298. Keeonna Harris with Jodi-Ann Burey: Mainline Mama: Raising a Family Through Incarceration and Resistance
Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series
Release Date: 03/06/2025
340. Thomas Mallon with Katie Campbell: Opera Talk: Fellow Travelers
Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series
Hear from acclaimed author, essayist, and critic Thomas Mallon, whose novel Fellow Travelers (2007) inspired an opera and a SHOWTIME® miniseries. With exacting attention to historical detail, Mallon’s novel brings to life the shameful era in the early 1950s known as the Lavender Scare, during which gay and lesbian federal employees were systematically expelled from government service. More recently, Mallon also published The Very Heart of It (2025), a collection of journal entries during his literary coming-of-age during the AIDS crisis in New York City. Reporter Katie...
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339. Chuck Klosterman:The Football Phenomenon
Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series
For many Americans, football is more than just a sport — it is a way of life. Year after year, it remains the most watched sport in the country, captivating millions every season. A recent study showed that 93 of the 100 most-watched programs on U.S. television were NFL football games. Football, whether we like it or not, is inescapable. Chuck Klosterman, New York Times bestselling author, journalist, and critic, visits Town Hall just after Super Bowl Weekend to discuss his newest book, Football. Here, Klosterman dissects the question of natural greatness, looks at football through...
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338. Letters Aloud: Love Me or Leave Me: Letters of Loving, Longing, and Leaving
Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series
Get ready to laugh, swoon, and maybe cringe just a little—Love Me or Leave Me from Letters Aloud unleashes the wild side of romance in a whirlwind show packed with real letters from history’s most lovelorn (and love-scorned) souls. With a cast of spirited actors, comedy crackles from every confession, break-up, and “did-they-really-write-that?” misadventure, all paired with lively music that sets hearts and funny bones tingling. It’s an unfiltered anthology of grand gestures, awkward flirtations, ridiculous rejections, and letters so sincere (or spectacularly misguided) you can’t...
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337. Vivian Tu with Tori Dunlap: Well Endowed: The Secrets to Strategic Spending
Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series
For most people, trying to be smart with money is a hurdle that isn’t going away anytime soon. And once you have a handle on the usual demands like bills, loans, and maybe even savings – what about the future? Long-term financial choices can be daunting and confusing, and isn’t wealth management advice for the already wealthy? How do everyday people balance today’s dreams and realities with tomorrow’s security? Tailoring her years of expertise for modern generations, bestselling author and CEO Vivian Tu wants to deconstruct the traditional framework of financial literacy and show...
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336. Jackson Cooper with Dr. Laura Marie Rivera: A Kids Book About Kindness
Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series
How can we be kind in today’s fast-moving, intense world? Kindness is a choice we make every day, but it’s also your superpower. Local author and educator Jackson Cooper, author of A Kids Book About Kindness (DK Kids, 2025), shares his insights on teaching the essential tools for kindness to families, parents, and the next generation of leaders. A Kids Book About Kindness is an accessible, family-friendly introduction for children and their caregivers to learn the tools of being kind. Using a “Kindness Toolkit”, author Jackson Cooper teaches readers the easy ways...
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334. David Guterson with Karen Maeda Allman: Evelyn in Transit
Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series
Whether you know him from his award-winning and bestselling novel set in Puget Sound, Snow Falling on Cedars, or his columns in Pacific Northwest publications, Bainbridge writer David Guterson may be one of our region’s most well-known writers. He’s written a new novel, Evelyn in Transit, which explores what it means to live a righteous life, maybe even in spite of our imperfections. Guterson’s novel introduces Evelyn Bednarz, who is radically open-minded, formidably strong, and unusually clear-eyed about herself and others. Yet Evelyn has always been a misfit in society. She’s...
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335. Jenn Lueke with Cailee Fischer: Don't Think About Dinner
Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series
Ever feel unenthused staring into the fridge night after night? Overwhelmed and over budget at the grocery store, yet somehow you still came home without what you need for the week? Been meaning to reorganize your pantry for months and don’t even know where to start? Avid cook and recipe developer Jenn Lueke has been there herself, and she wants to help pull home cooks out of the fog of decision fatigue and into achievable, delicious choices worth savoring. In her debut cookbook, Don’t Think About Dinner, Lueke has combined a practiced hand at meal planning, financial acuity, and years of...
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333. Karl Ove Knausgård with Elizabeth DeNoma: The School of Night
Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series
How far would you go to achieve your deepest dreams? That’s the question author Karl Ove Knausgård explores in his latest novel, The School of Night. Internationally acclaimed and award-winning Norwegian author Knausgård is known for blending everyday characters with transcendent perceptions of reality, and this new installment of The Morning Star series continues this thread while examining the power of human ambition. Set in 1985 London, a city rife with possibility and desire, Knausgård’s story follows Kristian Hadeland, a young photographer who believes his art is...
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332. David Spafford with Paul Atkins: Binging Shogun: Can Historical Fiction Be Good for History?
Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series
When Shogun was released last year on Hulu, it featured a great cast, spectacular visuals, and a gripping story. It was a commercial and critical success on release, and again when awards season came around. So of course, academic historians fretted. Were they concerned that it painted sixteenth-century Japan as another Game of Thrones (with more ninjas and fewer dragons)? Maybe a little. But most scholars were anxious because they understood how important the show would be, how profound an impact it would have, for years to come, on the public’s perception of Japanese...
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331. Jeff Chang with Shannon Lee, Doug Palmer, and Sue Ann Kay: Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America
Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series
In the decades since his untimely passing at the age of thirty-two, Bruce Lee’s body of work has grown to an undeniably lasting legacy. He went on to become globally recognized after his death, his influence acting as a cultural bridge between the East and West – popularizing martial arts and providing inspiration and momentum for a new arena of Western martial arts films. While the impact of his work can be seen across genres and generations, cultural historian and journalist Jeff Chang is hoping to highlight the barrier-breaking importance of Bruce Lee’s life to the development of...
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Writer and prison abolitionist Keeonna Harris shares her intimate memoir, Mainline Mama, about the formidable challenge of raising a family separated by prison walls and how we can fight back against a broken Byzantine system.
Keeonna and Jason met as young teens. Only fourteen, Keeonna had never had a boyfriend before, dreamed of attending Spelman to become an obstetrician, and thought she was “grown.” Within a year she was pregnant, and Jason was in prison, convicted of a carjacking and sentenced to twenty-two years. Overnight Keeonna had become a “mainline mama,” a parent facing the impossible task of raising a child — while still growing up herself — with an incarcerated partner.
Keeonna recalls her harrowing journey in Mainline Mama, from learning to overcome the exhausting difficulties of navigating the carceral system in the United States, to transforming herself into an advocate for other women like her — the predominantly Black and brown women left behind to pick up the pieces of their families and fractured lives. She offers inspiration and solace, showing how to create moments of beauty, humanity, and love in a place designed to break spirits.
Mainline Mama is about creating self-love and community — crucial acts of radical resistance against a prison industrial complex that is designed to dehumanize and to separate and shut away incarcerated individuals and their loved ones from the world.
Keeonna Harris is a writer, storyteller, mother of five, and prison abolitionist. She is a Ph.D. Candidate at Arizona State University finishing her dissertation Everybody Survived but Nobody Survived: Black Feminism, Motherhood, and Mass Incarceration. Her memoir, Mainline Mama draws from her experiences as a Black woman, teen mother, and twenty years of raising children with an incarcerated partner and building community in the borderlands of the prison.
Jodi-Ann Burey (she/her) is a writer and critic who works at the intersections of race, culture, and health equity. Her debut book, Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work disrupts traditional narratives about racism at work and is forthcoming in 2025 with Flatiron Books.
