The Elliott Bay Book Company, located in the heart of Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood, will be hosting a virtual event featuring local Seattle-based poets Katerina Canyon and Raul Sanchez on December 7, 2021 at 6PM. The event is free and open to the public.

Katerina Canyon, an Award Winning Poet, Best Selling Author, civil rights activist, and essayist, will be reading from her latest poetry collection Surviving Home (published by Kelsay Books, November 9, 2021). Surviving Home is a reflection on African American heritage and up-bringing, racism, and abuse. Concisely arresting and challenging the beliefs of family and the fantasies of tradition, the poems in Surviving Home show that home is a place that you endure rather than a place where you are nurtured. With unyielding cadence and unparalleled sadness and warmth, Katerina Canyon contemplates the prejudice and limitations buried in a person's African American heritage: parents that seem to care for you with one hand and slap you with the other, the secret desires to be released from the daily burdens of life, as well as the surprising ways a child chooses to amuse herself. Finding resilience in the unexpected, this collection tears down the delicate facades of family.

“A harrowing collection by a Pushcart Prize–nominated poet…” – Kirkus Reviews

Raul Sanchez, the newest City of Redmond Poet Laureate, will be reading from his latest book When There Were No Borders. Raúl Sánchez's long-awaited 2nd book is a gift, a gateway, a harvest. These poems present and re-present our "tongue," our "language," our "culture and pride." Steeped in history and "blood blood blood" unforgotten and dignified, these poems are never what you expect yet are as familiar as an ancestral landscape. Deeply layered like culture itself, this book es una flor, multi-petalled, many-voiced - sin frontera and utterly unique. From rich love poems to Nerudaesque declamaciónes to canciones and cantos, this book represents as we were, and are, When There Were No Borders, by presenting the multiverse that is US of America through the voice of one, Raúl Sánchez, crossing borders.

To attend this virtually hosted event, please register at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/210202470247.