About this Event
Poet, editor, and founder of Unsolicited Press Summer Stewart and writer and photographer Anne Leigh Parrish discuss their new books, MOTHER! and People Ruin Everything, alongside Douglas Cole.
Registration is not required, but helps us anticipate audience size.
About MOTHER!
MOTHER! by Summer Stewart is a genre-defying collection of poetry and essays that interrogates what it means to be made—and remade—as a woman. Moving through girlhood, the body, labor, relationships, and motherhood, the book dismantles the idea that identity is self-determined, revealing instead how it is shaped through expectation, silence, and survival.
Blending intimate narrative with sharp cultural analysis, Stewart explores pregnancy, loss, sexuality, and care as lived realities rather than abstract concepts. Her work exposes the invisible systems women sustain—within families, partnerships, and institutions—while examining the psychological and physical costs of carrying what is never fully named.
At once deeply personal and structurally aware, MOTHER! reframes motherhood not as a role, but as a condition that illuminates broader truths about autonomy, power, and inheritance. In doing so, Stewart offers not resolution, but recognition and a path toward self-definition that does not rely on disappearance.
About People Ruin Everything
People Ruin Everything is a literary short story collection exploring love, loss, and the quiet wreckage of human relationships. Through moments both realistic and faintly magical, Anne Leigh Parrish examines broken marriages, missed chances, and truths revealed too late. These stories linger in the space where desire, regret, and compassion collide.
Summer Stewart is an award-winning journalist, poet, nonfiction author, and the author of MOTHER! She is the publisher of Unsolicited Press and the voice behind If You Give a Girl a Book, where she writes about books, publishing, and the writer’s life. She holds an MFA in Poetry and Creative Writing from Portland State University.
Anne Leigh Parrish is the author of eighteen books, both poetry and prose. She writes about the evils of patriarchy and its desire to enslave half the population. She is also obsessed with the splendor of the natural world. Born during a snowstorm in upstate New York, she lived in New Jersey and Colorado before coming to Western Washington over forty years ago. Seeking truth among huge evergreens is good for her writing and photography.
Douglas Cole has published two novels and eight poetry books. He also writes the column “Trading Fours,” for Jerry Jazz Musician. His work has appeared in Beloit Poetry, Fiction International, Valpariaso, The Gallway Review and Two Hawks Quarterly. He has received two International Impact Awards and two American Best Book Awards, and his screenplay of The White Field, won the Best Screenplay Award in the Elegant International Film Festival, the Fusionfilm International Festival and the Pageant Film Festival. He received the Leslie Hunt Memorial prize in poetry, Best of Poetry Award from Clapboard House, First Prize in the “Picture Worth 500 Words” from Tattoo Highway, and the Editors’ Choice Award in fiction by RiverSedge. He has been nominated eight times for a Pushcart and nine times for Best of the Net. His website is https://douglastcole.com.
Event venue & nearby stays
The Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Avenue, Seattle, United States
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