Seattle City of Literature

Mission

Seattle City of Literature builds relationships and community partnerships to help creative potential meet opportunity. We connect and strengthen the local and global storytelling ecosystem and center stories rooted in traditionally marginalized communities. In our work, we integrate UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals to foster an exchange of knowledge, resources, and lived experience.

About Seattle City of Literature

Founded in 2013, Seattle City of Literature is the nonprofit organization that manages Seattle’s 2017 designation as a City of Literature within UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network. We are an all volunteer-run nonprofit that connects our city to literature and our programs have both local and international impact. Seattle City of Literature exists to:

• Promote literature as part of the creative economy and as a contributor to the local economic engine
• Advocate for the health and diversity of the local literary ecosystem and create an entry point to the Seattle literary community
• Bridge the local literary community to the international literary community
• Convene the local literary community and fosters dialogue and connection to allow an exchange of ideas and cross-pollination

Recently, we created literary map of Seattle to tell "the story of Seattle's stories." It's available for free to visitors and Seattleites alike at tourist hotspots, bookstores, libraries, and other brick-and-mortar locations, as well as online with an expanded digital version. We also created the Seattle Literary Calendar to highlight and consolidate all of the amazing literary work Seattle's community creates (which a $75 donation will allow us to host for free), as well as partnering with Partners in Print to print pocket poems for World Poetry Day.

This year we're expanding our Indigenous writers exchange with other international cities and we're hosting community workshops to get folks into a room to chat about issues facing the literary community, working toward solutions, and fostering connections within the community. We are also working on creating partnerships with local organizations to provide project funding opportunities for local and international writers. And we're working on year two of our international writing residency with Seventh Wave.

Want to learn more about what we have been up to in the last few years? Read our Membership Monitoring Report, our official report to UNESCO on Seattle's activities as a literary city since 2017.