Name: Foray: Get Lit! Festival Edition
Start: 2025-04-12T21:00:00-0700
End: 2025-04-12T23:00:00-0700

Saturday April 12, 2025 9:00pm - 11:00pm PDT

Foray for The Arts is a traveling multidisciplinary event that was founded by Greg Bem and Sarah Rooney. The event is intended to provide a place for local artists of all kinds to perform with each other in order to collaborate, network, and gain experience. This event series travels to local businesses in hopes to celebrate the unique variety of venues that Spokane has to offer while providing opportunities to connect with different parts of the community. This Foray event hopes to give the writers a flexibility to showcase their writing as well as pair it with possible other creative talents. This special festival edition of Foray is composed of 2025 festival authors Lauren Westerfield, Juan Carlos Reyes, Kristen Millares Young, Josh Fomon, Daniel Tam-Claiborne, Diana Xin, and Tiffany Midge alongside Spokane writers Margaret Albaugh, Shraya Singh, and Taylor Waring.

Purchase books by these writers via Auntie's Bookstore.

This event is free and open to the public. Attendees will enter the event via Emma Rue's, but readings will take place on the People's Waffle side through an interior curtain near the bar. Thank you to Foray and Emma Rue's for their partnership!

Please fill out our festival survey after you have attended this event. The information you provide will help us obtain critical grant funding and will help make next year’s festival even better!

Authors

Shraya Singh

Shraya Singh is an ex-engineer, writer, and teacher from India who just graduated with an MFA in fiction from Eastern Washington University. She loves frogs, Lord of the Rings memes, and epic fantasy and you can find some of her work in The Southern Review, The Spokesman-Review... Read More →

Daniel Tam-Claiborne

Daniel Tam-Claiborne is a multiracial writer, multimedia producer, and nonprofit director. He is the author of the short story collection What Never Leaves, and his writing has appeared in Catapult, Literary Hub, Off Assignment, The Rumpus, HuffPost, and elsewhere. A 2022 National... Read More →

Diana Xin

Born in the Hebei province of China and raised in the American Midwest, Diana Xin lived in Chicago, Beijing, and Missoula before landing in Seattle. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana and serves as a contributing editor for Moss. She is a recipient... Read More →

Greg Bem

Greg Bem (he/him) currently resides in Spokane where he is a librarian at Spokane Community College. After 14 years supporting literary arts in Seattle, Greg has focused his life in Spokane on running Carbonation Press, volunteering at local organizations like Spark Central, and co-running... Read More →

Josh Fomon

Josh Fomon's second book, Our Human Shores, will be published by Black Ocean in spring 2025. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals, including: Afternoon Visitor, Black Sun Lit’s Vestiges, Caketrain, DIAGRAM, The Destroyer, DREGINALD, The Georgia Review, jubilat, mercury... Read More →

Juan Carlos Reyes

Juan Carlos Reyes was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and now lives with his family in Seattle, WA. His debut fiction collection, Three Alarm Fire (2024), was released by Hinton Publishing. His short fiction, essays, and poems have been published in Moss, The Under Review, and Hawai’i... Read More →

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of the novel Elita (published by TriQuarterly Press/Northwestern University Press in January, 2025) and the story collection Outer Stars, which won the 2025 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction (UNT Press) and will be published in the... Read More →

Kristen Millares Young

Kristen Millares Young is a book critic, essayist, and author of the novel Subduction, named a staff pick by The Paris Review. Winner of Nautilus and IPPY awards, Subduction was a finalist for two International Latino Book Awards and Foreword Indies Book of the Year. Her work appears... Read More →

Lauren W. Westerfield

Lauren W. Westerfield is the author of Depth Control: Essays & Autofictions, a hybrid collection forthcoming in 2025 from Unsolicited Press. Her essays and poetry have most recently appeared in FENCE, Seneca Review, Willow Springs, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, and Ninth Letter... Read More →

Sarah Rooney

Sarah is nonbinary queer a poet who created “Speakeasy” Open Mic on March of 2022. They co-organize Foray for The Arts a multidisciplinary traveling event series in Spokane with Greg Bem that was started in Jan 2024. They are pursuing their Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing... Read More →

Tiffany Midge

Tiffany Midge is a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation and was raised by wolves in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Brooklyn Rail, Real Simple, First American Art Magazine, World Literature Today, McSweeney’s, and more. Midge’s poetry collections... Read More →

Taylor Waring

Taylor Waring is a writer, educator, and musician dwelling in Spokane, WA. He teaches English at North Idaho College. He performs with the psychedelic doom band, Merlock, the death rock band Cruel Velvet, and the blackened doom band Desertdweller.

Margaret Albaugh

Margaret Albaugh is a Chinese American photographer and visual artist. Her personal work is informed by social issues, primarily identity, race, and gender norms. She is inspired by topics that scratch at contentious or thought-provoking issues and is intrigued by the nuances of human... Read More →

Saturday April 12, 2025 9:00pm - 11:00pm PDT
Emma Rue's 17 S Howard St, Spokane, WA 99201, USA

In-person

Get Lit! Festival 2025