2023 LITERARY LIONS GALA

March 4, 2023

5:30-9:30pm

Keynote:
ISAbel Wilkerson

Venue:
Hyatt Regency Bellevue

About the Literary Lions Gala

The KCLS Foundation's annual fundraiser is the library event of the year. It’s an opportunity for community members to join together to raise funds for programs and services at the King County Library System. We hope that you’ll join us in 2023!

The Literary Lions Gala also features the debut of the annual Author Salon event series, with tickets first offered for sale exclusively to Gala attendees. Author Salons are intimate events with popular authors at venues around the Seattle Area, held throughout the spring and summer. Attendees can get to know their favorite author while enjoying delicious food and wine, all at a unique venue.

2023 Keynote: Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, is the author of the critically acclaimed, New York Times bestsellers The Warmth of Other Suns, and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. “Wilkerson's work,” in the words of The American Prospect magazine, “is the missing puzzle piece of our country's history.”

The Warmth of Other Suns won the National Book Critics Circle Award, among other honors, and was named to more than 30 Best of the Year lists, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker and The Washington Post. TIME Magazine named it one of the “10 Best Non-Fiction Books” of the decade. The New York Times Magazine named Warmth to its list of the best nonfiction books of all time.

Wilkerson won the Pulitzer Prize for her deeply humane narrative writing while serving as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times in 1994, making her the first black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first African American to win for individual reporting. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded Wilkerson the National Humanities Medal for "championing the stories of an unsung history."

As the historian Jill Lepore observed in The New Yorker: “What Wilkerson urges, isn’t argument at all; it’s compassion. Hush, and listen.”