British poet Simon Armitage (b. 1963, Huddersfield, in West Yorkshire) was in town this week for the Seattle Arts and Lectures Poetry Series (still tickets available for Naomi Shihab Nye's second night, May 8). more ›

Stephen Mitchell has introduced us to both Rainer Maria Rilke and Lao-tzu. He did the same for a lot of people, we suspect--his translation of the Tao Te Ching has sold over a million copies. Now he's on a book tour for The Second Book of the Tao, which is based on the writings of Lao-tzu’s disciple Chuang-tzu and Confucius’s grandson Tzu-ssu. He's in town Saturday, February 28, at the Elliott Bay Book Company for a 2 p.m. appearance. We ask him a few "We haven't read your book yet" questions below--after the jump there's an excerpt he selected just for Seattlest. more ›

BLOG-GAZING: We're going to The Pitch tonight, and as of this second, there's room for one more person on the guest list. The pitch this time is: "An established newspaper will never be able to provide better hyperlocal coverage than a well-managed neighborhood blog," and panel participants include West Seattle Blog's Tracy Record, the P-I's Big Blog's Curt Milton (we see Monica Guzman's on the guest list, too), and last but certainly not least if you ask him, CHS's lovely and talented Justin Carder. more ›

For a MacArthur-proclaimed genius, Linda Bierds is fairly low profile. She lives on Bainbridge Island, teaches in the English department at the University of Washington, and has had tons of poems published in mainstream literary magazines such as The Atlantic and The New Yorker, the holy grail of "someone who's not an MFA student has read my poetry" achievement. Tomorrow night she's at the UW Bookstore (7:00 p.m., free), reading from her new book, Flight. more ›