Amber Flame with Kristen Millares Young
Schedule
Wed, 17 May, 2023 at 07:00 pm
Location
Elliott Bay Book Company | Seattle, WA
Beloved local poet and integral part of the Hedgebrook (and greater Seattle literary) community Amber Flame launches her newest collection apocrifa with the help of friend of the store Kristen Millares Young.apocrifa imagines a love that sits comfortably at the crossroads of commitment and freedom. The developing intimacy between a lover and their beloved is propelled by a compendium of words for love, romance, sex, relationships, and affection that do not lend to direct translation in English. Serving as both titles and markers of the progression of time, these poetically defined words highlight the growing tension of one who claims “i cannot love you enough/to unlove the wide world” and yet is inextricably drawn to the offer of “a place of sustenance, rest, and my delight in your very bones.” Heavily inspired by the metaphors and structures of Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon), from the Apocryphal books of the Bible, the characters speak to each other with contrapuntal call-and-response while letting us into their private thoughts through epistles, sestinas, odes, and other poetic forms.
Amber Flame is the author of Ordinary Cruelty (Write Bloody Press) and apocrifa, forthcoming from (Red Hen Press). An artist and performer, Flame's work has garnered artistic merit residencies with Hedgebrook, The Watering Hole, Wa Na Wari, Vermont Studio Center, and Yefe Nof. Flame served as the 2017-2019 poetry Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House in Seattle, and is a queer Black dandy mama who falls hard for a jumpsuit and some fresh kicks.
Kristen Millares Young is a prize-winning journalist and essayist whose work has appeared in The Washington Post and The Guardian, along with the anthologies Pie & Whiskey, a 2017 New York Times New and Notable Book, and Latina Outsiders: Remaking Latina Identity. As 2018-2020 Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House, Kristen mentored more than 100 writers and created that institution’s first Spanish language literary programs with Seattle Escribe. She was the researcher for The New York Times team that produced “Snow Fall,” which won a Pulitzer Prize. She graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. in History & Literature, later earning her MFA from the University of Washington. From 2016 to 2019, Kristen was board chair of InvestigateWest, a nonprofit news studio she co-founded in 2009 to serve vulnerable peoples and places of the Pacific Northwest. She is the author of the novel Subduction (Red Hen Press).
This event is co-presented with our friends at Hedgebrook.
Where is it happening?
Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave,Seattle,WA,United States