2016 Get Lit! Festival

Kick off the Get Lit! Festival week with an evening of poetry presented by the Beacon Hill Reading Series, which features both local and regional authors. Meant to unite the various literary communities of Spokane, the series aims to make well-crafted writing accessible to a general audience. It is curated and hosted by writers Maya Jewell Zeller, Laura Read and Gwen James. The series is free and open to the public.

Jenifer Browne Lawrence is the author of Grayling (Perugia Press) and One Hundred Steps from Shore (Blue Begonia Press). Awards include the Perugia Press Prize, the Orlando Poetry Prize, and the James Hearst Poetry Prize. Her work appears in Los Angeles Review, Narrative, North American Review, Rattle, and elsewhere. Jenifer serves on the advisory board for the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, and lives on Puget Sound. She edits the Seattle-based literary journal, Crab Creek Review.

Kate Lebo is the author of two cookbooks, Pie School (Sasquatch Books) and A Commonplace Book of Pie (Chin Music Press). Her essays and poems have appeared or are forthcoming from Best American Essays 2015, Best New Poets 2011, New England Review, Willow Springs, Hobart, Gastronomica, and Ninth Letter, and she writes the "Cooking the Books" column for the Spokesman-Review. She works with food writers privately to midwife their cookbook manuscripts, and she teaches creative writing at literary arts centers across the nation.

Katharine Whitcomb is a third generation Whitcomb living in eastern Washington (grandfather was an entomologist, father was a language teacher). She’s taught creative writing at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington since 2004. Her second full-length collection of poems, The Daughter’s Almanac, was chosen by Patricia Smith as the 2014 Backwaters Prize winner. Her other books include Lamp of Letters (Floating Bridge Press), Saints of South Dakota (Bluestem Press) and The Art Courage Program (Jaded Ibis Press).