Jack Straw Reading, hosted by Claudia Castro Luna

Writers from the 2025 Jack Straw Writers cohort visit the store for a reading of their selected work. The readers include Asha Dore, Sigrun Susan Lane, Jenny Harrington Lill, Monique Ouk, and Connor Watkins-Xu. The evening will be hosted by Claudia Castro Luna.

Asha Dore is a writer and illustrator working on a book about fawning. Bylines include The New York Times, The Cut, and Slate. She hosts “Totally Biased Reviews,” a literary interview podcast. Her work can be found at www.AshaDore.net or on Instagram @adjsbb

Sigrun Susan Lane is a poet from Seattle Washington. After a successful career in business, she returned to her initial passion: to be a writer. She began writing poetry with Nelson and Beth Bentley and publishing poems in regional and national journals such as the Crab Creek Review and The Seattle Review. She’s won prizes for her poems from the Seattle Arts Commission and the King County Arts Commission. Lane has published three chapbooks; Little Bones and SALT from Goldfish Press and Drive from Finishing Line Press. SALT won the Josehine Miles award “for excellence in poetry” in 2020. Sigrun Susan is of Icelandic descent and often draws on her family’s history in her poems, stories of immigrants and of the “old country” and of its history.

Jenny Harrington Lill is a writer, researcher, and advocate living on Mercer Island. She is an MFA candidate in nonfiction and literature at the Bennington Writing Seminars. Jenny is currently working on her debut collection of essays on love, loss, and mothering.

Monique Ouk is a Cambodian-American writer. Her poetry appears in Diode Poetry Journal, The Margins, and The Seventh Wave.

Connor Watkins-Xu holds a BA in Professional Writing from Baylor University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland, where he taught creative and academic writing. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, North American Review, Redivider, Columbia Journal, Gargoyle, The Hong Kong Review, Salvation South, and elsewhere. His manuscript has been named a semifinalist for the Berkshire Prize and The Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, scholarships to the Southampton Writers Conference and New York State Summer Writers Institute, and a 2025 Best of the Net nomination. Originally from Alabama, he lives with his wife in Seattle.

Claudia Castro Luna is an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate fellow (2019), WA State Poet Laureate (2018 – 2021) and Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet (2015-2018). She is the author of Cipota Under the Moon (Tia Chucha Press, 2022) and Killing Marías (Two Sylvias Press, 2017) both shortlisted for the WA State Book Award in poetry, 2023 and 2018 respectively. She is also the author of One River, A Thousand Voices (Chin Music Press, 2020) and the chapbook This City (Floating Bridge Press, 2016). Her most recent non-fiction is in There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis (Vintage) and in Memory's Vault: The Poetic Heart of Fort Worden (Empty Bowl). Born in El Salvador, Castro Luna lives in English and Spanish, and she writes and teaches in Seattle on unceded Duwamish lands.

Host or Publisher Elliott Bay Book Company