Podcasts by SAL/on air
SAL/on air is a literary podcast featuring engaging author talks and readings from over thirty years of Seattle Arts & Lectures' programming.
Seattle Arts & Lectures (SAL) is a literary nonprofit. We champion the literary arts by engaging and inspiring readers and writers of all generations in the greater Puget Sound region.
Get tickets to SAL events at lectures.org.
Further podcasts by Seattle Arts & Lectures
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Richard Powers from 2022-01-22T02:32
Richard Powers’ characters are often both artists and scientists—disciplines he sees as intertwined. In a delicious moment in this March 2008 reading, he describes the commonality between art and s...
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Dean Baquet, Timothy Egan, & Jim Rainey from 2021-12-22T19:30:49
Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, and Jim Rainey, an award-winning reporter with the Los Angeles Times, spoke with hometown hero Timothy Egan in March of 2019 about the impor...
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Adam Zagajewski from 2021-09-30T23:39:27
At the start of this reading, which includes poems in English and Polish, Zagajewski says, “As long as you write new poems, you are alive. It’s the only proof of this.” Zagajewski died this March, ...
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Wallace Stegner from 2021-08-19T22:20:39
This talk by celebrated novelist Wallace Stegner, recorded in 1990, is really a master class on the intermingling of life and art. With equal measures of charm and critique, Stegner questions the v...
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Imbolo Mbue from 2021-07-08T17:33:53
"I live in a space between," Imbolo Mbue says in this talk. "It is the immigrant's burden to live with a body in one place, and the heart in another."
In this episode, recorded on June 7,...
Maxine Kumin from 2021-05-13T17:30:04
Maxine Kumin, whom we lost in 2014, once said that, quote, “The garden has to be attended every day, just as the horses have to be tended to. Not just every day, but morning, noon and night. Writin...
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Soraya Chemaly from 2021-03-18T21:50:40
As with any condition, until we have language for what we are experiencing, until we can name it, we often feel controlled by it. In January of 2019 Soraya Chemaly renamed and redefined anger for u...
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Barry Lopez from 2021-02-18T18:13:40
When Barry Lopez died at the age of 75 this past December, we knew we had lost one of the greats. His writings have frequently been compared to those of Henry David Thoreau, as he brought a depth o...
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Rick Barot from 2020-12-21T17:16:58
“Every generation has to reiterate, rewrite what those genres are and what they mean in the vocabulary of the moment. So the elegy is not a set genre, it's not a set form. We each have to re-write ...
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Aimee Nezhukumatathil from 2020-11-26T16:36:06
Have you ever had a slice of cake that had been soaked in a sort of syrup? Maybe rose-syrup? Maybe lemon? Dense and rich at the same time—soaked in joy—it’s almost not cake anymore. Every one of Ai...
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Ijeoma Oluo from 2020-10-29T19:32:39
As our annual reading program, Summer Book Bingo wrapped up, we asked readers to reflect on their favorite reading experience of the summer. One of you wrote: “My favorite reading experience was re...
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Jericho Brown from 2020-07-09T17:02:18
Almost exactly a year ago, on May 21, 2019, we closed our Poetry Series with a reading by Jericho Brown, followed by a conversation with Copper Canyon editor and poet Elaina Ellis. It was a rivetin...
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Eavan Boland from 2020-05-28T17:18:02
Four weeks after her passing in her hometown of Dublin, we want to celebrate the ways Eavan Boland drew up a new science of cartography for Irish poetry—one that included women in their everyday li...
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Valeria Luiselli from 2020-03-24T18:47:56
What drives storytelling? What is the story—who gets to tell it—and how? In a twist on the American road trip genre, Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive explores these tensions. As an artist c...
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Adam Davidson from 2020-03-09T21:15:37
What the 20th century economy typically required of Americans who wanted success was to step away from their passions and embrace sameness. Now, in this new century—amidst concerns about our jobs b...
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Rachel Maddow from 2020-02-03T22:36:43
When Rachel Maddow, host of the Emmy Award-winning Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, set out to research her latest book, "Blowout," she wasn’t necessarily looking to write about the oil and gas industr...
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Wendell Berry from 2020-01-07T00:26:45
Port Royal in Henry County, Kentucky has a population of less than a hundred. And it’s there that farmer, novelist, poet, and cultural critic Wendell Berry—whose family farmed Kentucky land for 7 g...
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Barbara Kingsolver from 2019-12-02T20:27:40
What happens when your world shifts, and you have to come to terms with a whole new reality? Barbara Kingsolver – the bestselling author of The Poisonwood Bible, The Lacuna, Animal, Vegetable, Mira...
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Ta-Nehisi Coates from 2019-11-07T17:56:36
Why write about slavery in 2019? And when you write about, how do you defy the popular conceptions about slavery that readers have in their heads? How do you make the subject new? It took Ta-Nehisi...
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Madhur Jaffrey from 2019-05-30T20:53:36
In this episode, we hear from Indian-born food and travel writer Madhur Jaffrey, who joined us in November 2013 for a talk on how we become who we are. At the time of her visit, Jaffrey, who is rec...
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Azar Nafisi from 2019-04-22T22:41:45
In 2003, Azar Nafisi electrified readers worldwide with "Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books," which went on to become a long-running #1 New York Times bestseller. A modest professor of Eng...
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Jane Hirshfield from 2019-01-24T21:16:15
In this episode, we hear from poet Jane Hirshfield, who joined us in March 2009 at Benaroya Hall for a reading spanning across her career, and for a discussion on the importance of inviting the int...
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Viet Thanh Nguyen from 2018-11-20T18:11:59
In this special Thanksgiving episode, we hear from Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer and The Refugees, who joined us at Benaroya Hall in May 2018. He is introduced by Ruth Dickey, SAL Ex...
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Frank McCourt from 2018-10-18T17:52:40
In this episode, we hear from Frank McCourt, who joined us in November 2006 for a lively talk about committing his youth to paper in his phenomenally popular memoir series, beginning with Angela’s ...
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Lucie Brock-Broido from 2018-09-20T18:26:25
When Lucie Brock-Broido, poet of the witching hour, sadly passed away in March 2018, we released audio of her reading "Infinite Riches in the Smallest Room," a title that's an apt description of he...
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Madeleine Albright from 2018-08-20T18:07:47
Madeleine Albright was America's first-ever female Secretary of State, from 1997 to 2001. Her distinguished career of public service includes positions in the National Security Council, as U.S. amb...
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Philip Roth from 2018-07-19T22:43:19
In our latest episode of SAL/on air, we hear from one of the pre-eminent authors of the 20th century—Philip Roth. He joined us back in October 1992 for a reading from his National Book Award-winnin...
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Isabel Allende, Part Two from 2018-06-29T19:40:55
This episode is Part Two of our double-feature with legendary Chilean writer Isabel Allende, who joined us for the second time for Seattle Arts & Lectures’ 2017/18 Season. On November 28, SAL had t...
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Isabel Allende, Part One from 2018-05-31T19:46:28
One of the world's most widely-read Spanish language authors, Chilean writer Isabel Allende is a master of the magical realism form and a colorful storyteller. At the time of Allende's first visit ...
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Ruth Ozeki from 2018-05-02T16:52:01
Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest, whose award-winning novels have been described as "witty, intelligent and passionate" by the Independent, and as possessing "shrewd and ...
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Elizabeth Strout from 2018-03-28T17:44:33
Elizabeth Strout is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge, the bestsellers Abide With Me, The Burgess Boys, My Name is Lucy Barton, and the award-winning Amy and Isabelle, all set i...
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