This year, the Seattle City of Literature nonprofit is adding five at-large volunteer seats to their board of directors that are specifically held for representatives from books-, reading-, and writing-related groups, businesses, and community organizations in five geographic areas across the Seattle area: north, south, east, west, and central. Seattle City of Literature is the 501(c)3 nonprofit that manages Seattle’s UNESCO designation as a center for literacy and literature.

The five positions will participate fully in all board decision-making, including voting, and appointments will last one year (February 2021 to January 2022). The board currently meets virtually once a month in the evening for 90 minutes to two hours; committees meet on an as-needed basis on a similar schedule.

These positions will help the nonprofit ensure that the UNESCO designation is fully representative of, and connected to, the work happening in the community. “It is crucial that the decision-making around the UNESCO designation management directly reflect the communities who earned our city that designation in the first place. We also hope that these positions will help serve as opportunities for folks to further develop their community leadership skills, through training and onboarding support that we provide,” said Juan Carlos Reyes, President, Seattle City of Literature Board of Directors, in a recent letter to Book Publishers Northwest News

These board positions will be uncompensated volunteer work.

If interested, please complete the application (a one-page Google Form) by Sunday, January 31. If you have any questions about the content of the application, need different accessibility options, or want to know more about Seattle City of Literature, please contact them at info@seattlecityoflit.org. 

Seattle was designated a UNESCO City of Literature in 2017 and has been working as part of the international network since then. The nonprofit has published Seismic, a collection that asks writers to consider what the designation means for the city and how literature might be an agent of change.