Caleb True, Rivka Clifton, Kara Briggs, and Rats Alice Trujillo
About this Event
Third Place Books welcomes writers Caleb True, Rivka Clifton, Kara Briggs, and Rats Alice Trujillo to our Ravenna store to celebrate their latest works!
by Caleb True spirals outward from the blood, sweat, and heat of the boxing ring, following an Argentinean fighter who relitigates a painful past through his matches.
by Rivka Clifton flexes the tensions between Capitalism's mass-produced nightmares and the individually strange experiences of death, art, and queerness to depict a world both sumptuous and awry.
In , Kara Briggs brings clear-eyed tenderness and moral urgency to poems shaped by Native history, inheritance, love, loss, and renewal.
Desolate and lyrical, Vermin by Rats Alice Trujillo is a tale of pain and discovery within the slow decay of the American city.
For important updates, RSVP is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book!
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About RAÑA . . .
RAÑA spirals outward from the blood, sweat, and heat of the boxing ring where Eugenio Rafael Raña takes on any opponent in Villa Ocho. In every match, he is again a soldier in the Falklands (Malvinas) War, battling alongside his Argentinian countrymen and hell-bent on victory. Inside the ring, he envisions himself a heavyweight phenom punishing his British foes with haymakers. Outside the ring, Raña spends his days in the hinterlands of Argentina, drinking and looking for his next fight. Rewinding, pausing, fast-forwarding—he replays VHS tapes of professional boxing matches, as he does his memories of the war, searching for a win. RAÑA is a phantasmagoria of modern war, brutal defeat, and a lifelong anguish that endures.
Caleb True is a writer, editor, critic, musician, athlete, and podcaster. He holds an MA in history from the University of Massachusetts and an MFA in creative writing from Old Dominion University. He is the author of the critical essay On Ruben Slikk: A Manifesto on the Purpose of Art and the Value of Transgression (Dynamo Verlag 2024) and Chansons Russes (Quetzalcoatl 2016; Dynamo Verlag 2023), a historical triptych of stories set in Soviet Russia. He has published short stories and essays in Ploughshares, The Sonora Review, Faultline, Yemassee, Whiskey Island, and many others. He is the founder and managing editor of Dynamo Verlag (est. 2015), a boutique publishing house specializing in textual work demonstrating genius, eclecticism, and originality.
About Wrong Feast . . .
In Clifton's second full-length collection, the lyric image, in all its ambiguous potential, flexes the tensions between capitalism's mass-produced nightmares and the individually strange experiences of death, art, and queerness to depict a world both sumptuous and awry, engaging Charles Simic's surrealist question: "How to think without recourse to abstractions, logic, and categorical postulates." Clifton turns the sensory details in her poems until their most mundane aspects become uncanny — a fish becomes a purse, a dog's head is deified as it is impaled on a fence, a buzzing cellphone is birthed into a crib.
Page after page, Wrong Feast models close attention, while fully considering the ambiguities and the possibilities within Clifton's creations. These poems will not provide lessons or insights. They are not the prophecy garnered from entrails.
They are the entrails.
Rivka Clifton is the transfemme author of Muzzle (JackLeg Press, 2025) as well as the chapbooks MOT and Agape (Osmanthus Press). Clifton's work has appeared in Pleiades, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, and other magazines. She lives in Seattle.
About You and I, and Spilyáy. . .
In You and I, and Spilyáy, Kara Briggs writes from the living ground of memory: family, ceremony, salmon, forests, rivers, and the many relations that join human life to the land. A Sauk-Suiattle Tribal Citizen and direct Yakama descendant, Briggs brings clear-eyed tenderness and moral urgency to poems shaped by Native history, inheritance, love, loss, and renewal.
The collection moves from childhood amid the Civil Rights era to ancestral stories, the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, and the Pacific Northwest's daily beauty. At its center is Spilyáy, the Yakama trickster-teacher, fool, and keeper of lessons about how people might care for one another and the earth. Against present-day forces that endanger salmon, water, and sacred places, these poems ask what it means to remember rightly, to grieve, and to remain answerable to the future.
Both intimate and communal, You and I, and Spilyáy is a gathering of witness and praise: an invitation to listen more deeply to the land, to the stories that endure, and to the lives still calling us home.
Kara Briggs announces her awaited second book of her poetry, You and I, and Spilyáy from Saint Julian Press. Her previous book, Rivers in My Veins, also published by Saint Julian, came out in 2024, the same year she won the James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poetry and graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts with an MFA in Creative Writing. She is a Sauk-Suiattle Tribal Citizen and direct Yakama descendant. She lives on the Tulalip Reservation, where she is an emerging forest farmer. Her work has appeared in anthologies, including Unsinkable: Poems Inspired by the Titanic (Salmon Press), Ms. Aligned 5 (El León Literary Arts, Berkeley and Manoa Books, Honolulu), and Reclaiming the Cascades: A Native Anthology (Hawkeye Press in 2025). She also participated in the pop-up display Poetry Along the Columbia River Gorge in April 2026.
About Vermin. . .
The world is something dead that continues to speak and writhe. Its arteries are filled with coagulated forms of consciousness, moving against the walls and void of their host. One of these re- combinations takes root in the dissipating body/mind of a drowned bicyclist called Vermin. The consequences of civilization, of failed revolution, haunt the streets and sky. Despite this, life remains. Marty tries to get some sleep, while smoke comes in through the window. He needs to go to work tomorrow. In this harrowing novella by poet Rats Alice Trujillo, the rubble of a dystopian present serves as a backdrop for a journey to the end of the self. Outer and inner landscapes intertwine, disintegrate, aggregate. Desolate and lyrical, Vermin is a tale of pain and discovery within the slow decay of the American city.
Rats Alice Trujillo (her / it) lives in Seattle and writes. She makes lots of zines and has published five books, including two poetry collections (Insurrectionary Auto-Vivisection, Body Apocalypse Manifesto), two novellas (Check Engine Light, Vermin), and one hybrid collection (Two People Going to the Bottom of a River). She helps to edit and assemble a literary / arts compilation zine called INFERNO. Rats Alice is a member of the Left Bank Books Collective, and most of her writing and arts are available through their store or website.
About Third Place Books
Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events.
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