. In our latest episode of SAL/on air, we are delighted to share her SAL…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
SAL/on air is a literary podcast featuring engaging author talks and readings from neary 40 years of Seattle Arts & Lectures programming. Seattle Arts & Lectures (SAL) is a literary nonprofit. Seattle Arts & Lectures cultivates transformative experiences through story and language with readers and writers of all generations. Get in-person or online tickets to SAL events at lectures.org.
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Seattle Arts & Lectures
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does SAL/on air have?
SAL/on air currently has 55 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is SAL/on air about?
SAL/on air is a literary podcast featuring engaging author talks and readings from neary 40 years of Seattle Arts & Lectures programming. Seattle Arts & Lectures (SAL) is a literary nonprofit. Seattle Arts & Lectures cultivates transformative experiences through story and language with readers and...
How often does SAL/on air release new episodes?
SAL/on air has 55 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to SAL/on air?
You can listen to SAL/on air on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts SAL/on air?
SAL/on air is created and hosted by Seattle Arts & Lectures.
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