Book News Roundup: Meet Hugo House's new faces, sign up for Short Run's summer school

Flame has regularly worked as an activist and organizer for a diverse number of theatrical, cabaret, queer, and POC communities — both during her time in the Bay Area and since returning to Seattle. Her connections to a broad network of artists and teachers also extends to the growing immigrant community and incarcerated populations through her work with The IF Project, a program funded by the Seattle Police Foundation.

  • Yesterday, Hugo House also announced their newest Made at Hugo fellows, which is a program that creates a cohort of young Seattle writers and gives them access to all of the Hugo House's mighty educational opportunities. The Made at Hugo program is a great way to take the pulse of Seattle's next generation of literary talent. You'll be seeing more of these names in the near future: "poet Holly DeBevoise, poet and writer Max Delsohn, writer Nia Dickens, poet Kym Littlefield, poet and artist Erin Lynch, and indigenous prose writer D.A. Navoti."

  • Speaking of mighty educational opportunities! Short Run's summer school looks like a lot of fun, with many free classes and all other classes below $50. Topics include letterpress printing, comics classes for kids, papermaking with local papercraft cartoonist Mita Mahato, and a class titled "How to Be Self-Employed in Seattle" that a lot of you should take.

  • Last year, some unpaid employees of Emerald City Comicon — who are unfortunately dubbed "minions" by ECCC leadership — sued the convention for compensation. Yesterday, lawyers announced that ECCC reached a settlement with the minions.Brigid Alverson at Smash Pages writes:

Under the settlement, Eitane Emerald Corp. and the Demonakos family will pay almost $500,000 to the volunteers, with the lawyers scooping up $123,300 for their troubles, [former "minion" Jerry Michael] Brooks [who filed the suit in the first place] getting $5,000, and the 250 or so other “volunteers” will divvy up the rest according to how many hours they worked.
  • This tweetstorm about BBC English is a great illustration of how language evolves, and how what we think of as "normal" English probably didn't exist just a few short decades ago. A few highlights: