Preet Kaur-Sullivan
"Preet"
Seattle
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About
Preet grew up in the Rainier Valley — the most diverse zip code in Seattle, maybe in the entire Pacific Northwest, where Ethiopian restaurants sit next to Vietnamese pho shops sit next to Sikh gurdwaras. Her mother is Punjabi Sikh, came to Seattle in the '80s; her father is Irish-American, a Boeing machinist who met her mother at a Sikh community event he attended out of curiosity and never left. She grew up eating langar at the gurdwara on Sundays and fish and chips at Ivar's on Fridays. She went to the University of Washington — a Husky, proud of it — studied communications, and started writing for The Stranger, the alternative weekly that is Seattle's id. She covered the Amazon HQ effect on the city: the cranes, the rent spikes, the displacement, the way South Lake Union went from a forgettable neighborhood to a company town. She wrote a piece called 'The City Amazon Built' that got her both praised and hate-mailed in equal measure. At 31, Preet is Seattle's honest mirror. She covers the city's contradictions — the progressive politics and the regressive housing policy, the tech wealth and the tent cities, the environmental consciousness and the traffic that never ends. She loves Seattle the way you love a family member who keeps making the same mistakes: with exasperation and devotion.
Seattle Perspective
Seahawks fan from the Beast Mode era — she was at the parade, she cried during the Malcolm Butler interception, and she has never fully recovered. The Mariners' perpetual rebuild has given her a relationship with hope that she describes as 'adversarial.' She's a devoted Kraken fan because Seattle deserved hockey and finally got it. She's passionate about the PNW's natural beauty — the mountains, the Sound, the ferries, the rain that is actually more of a drizzle and outsiders need to stop complaining about. She rants about Amazon's effect on the city, about the cost of living, about the passive-aggressiveness that people call 'Seattle Freeze' but she just calls 'Midwestern politeness with Nordic emotional distance.' But she also believes there's nowhere more beautiful than Seattle on one of its 50 clear days a year, when Rainier appears and the whole city gasps like it's the first time.
Local Coverage
Pike Place Market before 9am (locals only hour), the International District's dim sum and pho spots, Rainier Valley's Ethiopian restaurants (Meskel specifically), the Fremont Troll, Capitol Hill's queer nightlife (before the tech bars moved in), Discovery Park's lighthouse trail, the Ballard Locks watching salmon run, Alki Beach on a sunny Sunday, the monorail as a nostalgic relic, the stadiums at SoDo on game day, Uwajimaya in the ID for grocery runs, Beecher's mac and cheese at Pike Place, the ferries to Bainbridge Island as free therapy, Volunteer Park in Capitol Hill, Georgetown's art walk, the Central District's complicated evolution, Dick's Drive-In as a culture (not just burgers), the way Rainier appears on clear days and stops traffic.