Two hours ahead of showtime--before someone like George Plimpton or (in last week's case) National Book Award-winner Andrea Barrett takes the stage at Benaroya Hall--all attention is on Seattle Arts & Lectures' executive director, Matthew Brogan. Of all the things Brogan has brought to Seattle Arts & Lectures, and Seattle itself, his event "previews" are, if not his most glamorous innovation, his most scholarly. I'm not talking about Brogan's brief, charming opening remarks--"Zadie Smith was 12 years old when Seattle Arts & Lectures was founded in 1987"; "As with so many other things, we have Harvard to thank for Francine Prose"--but his less-well-known half-hour lecture previews. At last week's installment, in advance of Andrea Barrett's lecture, Brogan stood onstage and discussed Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, Mary Shelley's morally flummoxed monster-maker, early conceptions about the Arctic, Jules Verne's intrepid wanderers, English imperialism (and its metaphors), and Thomas Pynchon.

"To me, the lecture previews with Matt Brogan are just as valuable as the lectures themselves," said Dot Bittner, a SAL series regular who appreciates Brogan's efforts to provide context. "In some cases, they're better." Erudite and logical, not unlike the man who delivers them, the previews were originally Brogan's idea, and he began giving them as soon as he was installed in 1998.

Last week, the preview took a turn. During the question-and-answer session, someone said, "I have a personal question. I heard a rumor that you're leaving. Where are you going?" More to the point, someone else indignantly called out, "How could you?"

Brogan is returning to New York, the city from whence he came, where he will head up Nextbook, a national initiative to promote Jewish literacy. As SAL's executive director, he's been ultimately responsible for maintaining and developing all fundraising, programming, and educational outreach efforts. Under his leadership and in spite of the economy, SAL has expanded (the organization used to run two programs; it now runs five) and prospered (the budget when he began was $448,000; it's now $842,000).

The intellectual stature of the programming has flourished, too. Witness last week's lecture preview (Francis Bacon). Witness the four-part poetry series (which attracts the likes of Louise Glück and Galway Kinnell), or all the educational outreach programs he has founded or expanded--Teachers as Scholars, the Wednesday University, Writers in the Schools (where I'm temporarily working)--or the interesting, commercially risky special events he's staged, like last fall's "A New Generation of Mexican Poets," for which he flew in Coral Bracho, Tedi López Mills, Pedro Serrano, and Mónica de la Torre. In the words of one SAL staff member, "That event was indicative of exactly what he knows how to do: bring people who would have no audience here, but who are so relevant and important and are the people that we should be reading and thinking about."

A capable literary curator and chief administrator, Brogan is quiet, confident, cautious, by his own definition "bad" with people, serious, and often the source of his own amusement. (When he learned I was writing about him, he challenged me, jokingly, to incorporate the term "Svengali-like.") He's also a poet and a father, though he says, "I have to be alone to write poems, and I have a three-year-old. I'm never alone." Two summers ago, in his free time, he reread Ulysses. Last summer he learned Greek.

This week Brogan's not in Seattle; he's in Manhattan, looking at preschools and apartments. By the first of June he'll be gone. He's returning to New York, he says, for several reasons: because he loves its bustling foot traffic; because he and his partner, Betsy Apple, want their three-year-old son to be closer to his grandparents; and because "it's a different kind of literary scene there."

"There are ways in which I like the Seattle literary scene better," he says. "More people come out for things. They're more open. People in New York can be so jaded. But Seattle is also sometimes parochial and defensive. Because New York is the center of the world, there's less us-versus-them there because everyone's not so focused on who's local." In other words, he has outgrown this burg. Everyone in New York knows who Francis Bacon is. Everyone already speaks Greek.