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Grantee: Spokane is Reading

Project Title: Spokane Is Reading 2025 Featuring Tananarive Due and Her Novel "The Reformatory," October 23, 2025
Year awarded: 2025, Round 2

Spokane Is Reading is proud to announce that award-winning novelist and Afrofuturist, Tananarive Due, will visit Spokane on October 23, 2025, to discuss her gripping novel The Reformatory. Now in its 24th year, Spokane Is Reading invites the entire community to engage in a shared literary experience each fall. Due’s acclaimed historical horror nove (winner of the Shirley Jackson, Bram Stoker, and World Fantasy Awards) draws haunting parallels between the supernatural and the real-life horrors endured by Black children at Florida’s infamous Dozier School. The 2025 events will include two free public discussions with the author: at Spokane Valley Library (1 PM) and Spokane Central Library (7 PM). Books will be widely available across library branches and Auntie’s Bookstore in various formats.

Spokane Is Reading selected The Reformatory for its emotional power, imaginative storytelling, and urgent relevance in a time of growing censorship and erasure. With support from the Spokane Arts Grant Awards, the program will help cover costs related to bringing Due to Spokane including travel, accommodations, and honorarium. This will be one of the largest-scale Spokane Is Reading events to date, building on the success of last year’s record-setting crowds for Perma Red by Debra Magpie Earling. Organizers anticipate a wide and diverse turnout, especially given Due’s national acclaim and commitment to truth-telling through genre fiction. As Stephen King has said of The Reformatory, “Due hit it out of the park.”