Final Lion Rock Visiting Writers Series event scheduled for May 26

Central Washington University’s Lion Rock Visting Writers Series is proud to welcome Sonora Jha, PhD, author and professor of communication and media at Seattle University.  

She joins us Tuesday, May 26, in Black Hall’s Multicultural Center to present at two free events: a craft talk at noon in Black Hall room 151 on “staying in a state of story” followed by a Q&A and book signing; and a 5:30 p.m. reading in Black Hall 107. If you would like to attend the May 26 events online, please pre-register for the craft talk and the reading online.

Thanks to the generosity of a College of Arts and Humanities Student Activity grant, a complimentary lunch will be provided to all craft talk attendees, and five books will be given away at each event to students attending in person. 

Sonora Jha will be reading from her most recent novels, Intemperance and The Laughter. Intemperance is winner of the Washington State Book Award, a finalist for The Aspen Words Literary prize, and named a Best Book of 2025 by Library Journal.  The campus novel The Laughter (2023) was named a Best Book of 2023 by The New Yorker, NPR, and others. These followed her nonfiction book How to Raise a Feminist Son (2021), dubbed “a memoir and manifesto” by Rebecca Solnit; and her debut novel Foreign (2013), a finalist for the Shakti Bhatt Prize, the Hindu Prize, and longlisted for the DSC Prize in India. Foreign will be reissued in the U.S. in fall 2026. 

Dr. Jha’s love of writing is sure to inspire all who attend: “Writing has made me live more, not in terms of longevity, of course, but in intensity, in purpose, in presence, and in submission to uncertainty and mystery. When I write, even if I have had a quiet and solitary day, I feel like I have lived three times as much, three more days than were in my share.” 

As the Loyola Endowed Professor at Seattle University, Jha’s areas of expertise are feminism, racial and gender justice, social media movements, and social protest coverage. In an interview with The Seattle Times, Jha shared, “I’m drawn to being disobedient — with storytelling traditions, with a plot structure, with conventions of narrative, with expectations of me as a woman of color writing.” 

Intemperance, a novel about love, desire, and disability, challenges gender norms in both American and South Asian culture. The unnamed narrator, a university professor living in Seattle, decides to hold a swayamvar for her 55^th birthday, a practice (traditionally for young women) that involves finding a husband. Throughout this process, the narrator is both supported and cautioned by friends, family, a former student, and Hindu goddesses who appear to her in times of great need.

As she navigates the situation, her only desire is to “turn their curse into blessings” and live with agency. Seattle Times book reviewer Jenny Bartoy describes Intemperance as “at times laugh out-loud funny, sometimes achingly poignant…the novel also reckons with…the bucking of generational and cultural expectations, and the complexities of masculinity, disability, and family estrangement.”

Central Washington University’s Lion Rock Visiting Writers Series features nationally known writers reading their work in person and/or on Zoom. The series has hosted winners of the MacArthur Genius Award, Washington State Poets Laureate, and recipients of Guggenheim, Lanna, and NEA Fellowships. Past readers in the Lion Rock Visiting Writers Series include Natalie Diaz, Eduardo Corral, Elissa ashuta, Lucia Perillo, Anthony Doerr, Major Jackson, Kim Barnes, and many others.