Tag Archives: town hall seattle

Stacey Abrams on our Capitol Hill: ‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t run, I just said I wasn’t announcing anything’

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Stacey Abrams first set the goal of running for the presidency 25 years ago.

After breaking up with a boyfriend, Abrams, who acknowledges she is “bad at dating,” says she created a spreadsheet laying out her goals, including being Atlanta mayor — the ceiling for black people, she thought at the time — a millionaire, and an author.

In about 1994, one of her friends, a white Republican man from South Carolina who she worked in the Clinton White House through a fellowship asked her the shocking question: “Stacey, when are you running for president?”

“President of what?” she recounted asking in response.

He reassured her that she could do it.

“What shames me to this day is that I did not believe him,” Abrams said at a sold-out Town Hall Seattle event Thursday night at Capitol Hill’s Temple De Hirsch Sinai.

“This moment where this person who was becoming my friend saw possibility in me, I immediately rejected it because there had never been a black man, a black woman, a woman ever to be a viable candidate.”

After that conversation, she went home and updated the spreadsheet to say that she would run for president of the United States. Continue reading →

Closed for renovation, Town Hall Seattle comes to Capitol Hill with neighborhood’s histories and ‘what we’ll build next’

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With Town Hall’s more-than-100-year-old First Hill home closed for a year-long renovation, the community forum is distributing its effort to bring illuminating speakers and timely issues to the city into Seattle’s neighborhoods.

Next Monday night, Town Hall Seattle and its “Neighborhood Resident” representative Erik Molano will come to E Pike for a free gathering of “poets and storytellers celebrating the history of Capitol Hill” and “a panel discussion on how we can help navigate the future of the neighborhood.”

In Residence—Histories of Capitol Hill and What We’ll Build Next
Monday, April 16th — 7 PM
The Summit on Pike, 420 E Pike

Poets:

Laura Da’ is a poet and teacher. A lifetime resident of the Pacific Northwest, Da’ studied creative writing at the University of Washington and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is Eastern Shawnee. Her first book, Tributaries, won a 2016 American Book Award. In 2015, Da’ was both a Made at Hugo House Fellow and a Jack Straw Fellow. Her next book, Instruments of the True Measure, is forthcoming in 2018. Continue reading →