Lit Night

Nia Dickens is a fiction writer from Tallahassee, Florida and based out of University Place, Washington. She received her B.A. in Creative Writing from Florida State University and spent the last two years teaching overseas. She served as a contributor for Technical.ly D.C. and Technical.ly Philly and participated in VONA 2017 before relocating back to the PNW. As a Made at Hugo House Fellow, Dickens is currently working on a series coming-of-age stories about black youth, with a particular interest in how racism, sexism, and sexuality reshape this conventional genre.

Katie Ellison is an author for a Penguin Random House children’s biography series, and she is currently working on a memoir tentatively entitled Everything We Wanted, pieces of which are published in Shenandoah, Crab Creek Review, Arcadia, Jewish in Seattle, and elsewhere. She holds a BA in English Lit from Wellesley and an MFA from the University of Idaho. She moved to Seattle in 2015, was a 2016-2017 Hugo House Fellow, a 2017 Centrum Fellow, and is a 2018 alum of the TENT program at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA.

Shelby Handler is a Seattle-based writer, performer and organizer. They have received fellowships from Asylum Arts, the Yiddish Book Center and Winter Tangerine. Shelby’s work has been supported by the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, 4Culture’s Poetry on Buses, Gay City Arts, Mount Analogue Press and Artist Trust. Shelby is a teaching artist for Arts Corps and Youth Speaks Seattle and a founding member of the Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) Artists and Cultural Workers Council.