On October 19, 2025, 2-5 PM, Raven Chronicles Press will be hosting a panel on banned books at the Seattle Downtown Library (Level 4, Room 1). From Raven Chronicles: 

Earlier this year Raven Chronicles launched a year-long campaign in defense of banned books and the right to read. Our goal is to help build awareness and empower readers everywhere to fight against censorship in the face of ongoing efforts throughout the U.S. to restrict access to books and information. Especially concerning is the growing number of books that are banned or challenged due to their emphasis on reducing bias based on race, identity, or difference—books that help build empathy. Also on the banning radar are books that address sex—whether it be sex education or “forbidden” topics such as incest, rape, sexual slavery. Note: while the number of books banned in Washington State is minuscule compared to states such as Texas and Florida, the number of challenged books in our state continues to rise.

 

Three months ago Raven began a series of Podcasts of writers reading excerpts from Banned Books that are meaningful to them or are of historical or literary importance. This series is ongoing. All podcasts are posted on Raven Chronicles Youtube channel. 

 

On Sunday, October 19, 2025, 2-4 pm, Raven is hosting the first of a new panel-reading-discussion series titled “Banned Books: What’s the Story?” with MC Anna Bálint and Panelists Nancy Rawles and Rena Priest. 

 

Anna Bálint is a London born, Seattle-based poet, writer, editor and cultural activist of East European descent. Her many years of editorial work for Raven Chronicles Press includes co-editing Take a Stand, Art Against Hate Anthology—winner of the 2021 Washington State Book Award for Poetry; and editing Words From the Café, an anthology of writing by people in recovery. Her short fiction collection, Horse Thief (Curbstone Press, 2004), was a finalist for the Pacific Northwest Book Award. Anna has taught creative writing for many years and in many places, and currently she is a teaching artist at Recovery Café where, in 2012, she founded Safe Place Writing Circle for people in recovery from trauma, addiction, mental illness, and homelessness. 

 

Rena Priest is an enrolled member of the Lhaq’temish (Lummi) Nation and served as the sixth Washington State Poet Laureate (2021-2023). Her first collection, Patriarchy Blues, received an American Book Award. Her latest book, Positively Uncivilized(Raven Chronicles Press, 2025), examines the deterioration of salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest and the loss of Indigenous history. Priest holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Bellingham, Washington. You can learn more at renapriest.com.

 

Nancy Rawles is the award-winning novelist of Love Like Gumbo, winner of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and My Jim, a novel that brings to life the missing voice of the wife of Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. My Jim won an Alex Award from the American Library Association, the Legacy Award in Fiction from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, and was selected by the Seattle Public Library Center for the Book for the 2009 Seattle Reads program. In her New York Times review, Helen Schulman called My Jim “as heart-wrenching a personal history as any recorded in American literature.” Penguin/Random House has just released a 20th Anniversary edition of My Jim.

We hope you will join this informative and vital panel hosted by friends of Cascadia Poetics Lab!