Raúl Sánchez and friends — 'When We Were Water'

Third Place Books welcomes poet Raúl Sánchez to our Lake Forest Park location for a reading featuring his new collection When We Were Water [https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/book/9781937797119]. Local poets Benjamin Schmitt, T. Clear, and Molly Olguín join in creative community and conversation. This event is free and open to the public. For important updates, RSVP is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book! Having trouble registering? See Eventbrite's troubleshooting FAQ here [https://www.eventbrite.com/support/articles/en_US/Troubleshooting/how-to-troubleshoot-problems-registering-for-an-event?lg=en_US]. TICKETS: This event is free to attend. Registration is required in advance. ABOUT WHEN WE WERE WATER. . . "In Raúl Sánchez's When We Were Water, selections from his books All Our Brown-Skinned Angels and When There Were No Borders travel to us with abundant new work that continues to experiment in forms and shapes, with odes and acrostic poems, visions and flashbacks, elegies and spirit-journeys, but always with humor and human vitality and a golden thread connecting to Latin roots. This work is free and playful, jazzy and up close, exploding with intensity. These are questing poems, liberation poems, devotional poems, ecstatic poems, comic poems, sincere and lived and opening out." —Douglas Cole, author of The Cabin at the End of the World "With his new poems, Sánchez expands his everyman vision by focusing closer to home-he tends the garden, washes the dishes, kills a spider, gazes at the stars, and records his dreams. He sees the people and remembers the history most of us overlook. He immerses himself in the natural world. All the while, Sánchez builds on the ground he has previously staked out—celebrating and memorializing family, moving seamlessly between cultures and languages, and believing in the power of poetry to save us." —John Burgess, author of Punk Poems Raúl Sánchez is a self-taught poet whose work reflects the immigrant experience as well as his own. He teaches bilingual poetry in middle schools, juvenile detention, domestic and immigrant day labor workers. He runs “Poetry in the Park” a biweekly gathering of neighbors and friends at the Meadowbrook Pond in NE Seattle. Benjamin Schmitt is the Elgin Award-nominated author of five books, most recently Satan’s School for Girls and Other Works (Goldfish Press, 2026). His writing has appeared in Sojourners, Antioch Review, The MacGuffin, Sensitive Skin, Hobart, Columbia Review, The Seattle Times, and elsewhere. A co-founder of Pacifica Writers’ Workshop, he lives in Seattle with his children. Seattle poet T. Clear is the author of A House, Undone, winner of the Sally Albiso Award from MoonPath Press, and a chapbook, Egg Money, also from MoonPath Press. Her work has appeared in a long list of magazines and anthologies. She's an Associate Editor at Bracken Magazine. Molly Olguín is a queer writer and educator from Seattle. Her debut collection The Sea Gives Up the Dead was selected for the 2023 Grace Paley Prize by Carmen Maria Machado and is out now with Red Hen Press. Her short stories have appeared in journals like Foglifter, The Normal School, River Styx, and Quarterly West. She teaches English and creative writing to high school students. ABOUT THIRD PLACE BOOKS Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events [https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/events]