Name: Panel: Banned Books: What’s the Story?
Start: 2025-10-19T14:00:00-07:00
End: 2025-10-19T16:00:00-07:00
Location: The Seattle Public Library

$Panel: Banned Books: What\u2019s the Story?$

In honor of ALA’s Banned Books Week, Raven is hosting a Panel: Banned Books: What’s the Story?
Oct 19, Sunday, 2-4, pm
Seattle Downtown Library, (Room: Level 4, Rm 1);
MC: Anna Bálint
Panelists: Nancy Rawles, Rena Priest
Rena Priest is an enrolled member of the Lhaq’temish (Lummi) Nation and served as the sixth Washington State Poet Laureate (2021-2023). Her first collection, Patriarchy Blues, received an American Book Award. Her latest book, Positively Uncivilized, from Raven Chronicles Press, examines the deterioration of salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest and the loss of Indigenous history. Priest holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Bellingham, Washington. You can learn more at renapriest.com.
Nancy Rawles is the award-winning novelist of Love Like Gumbo, winner of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and My Jim, a novel that brings to life the missing voice of the wife of Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. My Jim won an Alex Award from the American Library Association, the Legacy Award in Fiction from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, and was selected by the Seattle Public Library Center for the Book for the 2009 Seattle Reads program. In her New York Times review, Helen Schulman called My Jim “as heart-wrenching a personal history as any recorded in American literature.” Penguin/Random House has just released a 20th Anniversary edition of My Jim.
Anna Bálint is a London born, Seattle-based poet, writer, editor and cultural activist of East European descent. Her many years of editorial work for Raven Chronicles Press includes co-editing Take a Stand, Art Against Hate anthology—winner of the 2021 WA STATE BOOK AWARD for Poetry; and editing Words From the Café, an anthology of writing by people in recovery. Her short fiction collection, Horse Thief, (Curbstone Press, 2004) spans cultures and continents and was a finalist for the Pacific Northwest Book Award. Anna has also taught creative writing for many years and in many places, including Washington State Prisons, El Centro de la Raza, Writers in the Schools, Antioch University, Richard Hugo House, and Path with Art. Currently she is a teaching artist at Recovery Café where, in 2012, she founded Safe Place Writing Circle for people in recovery from trauma, addiction, mental illness, and homelessness.
Photo credits: Nancy Rawles, Rox Spiegel
Rena Priest: Calvin Miller