Nonfiction for No Reason @ ANTiPODE Art Gallery

Seattle didn’t get very cold this winter, but it still feels like we’re coming out of a thaw — and so too Nonfiction for No Reason, which has been dormant for the past year but is now bursting forth with new possibilities. The name of the reading series hints at work that isn’t so much for no reason as for the right reasons, namely creative exploration and liberation.

Hosted by series founder Katie Lee Ellison at ANTiPODE Gallery, an art space founded last fall in Pioneer Square by “two jet-lagged immigrants from Tehran,” this spring gathering features a roster stacked with voices that push at the edges of form and feeling.

Seattle Civic Poet Dujie Tahat brings work attuned to language, faith and diaspora, while sullivan forderhase moves through poetry as both text and embodied experience — desire, grief and curiosity all in motion. Naomi Day draws from Black speculative traditions and visual storytelling to interrogate power and inheritance and Aileen McGraw writes with raw intimacy about illness, family and care. Tacoma-based writer and public historian Tamiko Nimura grounds her work in memory place, and the long arcs of history.

Expect surprise guests, a nonfiction dance performance and a room that hums with community. It’s a great time to see what creative crops have been nurtured over the long, hard winter.