The guy who wrote the book that launched the most popular musical and the guy who wrote the book that will likely become the most popular TV series.
The Pulitzer Prize winner who wrote the book that launched the most popular musical and the Pulitzer Prize winner who wrote the book that will likely become the most popular TV series. (L-R) Rob Kim, Amy Sussman // Getty Images

The 100 percent woman-operated Seattle Arts and Lectures organization has announced (most of) their lineup for the 2017/18 season, and hoowee does it sport a lot of recent prize winners.

Check out the list below, plus a few words about each reader.

LITERARY ARTS SERIES
This series features great writers of fiction and nonfiction. Normally authors read for a while and then talk about what they read with members of the local literary community.

• Ron Chernow—I'm sure you're familiar with the Tony Award-winning smash hit musical explosion known as Hamilton? Well, I've been told Ron Chernow wrote the biography of Alexander Hamilton that Lin-Manuel Miranda used as source material for his wildly popular show. This year, Chernow will be touring with a new presidential biography about Ulysses S. Grant, probably the greatest writer ever to hold the office.

• Isabel Allende—Author of The House of the Spirits, which Alexander Coleman over at the New York Times described as "a unique achievement, both personal witness and possible allegory of the past, present, and future of Latin America." She's written 22 books, including In the Midst of Winter, which comes out in October.

• Jesmyn Ward—Ward won the National Book Award in fiction in 2011 for Salvage the Bones. All of her book titles involve blood and death: Where the Line Bleeds (2008) and The Men We Reaped (2013). Her latest work of fiction, Sing, Unburied, Sing: A Novel, continues in this tradition.

• Colson Whitehead—He won every major award in fiction this year for The Underground Railroad, which really was that good.

• Viet Thanh Nguyen—He wrote The Sympathizer, which won last year's Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Nguyen strongly believes we need to hear the story of the American invasion of Vietnam from more Vietnamese peoples' perspectives, and his work is certainly making headway in that direction. His latest is a book of short stories about the lives of immigrants after that war, The Refugees.

• Laura Lippman and David Simon - Lippman is an award-winning author of detective novels and David Simon, her husband, created The Wire, which sustained the golden age of American television, and also Treme, which helped.

SAL PRESENTS
This series features whoever might not exactly fall into traditional literary categories.

• Moth Mainstage—This is the live storytelling competition that many people like because many people (like myself) are horrible gossips who only want to hear people confess their most embarrassing and heartfelt true stories so long as they're on topic.

• Reza Aslan—SAL associate director Rebecca Hoogs described Aslan's new show as a kind of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, but for religions. Sounds equal parts promising and infuriating.

POETRY SERIES

• Steph(en) Burt—Harvard professor of English, one of the greatest living literary critics, and a very good transgender poet. Burt's touring with a new book called The Poem Is You, which offers 60 good readings of poems. If you have ever thought to yourself "I don't get poetry!" then this lecture is for you. Also, you can just e-mail me. I'm right here.

• A.E. Stallings—Top notch formal poet with deep intellectual and aesthetic roots in ancient Greek writings.

• Gregory Orr—Much beloved and legendary poet who I once used as an example of bad poetry reading in an essay called "Stop Using Poet Voice." I just want to stress here that Orr's work is much bigger and better and more important than his reading voice, and that you really should check out The Caged Owl (published by Copper Canyon Press—they're local, guys!), if you're looking for a lesson on how to turn your trauma into poems without discrediting either.

• Tyehimba Jess—He won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and boy, did he deserve it. Stranger Genius Nominees Wave Books (they're local, guys!) published his winning book, Olio, which explores, embodies, and thinks through the early origins of black music in America. If you have not checked out this book, you must check out this book. Jess is doing shit with the page that I have never seen before in my life—writing poems you have to rip out of the book and roll into a tube in order to read, writing mirroring ghazals that actually read forwards and backwards, just to name a few.

• Of an Impossible Country: An Evening with Rachel McKibbens, Benjamin Alire Saenz, and Javier Zamora—SAL teams up with Copper Canyon Press to present three poets "whose work challenges and illuminates the notion of border-crossing," press materials say. MiKibbens has a new book out called Blud, Saenz's novels and poetry are all about life on the US's southwestern border, and Zamora is a young American poet born in El Salvador. His first book, Unaccompanied, "draws from his own story of migrating from El Salvador at the age of nine."

• Amy Nezhukumatathil—Very good lyric / narrative poet. Check out 2007's At the Drive-in Volcano.

Guests and lecturers are still TBD for the Sherman Alexie Loves series (wherein the beloved literary megatron hisself interviews people he likes, such as Brian Cranston) and Women You Need to Know series, which has hosted the likes of Alison Bechdel and which will host the likes of Emily Nussbaum next week.