Hands down, the Event of the Week is Thursday's Lit Crawl, which brings together the city's many literary talents for one orgiastic evening of pub-crawl-style short readings around Capitol Hill.

This year's Lit Crawl has five phases of one hour each, starting at 5 pm and then continuing every hour afterward: 6 pm, 7 pm, 8 pm, and 9 pm. The sixth and final phase is a big old afterparty at Hugo House. These readings are mostly intended as samplers, introducing you to a number of authors you might not have otherwise discovered.

As is tradition, I'm going to lay out three different themed tracks you might take at Lit Crawl. These are just a few of the suggestions; you can find the rest of the gigantic schedule on Lit Crawl's site.

TRACK 1: No White Dudes

• Start your night at 5 pm at the Shafer Baillie Mansion Bed & Breakfast for a reading by trans and queer authors of color including Ana Walker, Luzviminda “Lulu” Carpenter, J Mase III, and Nic Masangkay.
• At 6 pm, Berkeley poets Jongmin Jerome Baek and Emmanuelle Gauthier will read on the topic of rape, consent, and the word "no" at Office Nomads.
• For the 7 pm slot, run on up to Vermillion for the reading by Georgia Stewart McDade as part of the African American Writers Alliance's programming.
• Next, at 8, scramble to Corvus & Co for Surreal Storytelling with Strange Women, featuring Kate Bernatche, Vivian Hua, Jalayna Carter, Ellen Meny, and Kate Berwanger.
• End your night at the Writing Against the Body reading at Ada's Technical Books, in which Joyce Chen, Laura Wachs, Laura Titzer, and Abi Pollokoff will discuss what it means to have a body.

Track 2: Scary Stories, Told in the Dark

• At 5 pm, visit the Capitol Hill Branch of the Seattle Public Library where children's book authors Mark Maciejewski, Donna Barba Higuera, and Kim Baker will discuss boogeymen, farts, and a bear.
• Run to Capitol Cider for the 6 pm reading of Poems to Scare the Hell Out of You, read by librarians Misha Stone and David Wright, featuring "Shambling spirits and serial killers, and things that stare at you from pickling jar."
• 7 pm kicks off at Ollie Quinn with a reading about haunted heartbreak featuring Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Keetje Kuipers, Anne Liu Kellor, and Jessica Mooney.
• At 8 pm, it's back to the Capitol Hill Library for "a literary seance" of Late Night Scary Tales for adults and older children.
• And finally, the Pine Box hosts a straight-up horror reading, featuring writers Jarret Middleton, Chavisa Woods, and Ramon Isao.

Track 3: Literary Icons

• This evening of local literary institutions begins at 5 pm at Northwest Film Forum with organization Y-WE celebrating young women writers with readers Robin Hall, Azure Savage and Lucia Santos.
• At 6 pm, storied poetry collective Margin Shift takes over the Stumbling Monk for a reading including Woogee Bae, Eddie Kim, and Nadine Antoinette Maestas.
• At 7 pm, local writers colony Hedgebrook takes the stage at Capitol Cider with local legends Ellen Forney, Wendy Call, and Kathleen Alcala,
• Visit Spin Cycle at 8 pm for a reading from remarkable local poets like Jane Wong, Quenton Baker, Santi Holley, and Shayla Lawson.
• At 9 pm, Jack Straw, the local organization that helps writers present their work better, takes over Spin Cycle for a reading from Jack Straw fellows including Christianne Balk, Rena Priest, and Sylvia Byrne Pollack.