About this Event
Monona Wali discusses and reads from her new novel Sutra Americana with poet Tess Gallagher. Gallagher will also read from her latest book Surrounded by Weasels and Gary Copeland Lilley will read from his latest collection Raven on the Moaners Bench.
Registration is not required, but helps us anticipate audience size.
About Sutra Americana
In 1960 S. K. Sharma, a brilliant young astrophysicist at the beginning of his academic career, has finally succeeded in bringing his wife, Sushila, from India to America. Intensely drawn to one another as star university students, the couple pursue an unlikely affair and marriage that crosses caste lines. Their sweeping, decades-long story of love, forgiveness, and coming of age takes place in a country that is both fascinated by and shuns them. The United States, with its exaltation of individualism, offers immense opportunities, but its looser sexual mores threaten to undermine the family’s happiness and devotion to one another.
As their three daughters become young women, they must navigate the tumultuous decades of the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and the women’s liberation movement. In their journeys of self-discovery, they upend their parents’ hold on them to craft radically new identities for themselves. As they discover their parents’ faults they grow increasingly puzzled by their devotion to one another, eventually learning how love and forgiveness have the power to overcome the most uncomfortable truths.
Monona Wali is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, and filmmaker. Her debut novel, My Blue Skin Lover, won the Independent Book Publishers Gold award for multicultural fiction. Born in Benares, India, she now lives in Los Angeles, California.
Tess Gallagher, the author of eleven books of poetry, lives and writes in her hometown of Port Angeles, Washington, and in her cottage in Co. Sligo, Ireland. She is the only American to have been honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award for her poetry from the Foundation of Rome, which she received in 2023. Her most recent book, Surrounded by Weasels, stories by Irish storyteller Josie Gray and Gallagher from the NW of Ireland, was published by Cirque Press in August 2025. Her poetry collection Is, Is Not, published by Graywolf press, won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. Gallagher participated in Birdman and Short Cuts, films centered on the work of her late husband Raymond Carver’s stories. Her own collection, The Man from Kinvara: Selected Stories, is the basis for film episodes under development. She is privileged to serve as a board member for Friends of Theodore Roethke Foundation.
Event venue & nearby stays
The Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Avenue, Seattle, United States
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