White Magic: Book Launch with Elissa Washuta and Billy-Ray Belcourt

Celebrate Cowlitz Indian Tribe member Elissa Washuta’s newest release with Griffin Poetry Prize winner Billy-Ray Belcourt.

How to attend: Register through the Eventbrite. Zoom information will be sent to you via email and available on the Eventbrite page. https://bit.ly/38eaeH7

“White Magic is magnificent.” —Kristen Arnett

Bracingly honest and powerfully affecting, White Magic establishes Elissa Washuta as one of our best living essayists.

In this collection of intertwined essays, Elissa Washuta writes about land, heartbreak, and colonization, about life without the escape hatch of intoxication, and about how she became a powerful witch. She interlaces stories from her forebears with cultural artifacts from her own life—Twin Peaks, the Oregon Trail II video game, a Claymation Satan, a YouTube video of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham—to explore questions of cultural inheritance and the particular danger, as a Native woman, of relaxing into romantic love under colonial rule.

About the Author

Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author of My Body Is a Book of Rules and Starvation Mode, and her book White Magic is forthcoming from Tin House Books. With Theresa Warburton, she is co-editor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She’s a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient, a Creative Capital awardee, and an assistant professor of creative writing at the Ohio State University.

Special Guest

Billy-Ray Belcourt (he/him) is a writer and scholar from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection, This Wound Is a World, which was also a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. His second book of poetry, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, was longlisted for Canada Reads 2020. A recipient of the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship and an Indspire Award, Belcourt is Assistant Professor of Indigenous Creative Writing at UBC.

A Note on Recording

Please note that this event will be recorded via Zoom and posted publicly. The recording may contain attendees’ names and images. We recognize that this may be undesirable for some participants. If you do not wish for your name or image to be used in the video, please leave your video turned off during the event. You may also change your name to something generic like “Participant” or “Anonymous” in the Zoom meeting room by selecting yourself from the participants list and editing your name. By registering for this event and clicking the Zoom link that will be emailed to you, you consent to being recorded and are aware of actions you can take to anonymize yourself during the event. If you do not want to participate in the live session, the recording will be posted at a later date to our YouTube channel.