Brilliant local writers who also absolutely deserve your attention and dollars. by Katie Lee Ellison Instead of another year-end best-of list, I want to shout out the local writers who toil to find the right words in and around our very town, and don’t always get the shine they earn and deserve. In this wild world, local community is ever more critical to our survival, and books are our collective light in the darkness as we barrel toward the winter solstice and the darkest, wettest days of what has been another whomp-dinger-doozle of a g-d-help-me year. Do yourselves a favor and spend your dollars or library time on these artists who give us varied voices, strange stories, and new ways of seeing our world. One by one, here’s how each of them does it. Diana Xin, Book of Exemplary Women Book of Exemplary Women is the debut collection of stories from a writer long established in Seattle, Diana Xin. Xin—who ran the Hugo House Fellowship 2015–2016 and is now a contributing editor of Moss, a Seattle literary journal—is well deserving of our attention. In Book of Exemplary Women, dead animals, ghosts, and vampires are our ways into the inner lives of women in the suburbs,  from Chicago to Beijing. Ancestral and personal histories haunt these tales, and Xin weaves quiet pain, humor, and anger in her both lyrical and spare prose. It’s a must-read if you’ve struggled with faith or sleeping through the night, or longed for a series of examples of what exemplary women do under ancient and daily pressures. Sara Jaffe, Hurricane Envy Max Delsohn, writer of the recently released, lauded, brilliant, and highly Seattle-specific short-story collection Crawl, called Hurricane Envy “Sara Jaffe’s masterpiece.” And to that, I say: amen. This collection of stories shocks with its quiet refusal of resolution: A baby is left in close proximity to a hostile stalker, for example, and no one thing in particular happens as a result. But you can’t help but imagine what might’ve happened beyond the page. Throughout Hurricane Envy, Jaffe skillfully sucks us into each narrative, then jerks us back into our reader bodies with her precise capture of time. There is often a shock of an event juxtaposed against a stark reality. These stories speak to our greatest social ills through all-too-familiar situations in unfamiliar bars, record shops, and a barn that could hold 40 grand pianos. Compelled? Really, you should be. Abi Pollokoff, Night Myths • • Before the Body Abi Pollokoff’s Night Myths • • Before the Body is somatics on the page. In this poetry collection, she creates musicality in her repetition, cutting phrases with periods at sharp and frequent intervals to create songs of rage and fury and rebuilding. If you’re a woman confused about what it means to be a woman, how to be a woman, you will find yourself at home in these pages. If you are the type to wonder how we humans are made, how we are put together, and how we come apart, hang out with Pollokoff in this collection. Reading this book had me thinking of cycles, of the full surface of our bodies we shed from our skin every seven years, and how compost is life and death at once. Here are some frequently appearing words if you’d like a peek into her style, tropes, and aesthetic leanings: lily, cross and uncross, bonesap, light, insides, birch. Laura Da’, Severalty Read this poetry collection and, no matter how well read you may be, learn new words. Be touched in your gut before you see it coming. Get a nuanced, precise, and truly wise voice on the experience of health and survival as a woman and a Native woman in this country, now and before. Laura Da’ writes with her heart and her gigantic mind. A few of Severalty’s themes and subjects: generations, health, survival, Genesis and Aristotle, rebirth and fruits, nations and treaties, aging and nature, and, of course—because it’s really good poetry—death, love, and time. Da’s writing is a well more of us would do ourselves a favor to tap. Jamie Silvonek, Marginal Verse This poetry collection came to me by recommendation from beloved local poet Ally Ang. Jamie Silvonek wrote these poems and published them from prison, where she’s served the last 10 years after having been incarcerated at the age of 15. She was convicted as an adult, has since applied for clemency, and is now in the hands of our judicial system. Marginal Verse is raw, from a sharp mind with a rare and compelling story and perspective. We don’t always get access to published writing from incarcerated folks, and this is an opportunity to engage directly with the inner world of someone living a tragically complex reality inside our broken justice system. BONUS BOOKS! (Also by brilliant local writers who also absolutely deserve your attentionand dollars.) Ching-In Chen, Shiny City  A poetry collection many years in the works from a teacher, an activist, and your favorite local poet’s favorite poet reaching into the history of Chinese immigrants who picked fruit in Riverside, California, to tell the tale of a global future. Kalehua Kim, Mele This is Kim’s first collection of poems, which won the 2024 Trio House Press Editors Choice Prize. If you’re a form nerd, you’ll love this book. Margot Kahn, The Unreliable Tree Kahn is the author of Horses That Buck: the Story of Champion Bronc Rider Bill Smith, and coeditor of two essay anthologies, This Is the Place, and Wanting (one of my favorites). This collection of poems tracks her early years of parenthood alongside the seasons of her family’s orchard. Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, Outer Stars Lunstrum is the author of five books of fiction, and this latest won the 2025 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. The seven stories examine how we survive the wreckage of our planet, physically, relationally, culturally, and psychologically, and offer hope. Josh Fomon, Our Human Shores  This is Fomon’s second collection of poems. Like Lunstrum’s stories, Fomon takes on “how language is rooted within the Anthropocene—and how poetry shapes meaning-making, faith in people and institutions, and death through lyricism, experiment, and ecopoetics.” ...read more read less