Toni Morrison and the Library

From a small town girl to a big city woman, Toni Morrison had a deep, enduring connection to libraries. As a teenager, after school, she did housework for a white family. Complaining about the treatment she received, her sister helped her get a job shelving books at the Lorain Public Library. This experience was the beginning of a lifelong connection to libraries.  “[The] Lorain Public Library,” she says, “was so important in my life. And the reason it was important was not only because much of the time I worked there and made a little change. But basically because it was the place I spent long, long hours reading and it was a place where a group of women were  very careful with avid reading children,” Morrison said.

Intiman’s Native Gardens: Beyond the Theatre

A familiar story is taking place. Faces change but tensions remain the same. What to do about the new neighbors?

Playwright Karen Zacarías

In Native Gardens, playwright Karen Zacarías makes a scene, actually many, out of the dilemma a couple of couples face while getting to know ”the neighbors.”

Set in the adjoining backyards of two townhouses in Washington, D.C., stark differences are, readily, apparent. The Butley’s, a well-to-do middle-aged white couple have put years of loving care into their property. In fact, they hope their formal garden will be a prize winner in the upcoming annual horticultural competition.

Bird Week: Tweet Spring! Celebrating Seattle’s Birds

The Seattle Public Library is partnering with the Seward Park Audubon Center for Bird Week, April 23-30, in celebration of the center’s tenth anniversary and the National Audubon Society’s 2018 Year of the Bird.

From the oldest of worlds into the new they flew, heralding dawn, signaling coming night, solitary, in flocks they arrived. Seed carriers, twig bearers, architects of nests.  Water gliders and earth diggers defended territory, courted, raised young, migrated, created shelter and survived. They flitted by the Xachua’bsh (hah-chu-AHBSH) (the Lake People) when the peninsula known as Seward Park was called skEba’kst, a word meaning nose in Lushootseed.

Seattle Rep’s FAMILIAR: Beyond the Theatre

Seattle Repertory Theatre presents FAMILIAR from April 27- May 27, 2018. Librarians at Seattle Public Library created this resource list of books, CDs and DVDs to enhance your experience of the show.

We know that a wedding unites more than two people. The couple are not just traveling the distance to complete their vows, their families are traveling the distance with them.  Even when language, food, culture and customs are shared, couples, still, encounter unknown and unexpected ideas and beliefs.

Click! Photography through the Lens of History

Click! A photograph is a precise record of an irretrievable instant, locked within the borders of a frame that transcends time. Did you know that the history of the camera predates the history of photography? Check out 100 Ideas that Changed Photography for more eye opening discoveries of how a room-sized device came to be held in the palm of our hands.

Once a purview of the few, cameras are, today, ubiquitous and unavoidable. A lot of thinking and experimentation went into the process of refining the photographic process. In A History of Photography in 50 Cameras you have a front row seat to technological changes that made it possible for the camera to become a necessary part and partner of memory making.