Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series

Have you ever wondered how American cuisine came to be? When we look at food from around the world, we may more readily accept the complexity of its origins or their legacy in the culinary landscape. But it may be surprising to some that many of our country’s dietary customs likewise stem from culturally robust beginnings. From a James Beard Cookbook Hall of Famer and the star of the Netflix docuseries High on the Hog, Dr. Jessica B. Harris comes her latest work, Braided Heritage: Recipes and Stories on the Origin of American Cuisine. This cookbook — replete with over 100 recipes — is paired with tales to help show how Indigenous, European, and African traditions intertwined to form an entirely new cuisine. Dr. Harris brings decades of cross-cultural and cross-continental research to map how our food arrived and adapted over generations. Through this blending of peoples and practices, we have dishes like Clear Broth Clam Chowder and Enchiladas Suizas (which have both Indigenous and European roots). The book also discusses how African American food through the centuries has evolved based on region, migration, and innovation, resulting in classics like Red Beans and Rice and Peach Bread Pudding Cupcakes with Bourbon Glaze. With recipes ranging from everyday meals to festive spreads, Braided Heritage offers reflections at the intersection of food, culture, and history. Dr. Jessica B. Harris is the author, editor, and translator of seventeen books, including twelve cookbooks documenting the foods and foodways of the African diaspora. Her IACP Award–winning book High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America has been adapted into a Netflix series. Harris is a professor emerita at Queens College/CUNY in New York and has written extensively for scholarly and popular publications. She served as the culinary consultant for the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture and their lauded restaurant, the Sweet Home Café. She holds lifetime achievement awards from the Southern Foodways Alliance, the Soul Summit, and the James Beard Foundation, which also inducted Harris into the Cookbook Hall of Fame. Chef Kristi Brown has spent over three decades in the culinary industry, starting at a café in downtown Seattle. After graduating from Seattle Culinary Academy, she founded That Brown Girl Cooks Catering in the mid-1990s. Her mantra, “Everybody Gotta Eat,” led her to co-found a community kitchen, earning widespread recognition. In the same era, Chef Kristi and her son Damon Bomar opened Communion R&B in Seattle’s Central District. With praise from Conde Nast Traveler and The New York Times, the restaurant has become a beacon of unity and community.

While the war in Ukraine continues to grab news headlines, the daily lives of Ukrainians remain opaque and mostly anonymous. What is it really like to live there during wartime? Historian Danielle Leavitt answers that question in her book, By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine. By going beyond familiar portraits of wartime heroism and victimhood, Leavitt reveals the human experience of the conflict. A U.S. citizen who grew up in Ukraine, Leavitt draws on her deep familiarity with the country and online diaries to track a diverse group of Ukrainians through the first year of the war. Among others, she introduces Vitaly, whose plans to open a coffee bar in a Kyiv suburb fall apart when the Russian army marches through his town and his apartment building is split in two by a rocket; Anna, who drops out of the police academy and begins a tumultuous relationship with a soldier; and Polina, a fashion-industry insider who returns home from Los Angeles to organize relief. To illuminate the complex resurgence of Ukraine’s national spirit, Leavitt also tells the story of Volodymyr Shovkoshitniy—a nuclear engineer at Chernobyl who went on to lead a daring campaign in the late 1980s to return the bodies of three Ukrainian writers who’d died in a Soviet gulag. Leavitt offers an interior history of Europe’s largest land war in seventy-five years—one that goes beyond the headlines about the conflict. Danielle Leavitt holds a PhD in history from Harvard University, where she has been a fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute. She grew up in both Ukraine and the United States, and currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. By the Second Spring is her first book. Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor of Slavic, Jewish, and International Studies at the University of Washington. He’s the author of How the Soviet Jew Was Made (2022), and co-editor and co-translator of In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (2026). https://www.elliottbaybook.com/item/f10yIDkbWsuoPNRwMfzjfA Buy the Book [https://www.elliottbaybook.com/item/f10yIDkbWsuoPNRwMfzjfA] By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine (Hardcover) [https://www.elliottbaybook.com/item/f10yIDkbWsuoPNRwMfzjfA] Elliott Bay Book Company [https://www.elliottbaybook.com/item/f10yIDkbWsuoPNRwMfzjfA]

Ted Bundy, arguably the most notorious serial murderer of women in American history, committed many of his crimes in the landscape of the Pacific Northwest. But in the 1970s and ’80s, Bundy was just one perpetrator amid a large number of serial and violent acts across the region. Why were there so many, and so particularly gruesome? What caused the rise and then sudden fall of an epidemic of serial killing? In Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, nonfiction author and Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Fraser maps the lives and careers of Bundy and his infamous peers—the Green River Killer, the I-5 Killer, the Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler, and even Charles Manson. Fraser’s research takes her around the Northwest as she seeks to uncover mysteries and investigate an overlapping pattern of environmental destruction. For example, in nearby Tacoma, Bundy’s ground zero, stood one of the most poisonous lead, copper, and arsenic smelters in the world. As Fraser’s investigation proceeds around our region and beyond, evidence mounts that the emissions from these smelters not only infected and sickened millions but also warped young minds, including some who grew up to become serial killers. Whether a fan of true crime or noir novels, anyone curious about the minds and motivations of serial killers may find Murderland‘s findings of interest. Caroline Fraser is the author of Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heartland Prize, and the Plutarch Award for Best Biography of the Year. She is also the author of God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church, and her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, and the London Review of Books, among other publications. She lives in New Mexico. Bruce Lanphear, MD, MPH, a Professor at Simon Fraser University, has conducted research on the sources of lead exposure and impacts of lead poisoning for over 25 years. He led studies used by federal agencies to set standards for lead in air, water, and house dust. His studies also obliged federal agencies to conclude that no amount of lead is safe. Dr. Lanphear, who is a member of the US EPA’s science advisory panel for the national air lead standard, produces videos [http://littlethingsmatter.ca/] to show how human health is inextricably linked with the environment and to elevate efforts to prevent disease. https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/book/9780593657225 Buy the Book [https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/book/9780593657225] Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers (Hardcover) [https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/book/9780593657225] Third Place Books [https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/book/9780593657225]

A fur-trading schooner beached in 1811. A passenger liner lost in 1906. An almost-empty tanker broken on the shore in 1999. These shipwrecks, and thousands more, are why the northwest coast of North America is sometimes called the “Graveyard of the Pacific.” Drawing from his book, Wrecked, history professor and author Coll Thrush tells the stories of many vessels that met their fate along this rugged coast and how they open up conversations about colonialism, Indigenous persistence, and place-based history. Shipwrecks are commemorated in museums, historical markers, folklore, place names, and the remains of the ships themselves. They’ve become a rich regional archive that has inspired Indigenous and settler survivors and observers to create meaning for these events. Thrush examines the ways in which shipwreck tales highlight––and debunk––myths of settler colonialism: the disappearance of Indigenous people, the control of an endlessly abundant nature, and the idea that the past would stay past. There’s no doubt that shipwrecks capture our imagination. Thrush also shows that these disasters are passageways to deeper stories. Through a cultural history of this notorious part of the Northwest, Thrush demonstrates how the tales of shipwrecks reveal the fraught and unfinished business of colonization. Coll Thrush is a professor of history at the University of British Columbia and founding co-editor of the Indigenous Confluences book series at the University of Washington Press. He is the author previously of Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place and Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire. Joshua L. Reid (citizen of the Snohomish Indian Nation) is an associate professor of American Indian Studies and the John Calhoun Smith Memorial Endowed Associate Professor of History at the University of Washington, where he directs the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest. He is the author of The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs. Presented by Town Hall Seattle and University of Washington Press. https://www.elliottbaybook.com/item/XTs8TVthO8g5FxaYQ-YZLw Buy the Book [https://www.elliottbaybook.com/item/XTs8TVthO8g5FxaYQ-YZLw] Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific (Hardcover) [https://www.elliottbaybook.com/item/XTs8TVthO8g5FxaYQ-YZLw] Elliott Bay Book Company [https://www.elliottbaybook.com/item/XTs8TVthO8g5FxaYQ-YZLw]

You could argue that Dave Barry is the country’s class clown, but did you know that he actually was elected class clown in high school? It’s no wonder, then, that he’s made a career out of making fun of pretty much everything. So how in the world does the son of a Presbyterian minister wind up winning a Pulitzer Prize for writing a wildly inaccurate newspaper column read by millions of people? Dave Barry will explain. Barry draws from his latest book, Class Clown, to take us on a ride through his life so far, starting with a childhood largely spent throwing rocks for entertainment—there was no internet—and preparing for nuclear war by hiding under a classroom desk. He began his journalism career at a small-town Pennsylvania newspaper and somehow wound up as a humor columnist for The Miami Herald, where his boss encouraged him to write about anything that struck him as amusing and to never worry about offending anyone. His columns were not popular with everyone: He managed to alienate a vast army of Neil Diamond fans and the entire state of Indiana. But he also developed a loyal following. Barry dives into all aspects of his life––the humor, absurdity, joy, and even sadness. Barry says the most important wisdom imparted by his Midwestern parents was never to take anything too seriously, which is a lesson that has served him well as a professional class clown. Dave Barry is the author of more bestsellers than you can count on two hands, including Swamp Story, Lessons from Lucy, Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys, Dave Barry Turns Forty, and Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up. A wildly popular syndicated columnist best known for his booger jokes, Barry won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He lives in Miami. Brett Hamil is a cartoonist and comedian living in Seattle. He publishes a weekly political cartoon, Doom Loop [https://southseattleemerald.org/topic/doom-loop], for the South Seattle Emerald, and produces a critically acclaimed live comedy show, Joketellers Union [https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100057085434274] at the Clock-Out Lounge. He’s also the author of 3 graphic novels [https://bretthamil.bigcartel.com/]. https://www.elliottbaybook.com/item/gQpiPqSJBXgiTo4y3y73ZA Buy the Book [https://www.elliottbaybook.com/item/gQpiPqSJBXgiTo4y3y73ZA] Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up [https://www.elliottbaybook.com/item/gQpiPqSJBXgiTo4y3y73ZA] Elliott Bay Book Company [https://www.elliottbaybook.com/item/gQpiPqSJBXgiTo4y3y73ZA]