About this Event
In celebration of Michelle Peñaloza's new book, All the Words I Can Remember Are Poems, poets Raya Tuffaha, Dujie Tahat, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Michelle Peñaloza, and Troy Osaki will read for an evening of poetry, friendship, and joyful solidarity.
Though oceans apart, Palestine and the Philippines share histories shaped by colonization, U.S. empire, and military occupation as well as the intersections of diaspora, displacement, survival, resistance, grief and hope. From Palestine to the Philippines, stop the U.S. war machine!
All The Words I Can Remember Are Poems challenges colonized ideas of history and truth, particularly in relation to Filipinx/a/o history and its colonization by the United States. Engaging with archival materials and playing with the sounds of remembered words and their unique associations, Michelle Peñaloza confronts violent and ironic tensions within historical narratives, subverting erasure and creating her own cultural fluency that speaks to growing up in diaspora and the complexities of identity, motherhood, and the transmission of love across generations. The expression and reception of love between parent and child, particularly Filipinx/a mothers and daughters, becomes its own translation, a generational game of telephone across time and space. In conversation with the history of US imperialism and the broader implications of colonization, this book embraces the impotence of revision, the power of the always-reaching—what wisdom and connection we find there.
Michelle Peñaloza is the author of All The Words I Can Remember Are Poems (Persea Books, 2025), winner of the 2024 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award and the James Laughlin Award, awarded by The Academy of American Poets. She also wrote Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, winner of the 2018 Hillary Gravendyk National Poetry Prize (Inlandia Books, 2019), and the chapbook, landscape/heartbreak (Two Sylvias, 2015). The proud daughter of Filipino immigrants, Michelle was born in the suburbs of Detroit, MI and raised in Nashville, TN. She now lives in Covelo, CA (though she always feels like home in Seattle).
Dujie Tahat is the Seattle Civic poet and author of Shibboleth (Fonograf 2027) as well as three poetry chapbooks: Here I Am O My God, selected for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship; Salat, winner of the Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Award and longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection; and Balikbayan, finalist for The New Michigan Press / DIAGRAM chapbook contest and the Center for Book Arts honoree. Along with Luther Hughes and Gabrielle Bates, they cohost The Poet Salon podcast. Dujie serves as Critic-at-Large for Poetry Northwest and poetry editor for Moss.
Raya Tuffaha is a Palestinian writer, fight director and actor from Seattle. Poetry collections: To All the Yellow Flowers (Golden Antelope Press, 2020), apocalypse blues (2022). Other commissions/publications include Seattle Opera, Mizna, Asian American Writers' Workshop, Phoebe Journal, Ms. Magazine, and Button Poetry. She holds a BA from Swarthmore College and the British American Drama Academy. She's interested in muscular stories.
Troy Osaki is a Filipino Japanese poet, organizer, and attorney. A three-time grand slam poetry champion, he’s received fellowships from Kundiman, Artist Trust, and the Poetry Foundation. His work appears in Poetry, The Missouri Review, The Offing, and The Gate of Memory (Haymarket Books, 2025), an anthology by descendants of Nikkei wartime incarceration. A member of the National Lawyers Guild, he earned his Juris Doctor from Seattle University School of Law, where he interned at Creative Justice, an arts-based alternative to incarceration for youth in King County. He lives in Seattle, WA.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. She is the author of three books of poetry and two poetry chapbooks. Something About Living (UAkron Press) won the 2022 Akron Prize, the 2024 National Book Award, the 2025 Arab American Book Award and was a 2025 American Library Association Notable Book. Kaan and Her Sisters (Trio House Press) was a finalist for the Firecracker Award and an Honorable Mention for the Arab American Book Award, and Water & Salt was the winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Avenue, Seattle, United States
USD 0.00
