The Porous Borders of Poetry and Prose: A Literary Evening with Anne Leigh Parrish, Summer Stewart, & Douglas Cole.

Join us at Elliott Bay Book Company at 7PM for an evening with Summer Stewart and Anne Leigh Parrish, in conversation with Douglas Cole, as they celebrate new work across poetry, fiction, and hybrid forms.

Summer Stewart’s MOTHER! is a fierce, intimate, and genre-bending exploration of motherhood, identity, grief, the body, and the expectations placed on women to endure quietly. Written with urgency and precision, the book asks what it means to be made and unmade by care, loss, inheritance, and survival.

Anne Leigh Parrish, an accomplished poet and fiction writer, brings her signature wit, emotional acuity, and sharp eye for human contradiction to People Ruin Everything, a collection of stories about desire, disappointment, reinvention, and the strange ways people fail and reach for one another. Parrish writes with humor and tenderness about the mess of being alive, especially when love, ambition, and self-preservation collide.

The conversation will be moderated by Douglas Cole, author of the poetry collection The Cabin at the End of the World and the novel The Invisible Hand. Together, Stewart, Parrish, and Cole will discuss the porous borders between poetry and prose, the role of emotional honesty in contemporary literature, and the complicated negotiations writers make with family, art, aging, autonomy, and the selves they are still becoming.