About the Event:
We can’t wait to host you at EQUIVOX '25 and celebrate women authoring change. We’ll gather as a community—in person and online—on Sunday, March 16 to explore the ways in which Hedgebrook’s support of women’s voices and stories has a global impact.
How to join us at EQUIVOX '25 on Sunday, March 16:
Brunch Event: Get your ticket for a special EQUIVOX '25 brunch at Sodo Park in Seattle, WA. We’ll welcome you at 11:00am when doors open to gather with fellow writers, readers, and alumnae to enjoy mimosas and champagne. The program will begin promptly at 11:30am for a program and brunch. You’ll have the opportunity to contribute to Hedgebrook's Writer-in-Residence program, where the entire 2-3 week residency experience is free to every selected writer.
Online Broadcast: Tune in online to EQUIVOX '25 at 11:30am PT and say hello to our Sodo Park guests as we come together for a community-centered program. Invite friends and family to join—the online broadcast is free for everyone.
Our Featured Speakers:
Claudia Castro Luna (2017 Hedgebrook Alumna / Cottage: Cedar)
Claudia Castro Luna is an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate fellow (2019), WA State Poet Laureate (2018 – 2021) and Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet (2015-2018), the author of One River, A Thousand Voices (Chin Music Press), the Pushcart nominated Killing Marías (Two Sylvias Press) also shortlisted for WA State 2018 Book Award in poetry, and the chapbook This City (Floating Bridge Press). Her most recent non-fiction is forthcoming in There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis (Vintage) due out in May 2021.
Born in El Salvador she came to the United States in 1981. Living in English and Spanish, Claudia writes and teaches in Seattle on unceded Duwamish lands where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children.
Jacqueline Woodson (1998 Hedgebrook Alumna / Cottage: Cedar)
I wrote on everything and everywhere. I remember my uncle catching me writing my name in graffiti on the side of a building. (It was not pretty for me when my mother found out.) I wrote on paper bags and my shoes and denim binders. I chalked stories across sidewalks and penciled tiny tales in notebook margins. I loved and still love watching words flower into sentences and sentences blossom into stories.
I also told a lot of stories as a child. Not “Once upon a time” stories but basically, outright lies. I loved lying and getting away with it! There was something about telling the lie-story and seeing your friends’ eyes grow wide with wonder. Of course I got in trouble for lying but I didn’t stop until fifth grade.
That year, I wrote a story and my teacher said “This is really good.” Before that I had written a poem about Martin Luther King that was, I guess, so good no one believed I wrote it. After lots of brouhaha, it was believed finally that I had indeed penned the poem which went on to win me a Scrabble game and local acclaim. So by the time the story rolled around and the words “This is really good” came out of the otherwise down-turned lips of my fifth-grade teacher, I was well on my way to understanding that a lie on the page was a whole different animal — one that won you prizes and got surly teachers to smile. A lie on the page meant lots of independent time to create your stories and the freedom to sit hunched over the pages of your notebook without people thinking you were strange.
Lots and lots of books later, I am still surprised when I walk into a bookstore and see my name on a book or when the phone rings and someone on the other end is telling me I’ve just won an award. Sometimes, when I’m sitting at my desk for long hours and nothing’s coming to me, I remember my fifth-grade teacher, the way her eyes lit up when she said “This is really good.” The way, I — the skinny girl in the back of the classroom who was always getting into trouble for talking or missed homework assignments — sat up a little straighter, folded my hands on the desks, smiled, and began to believe in me.
Dr. Seema Yasmin (2016 Hedgebrook Alumna / Cottage: Meadow House)
Seema Yasmin is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, medical doctor, and author. A fiction fellow of the Kundiman and Tin House workshops, she is the author of four books including Muslim Women Are Everything, Viral BS: Medical Myths and Why We Fall for Them, and If God is a Virus, poems based on her reporting on the Ebola epidemic in West Africa.
Yasmin is a medical analyst for CNN and a correspondent for Conde Nast Entertainment. Her writing appears in Rolling Stone, The New York Times, WIRED, Scientific American, and other outlets. She teaches science storytelling and health journalism at Stanford University where she is director of the Stanford Health Communication Initiative and clinical assistant professor of medicine.
