Seattle’s Most Influential People 2018: Seattle City Councilmember, Teresa Mosqueda
The freshman councilmember is proving to be a bridge player on an increasingly fractured City Council
By Erica C. Barnett October 17, 2018
This article originally appeared in the November 2018 issue of Seattle magazine.
This article appears in print in the November 2018 issue, as part of the Most Influential People of the Year feature. Click here to subscribe.
In her first several months on the council, Mosqueda, an energetic former labor lobbyist elected in 2017, proposed a plan, one that shouldn’t be radical yet is, to give surplus city land to affordable-housing developers, instead of selling it to the highest bidder; cast one of just two votes against repealing the “head tax,” which would have paid for housing and homeless services; passed new city protections for domestic workers; and stuck her neck out as a high-density housing advocate at a time when a revanchist neighborhood movement is ascending. Rarely has a City Council freshman taken a mandate and run with it quite as hard as Mosqueda. In doing so, she’s proving to be a bridge player on an increasingly fractured City Council.
Follow Us
The Councilmember: Alexis Mercedes Rinck
Seattle’s youngest councilmember leads with a boots-on-the-ground approach.
Crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Standing on Medgar Evers’ driveway. Looking over the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. At 16, Alexis Mercedes Rinck had heard stories of these Civil Rights Movement landmarks from her politically engaged grandmother, who was raising her, but in 2012, Rinck was there. And she was meeting the people—sung and unsung—of…
The Literary Leader: Christopher Frizzelle
The former Stranger editor launching a community-funded publishing company that puts its authors first.
The path to FrizzLit Editions began in the fraught days of March 2020. Christopher Frizzelle, then an editor at the Stranger, was searching for new ways to reach readers in a city that had all but shut down. “My brilliant idea is, we’ll do a book club,” he remembers. That first book club—a quarantine edition…
The Big Giver: Shari D. Behnke
The philanthropist pouring resources into the arts, hoping to inspire others to do the same.
Like almost everyone who has spent time at On the Boards, Shari D. Behnke has memories of shows that have deeply moved her. And then there are the performances she found so jarring that she walked out part-way through—few and far between, but still a hazard of frequenting contemporary performing arts. “That’s one of the…
The Explorer: Tessa Hulls
Her graphic novel won a prestigious Pulitzer Prize.
People who know Tessa Hulls won’t be surprised by her initial reaction to learning she’d won a Pulitzer Prize for her first book, the graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts (Macmillan, 2024). “I think I was in shock for a couple of months,” Hulls says. “I went into the backcountry for as long as I needed until…