EWU Get Lit! Programs

✨We’re thrilled to be part of the next Books & Brews Book Fair at Brick West, hosted by our official festival bookseller Auntie’s Bookstore! 📚We’ll be selling festival t-shirts and other merch! Auntie’s will have TONS of books for sale for readers of all ages. Can’t wait to see you there!✨

☀️Our socials may be quieter over the summer, but Spokane’s literary community does not quit! We had a blast celebrating all of the MFA grads in June and love to continue to hear them share their work at so many fabulous summer events. Go, Spokane!✨

📚Book Fair part 1!📚We loved seeing all of our friends buzzing on their free and .spokane at the Book Fair! Learning about all of the local and regional bookish orgs and makers and mags and small presses was so much fun!

✨This is the first of many celebratory posts we’ll be making to share the joyful and inspiring moments from this year’s festival! There were LOTS!🔥Thank you to the authors—especially our headliner Carmen Maria Machado!! Thank you to our volunteers, interns, LIZ, the people who took photos, the people who moved chairs—THANK YOU ALL! 💙Please don’t forget to fill out a survey and keep watching on YouTube!🔥📚

✨Another awesome day in the books!✨📚Thank you for coming to our events at and ! Don’t miss the final BIG day of in-person events tomorrow including our all day Book Fair at and headlining event with Carmen Maria Machado at !✨

🥂We’re thrilled to have some inspired cocktails coming your way from our friends at Emma Rue’s!🥂These special drinks inspired by and will be available Friday night for PNW Writers After Dark and will remain on sale throughout the weekend! $1 from each sale goes back to Get Lit! so make sure to stop by and try one or both!🔥Mocktails are also available. Thanks, !!✨

💥One more day ‘til kickoff! And that means one more day ‘til Pie & Whiskey!!! Don’t miss this super popular and super fun event celebrating pie, whiskey, and readings—in that order! The graphic here is a sneak peak of the hand-bound chapbook with everyone’s work which will be sold for $10 tomorrow night only! This event is 21+ and $5 at the door. See you there!💥

There's just 1 DAY 'TIL KICKOFF!🔥

‼ We hope you've got your schedule planned and that you make time on Saturday for Get Crit!, our third annual live D&D event featuring DM Kate Welch ‼

⭐️ Kate is a writer working primarily in gaming. Her work focuses on fantasy role playing worlds and stories. She was a game designer on Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition and now works as a narrative director on AAA video games!

⭐️ The game will be played by graduate students in Eastern's creative writing program, alongside Dr. Terrance Macmullan, our English and Philosophy Chair at EWU!

We can't wait to see what exciting adventures will unfold! 🐉

🔥 One of our favorite and most longstanding festival events is our Poetry Salon! 📖

➡️ This event is a chance for a group of poets to sit down together to discuss their craft—how they came to it, how they sustain it, and what gifts it can bring to those they share it with.

➡️ Each poet brings a unique perspective and vast experience to the table, and every year we are stunned at the magic that takes place within these conversations. This year’s conversation includes poets with award-winning debut collections alongside seasoned veterans with several collections and impressive accolades---come hear from Luther Hughes, Katherine Gaffney, Henrietta Goodman, Jennifer (JP) Perrine, and Vincent Rendoni talk poetry!

This event will take place at 📍

FREE and tickets aren't required‼️
Make sure to show up on time to get your seat!🥳

✨Please DO stare directly at the latest creation in our Tiny Book Series with !🔥We love these SUPER LIMITED hand-printed and hand-stitched chapbooks of our favorite story by this year’s headliner Carmen Maria Machado! These will be for sale at the festival and if you’re lucky you might even get your copy signed!🥳📚✨

One week from today our virtual events will premiere on YouTube!📹

One event we can't wait for you to watch is a reading and conversation between authors Sofia Ali-Khan and Jennifer Lunden!🥳

📖 Jennifer is the author of American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life.

📖 Sofia Ali-Khan is the author of A Good Country: My Life in Twelve Towns and the Devastating Battle for a White America and winner of the 2023 Nautilus Gold Book Award.

📚 Jennifer and Sofia believe that the only way to adequately convey the breadth and complexity of issues of social justice is through braided memoir, which intertwines many threads of research, told from the subjective personal point of view, engaging heart and mind together to catalyze social change.

🔗 Join us for this inspiring event on our Youtube channel! ▶️

One thing we know for sure about our Spokane community is that it's full of talented writers!📖

If you're not on our festival lineup this year but want to share your work with our audiences, you're in luck!🍀 This year we're thrilled to be offering TWO community open-mics.🎤

1️⃣ The first is completely FREE and hosted by Spokane's current Poet Laureate Mery Smith!

2️⃣ The second open-mic will be hosted by Broken Mic and that will take place at our Saturday hub the Montvale Event Center, which requires a Book Fair Pass.

Check out our full schedule and start planning your reading with us!😝
*Sign ups are at the events*
*First-come-first-served*

✨One week ‘til kickoff!! That means we’re about to need some serious caffeine—our friends at DOMA have us covered with another fantastic festival coffee blend!!☕️We’re OBSESSED!✨You’ll be able to purchase a bag at the festival next week! And all 2024 festival authors will get one free!! Thank you so much for continuing this partnership into year SIX!🔥🙌🏽☕️📚

We love collaborating with our community, especially the art community, and this year we have a very exciting partnership to announce with Saranac Art Projects!🖌🖼

Featured Saranac Artists ⬇️
▪ Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton
▪ Mary Farrell
▪ Lena Lopez Schindler
▪ Mariah Boyle
▪ Josh Hobson

👉 These artists were given the names of past festival authors along with this year’s headliner, and were asked to choose a writer to inspire their own visual art. We will be presenting a gallery reception to view their art, and a panel discussion featuring several artists who will discuss how they wrestle with literary themes in their work across a variety of mediums.📚🖌✂️🖼

You won't want to miss these exciting mixed media events!🤩
One of which will feature an opening reading from writer ✨Kate Lebo✨ whose work was used as inspiration!

🔗 Check out our schedule to learn more!

Our exciting virtual events just keep coming!🥳

✨JOIN US✨ for LGBTQ+ & Disabilities: Writing Our Way into Acceptance, a reading and discussion with Jeffrey Dale Lofton and Greg Marshall.

👉 Jeffrey Dale Lofton is the author of Red Clay Suzie, a fictionalized memoir of growing up gay and disabled in rural Georgia.

👉 Greg Marshall is the author of Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy who Grew from It, a memoir of family, disability, and coming of age in two closets as both a gay man and someone living with cerebral palsy.

✅ Both writers will read from their work, followed by a wide-ranging conversation on how their experiences have shaped how they grew up, who they have become, and the stories they now share with the world.

🔗 This event will be shown on our Youtube channel, and you might even catch the writers in our live chat!

‼️ Don't miss it ‼️

❗SPONSOR SHOUT OUT❗

We would like to thank SRM Development for their support!😄

SRM Development focuses on creating distinctive environments in which people can live and work with intention in their neighborhoods and communities. They've built over six million square feet across the Puget Sound, Tri-Cities, San Franciscio Bay area, and southern California markets, with particular empahsis on multi-family, senior housing, affordable, and mixed use projects.🤩

➡ Check them out at srmdevelopment.com ⬅
Thank you for supporting our literary community!

We have another awesome virtual event to share with you!😎

❗JOIN US for a Reading and Conversation with Poets Mary Leauna Christensen and Katherine Gaffney❗

Mary Leauna Christensen is a writer who was named Indigenous Nations Poet fellow of 2022 for the inaugural In-Na-Po retreat and she was selected again in 2023. Katherine Gaffney's work has previously appeared in jubilat, Harpur Palate, Mississippi Review, Meridian, Best New Poets, and elsewhere.🤩

✅ Even if you can't make it to Spokane, you can enjoy this rich and dynamic sharing between these two writers on our Youtube channel.

DON'T MISS OUT👀

❗️SPONSOR SHOUT OUT❗️

We would like to thank these outstanding regional colleges and universities for being our scholarship sponsors this year! The English departments or writing programs at these 8 schools have provided funding for DOZENS of their students to attend our ticketed events for FREE! 🤩

➡️ LEARN MORE by visiting our sponsor page in the schedule ⬅️










❤️

📚We just had the dreamiest book club meeting at Auntie’s celebrating In The Dream House by our headliner Carmen Maria Machado! If you haven’t gotten a ticket to her craft class yet—grab it tonight! They’re selling FAST! Linkinthebio!💥 AND stop by the festival table at to get ready for April! Aunties donates 10% of festival book sales to Get Lit!, so your bucks go towards helping a legendary local bookstore AND a non-profit festival! Thanks, Aunties!✨

🌼Happy Spring!🌧️It’s the 21st and there are 21 days until the festival! Isn’t there a name for that?! We can’t wait to show the visiting festival authors our beautiful city!🌼

Have you seen our amazing virtual lineup this year?👀

✅ Even if you can't make it out to Spokane in April, you can still experience multiple festival events on our YouTube channel! The events will premiere during the festival and will remain free to watch anytime.

📣 One event we're especially excited to present is The Sacred and the Profane: Womanhood, Motherhood, and Grief featuring Sarah Ghazal Ali and Cori A. Winrock. Grief and loss are universal themes in both Cori and Sarah's collections --- these collections travel through personal, cultural, and political complexities to illuminate the vast, shared emotions that bind us together.

We can't wait for you to meet these poets and hear them discuss their powerful work!🤩📚🖊

This year's festival events are taking place all over town, but on Saturday the place to be will be our Book Fair!🤩

📍 The Book Fair will host 25+ bookish organizations including lit mags, booksellers, non-profits, and our very own Auntie's Bookstore!

While the Book Fair takes place on the first floor, 10+ events will be presented on the floors above, including a live D&D game, a silent reading party, a poetry workshop, and panel discussion featuring headliner Carmen Maria Machado! 📣

✅ Make sure to grab your ticket using the link in our bio, and we'll see you there!

March Book Club: Headliner Book Meeting
We will be reading the spectacular biography by Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House. Machado will be a part of a few events with the festival this year, including a nonfiction craft class at the library and a conversation at the Bing Crosby Theater with local author, Sharma Shields. This month's book club will take place on Sunday, March 24th at 6pm on the mezzanine above Aunties Bookstore. For more information, please contact [email protected] :)

✨Your eyes do not deceive you! Festival tickets are ON SALE NOW!✨Use the link in our bio to get yours today!!🔥

🔥Contest Announcement!🔥We are offering festival attendees the exciting chance to sit in on a LIVE Spokane Public Radio interview with one of our authors! 💥SPR’s Art & Music Director E.J. Iannelli will be interviewing writer Emilly Prado!💥Space is limited to 8 attendees—so to enter to win the chance to sit in you’ll need to: Tag a friend in this post, share the post to your story, and/OR email us at getlit @ ewu.edu with the subject line CONTEST🥳 Winners will be announced by April 1st!

💥We just spent another fantastic Friday at Spark Central for a Visiting Writer event from ! This time we were wowed by Kai Carlson-Wee’s poetry AND his short poetry films helped to add even more wonderful visual and auditory layers. The next Visiting Writer will be joining us during the festival—check out the full schedule via the link in our bio!🔥

Another event we're thrilled to present this year is a free panel discussion and hands-on workshop on the joy of writing animals!🖊📚

Who hasn’t imagined the lives of their non-human friends? 🙋

Who hasn’t despaired over climate catastrophe and other challenges facing human and non-human animals alike? 🌎

How might writing about animals give us new ways to express both emotional states and others in between? 🐳

From humorous memoir to more serious ecologically-informed poetry, this multi-genre event featuring Henrietta Goodman, Ryan Scariano, Jessica Gigot, Caitlin Scarano, and Michelle Eames is one you won't want to miss!

Check out our full schedule via the link in our bio to learn more!🔗

We are excited to be presenting two events on Eastern's main campus in Cheney this year! 🤩

1️⃣ The first is a panel discussion featuring four writers examining what it means to be a human at war, and how women are impacted by and often implicated in contemporary warfighting and its aftermath.

2️⃣ The second event we're presenting in Cheney is a reading and discussion with beloved Spokane writer Erin Pringle who will be reading from her short-story collection Unexpected Weather Events!

‼ These events are presented in partnership with the Veterans Resource Center and the Pride Center. We hope you'll be ready to help us kick the festival off in Cheney on Thursday, April 11th! 😎

✨This amazing news deserves a spot on the grid! One of our favorite poets and last year’s headlining author Ada Limón was named one of Time magazine’s Women of the Year!✨What a well-deserved honor! Congrats !! 👑🥳

We're getting very close to our big schedule reveal!🥳

➡️ Here's a sneak peak into one of the events we're most excited about 👀—a panel discussion featuring some of our favorite local and regional writers AND our headliner Carmen Maria Machado! In addition to Carmen, The Surreal is Real: A Conversation on Myths and Magic will feature writers Alexandra Teague, Maya Jewell Zeller, Jennifer (JP) Perrine, Erin Pringle, and Carla Crujido!🔥

‼ This is a conversation you won't want to miss‼