• The Institute of American Indian Arts just announced the recipient of their very first Sherman Alexie Scholarship. Alexie himself selected the winner:

Jamie Natonabah (Diné) will receive $7,500 per semester for four semesters, for a total of $30,000, $24,000 of which will be applied to tuition. The remaining $6,000 will help pay for her travel, lodging, books, and meals during the five residencies in Santa Fe. Jamie is an IAIA Alumnae. Jamie is from Fort Defiance, Arizona. For twenty-eight years she has embraced her love of writing which has evolved into a thirst for personal truth created largely through poetry. She won first place in the New Mexico Slam Poetry Competition (online). Also, for two consecutive years, Jamie participated in performances of her poetry through funding from the Witter Bynner Foundation. Her work has been published in Red Ink: An International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts, & Humanities as well as the IAIA Literary Anthologies Bone Light and Fourth World Rising among others. Jamie is now living in Santa Fe with her partner Paul and daughter Anastasia Moriarty.

• Town Hall's Executive Director, Weir Harmon, published a thank-you to the community for contributing to Town Hall's renovation compaign. He also promises that you'll find Town Hall programming "in venues scattered in neighborhoods across Seattle" until Town Hall reopens in fall of 2018. He shares more about the program, which is cleverly titled Inside/Out:

Many events will be programmed in consultation with Neighborhood Steering Committees; some will be co-created by audience members, in collaboration with Artists and Scholars in Community. If we do this right, Inside/Out will create lasting mechanisms to bring grassroots ideas and community-sourced solutions into broad public consideration—and we’ll welcome a whole new slate of exciting voices back to our renovated home. We’ll share more about Inside/Out over the coming months, and I hope you will join us for this transformative year.

• RJ Casey at the Comics Journal interviews Kimberley Motley, a lawyer who is trying to help Fantagraphics cartoonist Matt Furie save his creation, Pepe the Frog, from hate symbol status:

You can’t really control how Pepe has been used on the internet in the past, especially since he’s been turned into this meme. Dealing with the internet is difficult because there are so many users all around the world. Pepe has taken on a life of his own. However, what should not happen is people profiting off Pepe and the intellectual property of Matt Furie. That’s a big concern. I couldn’t make a tuna fish sandwich at home and stick a McDonald’s logo on it and sell it to people. The McDonald’s corporation would come after me. This is Matt’s creation and people don’t have a right to take his intellectual property and then themselves profit off of it without his permission.

• For KUOW, Elizabeth Austen introduces listeners to Seattle-area poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, with a pair of extra poems published as an online extra.

• It was published in May, but I only just came across Bill Gates's summer reading list. Have you ever found yourself standing in a bookstore and wondering, "what would Bill Gates read?" Wonder no more:

• Last week, On the Media interviewed a few sci-fi authors about dystopian fiction for a dystopian world, and it's a very thoughtful episode. I especially love that host Brooke Gladstone asks each of the authors if they agree with Jill Lepore's recent observation that "Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; it’s become a fiction of submission."