Speakers Forum

‘I got an email being called the N-word just last week as a matter of fact for some of our coverage. I think at the end of the day what we can do is just truly speak the truth.' -Marcus Harrison Green

‘All anybody wanted to talk about was the pandemic, which I resisted for about a week, and then I realized we all need to talk about the pandemic. It's not even like it was the elephant in the room. It's like it was the room. It was unavoidable.'

‘It took her some time to find her voice, but when she did she said three careful words, it's so beautiful.'

‘In the equation of institutional sexual abuse, the constant is the abuser. There's always going to be a certain percentage of child sex abusers in the population.'

‘If black children belong to us, and we need not be mothers or fathers or even black for black children to belong to us, a part of us is always vigilant, and always exhausted.'

‘When I talk about public safety, when I talk about I need more officers, I always lead with, but not in a racialized or militarized fashion.'

One poet asks, ‘Will you not open this door for me? My hand is exhausted from knocking at your door.'

‘It's not going to happen in my lifetime. We are working to a future that we will not live to see. That's what this work is about, and the healing is knowing that we're doing it together.'

‘It's a different kind of approach and different kind of exchange that I know that we can do because I've seen it, and it's growing. It begins with a different definition of listening. Listening is about showing people they matter.'

'This, I argue, is the beginning of the Age of Exploration, the Age of Discovery, and thereby, the start of the modern world.'

‘Contemporary Asian American Activism: Building Movements for Liberation'

‘Black women have been deeply engaged in trying to figure out how to get this country to accept, to understand, to learn about human rights.'

‘That's why we lose a lot of our own community members who are not interested in western sciences because they don't see themselves being reflected. I think with Indigenous science we have to reflect ourselves because, otherwise, we are ignoring part of our kinships and also teachings that we have been passed down.'

‘Free speech has been perhaps one of the most powerful engines of human equality that we've ever stumbled upon as a species.'

‘We are having exponential growth in our understanding of the immune system. There's just so much to learn, and our baseline has just been established.'

‘We had been married over five years before he decided that he would even mention to me what had happened. I just knew he was having trouble sleeping. And this is the kind of torture that followed him until he died.'

‘It's Tim who stands out in my memory, who was always by my side. Until he wasn't.'

‘Crip Kinship: The Disability Justice & Art Activism of Sins Invalid'

'Crane is now in the hands of the specialists, while the invisible army of so-called general readers, the same people who still take pleasure in reading old standbys such as Melville and Whitman, are no longer reading Crane.'

What it will take to share this region with Qw'e lh'ol mechen, ‘the people that live under the sea'

‘Dr E. Forbes-Sempill henceforth wishes to be known as Dr Ewan Forbes-Sempill'

‘We know it's a cultural problem. We know it's a behavioral problem. But it's not a problem of a few bad apples.' – Professor Anita Hill

‘I'm still surprised when I'm noticed. I came to believe I was invisible.'

‘We're pumping millions of tons of warming pollutants into the atmosphere every day. The trick is, you don't need very much of the population to doubt it to stop action.'

‘I think sometimes that we are a little bit like ghosts. We're haunting the world because it's not entirely ours and we scare people.'

‘I had my son attacked by one of these people and thought, what in the holy hell? How did we get here? It's this weird mix of strange machismo patriotism, wrapped in a flag, sort of near a bible.'

Hugo-centric Lit Crawl Seattle 2021 keeps a celebratory torch burning

‘Most people got to know me over the last four years and have one impression of me as this ardent partisan. Prior to Trump, most of the criticism I got was for working too much across the aisle, and I don't consider myself a partisan.'

Dan Savage celebrates and reflects as Savage Love turns 30

‘Every building is a philosophy in a way. I see all buildings as attempts to try to figure out and express what it means to dwell as a human being on Earth.'

‘The land knows you, even when you are lost.'

‘What do we owe in death? What do we owe to our parents?'

‘A Little Book of Self-Care for Those Who Grieve began as notes scratched out over many midnights; thoughts formed as I lay sleepless, or in the aftermath of painful dreams.'

‘The agents say they'll put themselves between a bullet and the president. They'll take a bullet for the president. Well, they felt like more and more they were just dodging a bullet.'

‘If people hear something that's false, and they're immediately told it's false, then they will remember it in some sense or in some part of their mind as true for the long-term. That's insidious!'

As a teen, Chinese American author Anna Qu was forced by her mother to work in their family's garment factory in Queens, New York. At home she was the family's maid, and faced punishment for doing things like schoolwork. Qu contacted Child Protective Services to report her mother, but due to bureaucratic bumbling she was left her to fend for herself. Now as an adult, Qu reckons with life, family, and not so easy answers to past trauma in her memoir.

Social Distancing may be drawing to a close, but that doesn't mean folks are eager to come together just yet. The potential unity among Americans, involving civil civic discourse, continues to prove a bumpy road, to say the least. But according to the speakers in this talk, it's a journey still worth committing to, having ‘faith' in, and suffering through, together.

It has been just over six years since the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling. In his new, exhaustively researched book The Engagement: America's Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage, author Sasha Issenberg shares many of the stories and successful strategies that led to marriage equality.

‘Nothing should be lost. Everything has a purpose. Everything is in need of care.'

In his new book After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made, author Ben Rhodes grapples with the dissolving notion of American exceptionalism in a post-Covid world. Using a global lens, Rhodes presents a glimpse of a highly possible democracy-free future, presently modeled by countries like Hungary, Russia, and China.

Make Love Not Porn founder Cindy Gallop says the future of pornography is "social sex" and the end of fetishizing women of color.

Author Grace M. Cho breaks bread with the numerous voices haunting her ‘pained spirit' in her new novel.

Godin's new book sheds an intriguing light on the tropes surrounding those on the spectrum of blindness.

‘Most nights we were the only people in the world who knew where we were. There are many definitions of freedom, but surely that is one of them.'

‘Origin stories matter, for individuals, groups of people, and for nations. They inform our sense of self, telling us what kind of people we believe we are, what kind of nation we believe we live in.'

"In any given moment the human eye takes in about a billion bits of information. The brain discards the vast majority of that information, and processes about 40 bits of information."

Chinese American photographer Andrew Kung is reclaiming representation of the all-American man one portrait at a time.

‘And as she walked by, she said ‘In America, we say excuse me!' She just looked angry, and I looked around. I was stunned.'

The surge of hate crimes committed against Asian Americans has swelled since the start of the Covid 19 pandemic. It's a sad but known truth that racial hatred against Asians (or racial hatred, in general) isn't just a new phenomenon in the US. But neither is standing up to and confronting that hatred...

From adult films to a portrait series on Asian men, stereotypes of Asian identity are being disrupted in surprising and creative ways.

‘For better and for worse, our choice now is between eco-socialism or eco-apartheid.’