Topic: Writers & Poets
Author Betty MacDonald (1907-1958) spent most of her life in and around Seattle, living over time in six locations, three of them for substantial periods of time. Because MacDonald wrote extensively a...
Seattle's Blue Moon Tavern first opened its doors at 712 NE 45th Street near the University of Washington on or near April 15, 1934. Founded by Hank Reverman (1912-2009), the tavern was an instant hit...
Carlos Bulosan was a prolific writer and poet, best remembered as the author of America Is in the Heart, a landmark semi-autobiographical story about the Filipino immigrant experience. Bulosan gained ...
A 1933 Newberry Honor Book winner, Children of the Soil: A Story of Scandinavia (1932), brought acclaim to author, teacher, and folk artist Nora Burglon, who lived in a small Scandinavian-style c...
Margaret Bundy Callahan was a Seattle writer, journalist, and editor. She reported for The Seattle Star and The Seattle Times, and she wrote and helped edit the arts weekly Town Crier during the 1920s...
Raymond Carver, acclaimed author of short stories and poems, was raised in Yakima by a family of working people from Arkansas. Determined from childhood to become a writer, he studied under the noveli...
Horace Cayton was the African American publisher of the Seattle Republican, a newspaper directed toward both white and black readers and which at one point had the second largest circulation in the ci...
Frank Chesley’s long career in journalism put him in the front row of some of the most tumultuous years of the American mid-twentieth century, reporting in the era of the civil ri...
Dolly Connelly was a journalist and photographer in the Pacific Northwest. As a stringer for Time, Life, and Sports Illustrated, she covered topics that included the new outdoor recreational activitie...
Walter C. Crowley was the founding president and executive director of History Ink, the non-profit historical organization which produces HistoryLink.org, the nation's first online encyclopedia of loc...
Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961), acclaimed as the creator of modern American detective fiction, spent a winter in Tacoma not long before he began writing the stories that would make him famous. This acco...
Place has primacy in the writing of Annie Dillard, and the history and geography of Washington figure notably in several of her books. Even though she resided only four years in the state, two of thos...
Ivan Doig spent much of his adult life in the Seattle area but his imagination rarely wandered far from his native Montana. The author of 13 novels and three nonfiction books, including the acclaimed ...
Well known for his many books and publications on Seattle, past and present, Paul Dorpat has contributed more than 1,300 "Now & Then" features to The Seattle Times Pacific Northwest magazine. Dorp...
Marjorie Ann Duryee was an artist and adventurer who pursued several careers in her lifetime – teacher, photographer, painter, poet, photo journalist – and achieved success in all. Bo...
Fishtown was a community of artists, sculptors, and poets that sprang up along a bend of the Skagit River near La Conner. From 1968 to 1989, this contingent lived in primitive cabins on stilts built d...
Thomas (Tomas) L. Gayton was born and raised in Seattle, Washington, the grandson of black pioneers John T. Gayton and Magnolia (Scott) Gayton. Tomas began writing verse soon after graduating with a J...
Since childhood, Tacoma-born Frank Herbert had been determined to become a published author. For years, he wrote fiction with limited success while working as a journalist. He was hounded by creditors...
Richard Hugo rose from an insecure childhood in White Center, a poor area just south of Seattle, to become one of the foremost American poets of his generation. His collected poems in Making Certain I...
Seattle’s longest-running prose and poetry reading series open to anyone in the community, "It's About Time," was founded in January 1990 by Esther Altshul Helfgott (b. 1941). Named after a defu...
Author James Baldwin (1924-1987) spoke at Seattle's Egyptian Theatre on May 6, 1963, in a fundraiser for the civil rights organization Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Murray Morgan (1916-2000) cov...
Elizabeth Rider Montgomery Julesberg (1902-1985), known professionally as Elizabeth Rider Montgomery, was the co-author of many of the "Dick and Jane" reading primers published from the 1930s through ...
June (1893-1969) and Farrar (1888-1974) Burn, newly married in 1919 and searching for adventure and the best place to start their lives together, consulted an atlas and decided that the San Juan Islan...
Stoddard King was a Spokane journalist, an internationally acclaimed poet, and the writer of a song widely performed during World War I. His light verse and public persona, as well as his intellect an...