British fiction writer/playwright Helen Oyeyemi is one of the many writers to look forward to hearing at SAL next season. At 31, shes written five novels and two plays. Her latest is a collection of short stories called What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
British fiction writer/playwright Helen Oyeyemi is one of the many writers to look forward to hearing at SAL next season. Piotr Cieplak

SAL just announced a partial list of writers they're bringing to town next year. As with many recent seasons, this one's stuffed with a bunch of essayists, fiction writers, and poets who've won gobs of national awards in the last couple years.

They haven't announced the readers for their Women You Need To Know Series, and they're still waiting to announce one more poet for the poetry series, as well as a couple other SAL Presents events (other authors/artists they bring outside of the Literary Arts Series, e.g. Drew Barrymore), so there's still more to come. In the meantime, here's who's coming to the Literary Arts Series, in order of appearance:

• Ann Patchett: Sept. 19
• Timothy Egan: Oct. 26
• Helen MacDonald: Feb. 1
• Ben Fountain: Mar. 1
• Bryan Stevenson: Mar. 28
• Helen Oyeyemi: Apr. 25

Here's who's coming to the Poetry Series, in order of appearance:

• Ada Limón: Oct. 5
• Rachel Zucker: Nov. 14
• Ross Gay: Feb. 7
• Ellen Bass: Feb. 28
• Alice Notley: Apr. 5

Timothy Egan will be reppin the home team for SAL. Former Seattle Times correspondent, current lefty columnist for the New York Times, winner of the 2006 National Book Award for The Worst Hard Time about the horrors of the Dust Bowl.
Timothy Egan will be reppin' the home team for SAL. He's a former Seattle Times correspondent, current lefty columnist for The New York Times, and winner of the 2006 National Book Award for The Worst Hard Time, which was about the horrors of the Dust Bowl. Current book is The Immortal Irishman. Lisa Howe Verhovek

In terms of the literary series, I'm most pumped about the two Helens. Helen MacDonald's H is for Hawk is a well-observed, lyrical memoir about hawks, T. H. White, and the grief of losing a father. Her descriptive sentences pull you in so that you feel like you're just walking around and having a nice chat full of arcane facts with your pal Helen MacDonald, but then she'll drop a surprising image and it'll hit like a firework up close. Read this excerpt and you'll see what I mean.

At 31, Helen Oyeyemi has already written five novels on major presses and two plays. Her latest book is a collection of short stories called What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, which is full of understated, surreal stories about stories.

Poetry-wise, I like Alice Notley, Rachel Zucker, and Ross Gay. Notley's a legendary second-gen so-called New York School poet who wrote the The Descent of Alette, which is sort of like a modern day Dante's Inferno but set in a subway and from a woman's point of view.

Rachel Zucker's The Pedestrians came out a couple years ago on Wave Books and blew everybody away. The book's a discursive and lyrical meditation on the way motherhood affects one's experience of time. Zucker follows in the tradition of Sylvia Plath, Alice Notley, and Adrienne Rich in giving us long, unflinching stares into the lives of women. She'll be here in November to give a lecture on "poetry, confession, and ethics."

Ross Gay, who just won the very lucrative Kingsley Tufts award (a $100,000 purse for outstanding mid-career work), is a poet who is the exact opposite of pretentious. He's coming in February and will read from Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, which won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and is full of chatty and warm but not smothering poems that are easy to grasp on a first read.

This year, SAL is moving the readings back to Benaroya Hall, an ambitious gesture that makes sense: SAL totally sold out their Literary Arts Series this year, so they could use the room.