october 17-20
2024
Peter Anderson’s most recent books include Reading Colorado: A Literary Road Guide (Bower House Books, 2023), an anthology of placed-based writings; Heading Home: Field Notes (Conundrum Press, 2017), a collection of flash prose and prose poems exploring rural life and the modern day eccentricities of the American West; Going Down Grand: Poems from the Canyon (Lithic Press, 2015), an anthology of Grand Canyon poems edited with Rick Kempa, which was nominated for a Colorado Book Award; and First Church of the Higher Elevations (Conundrum Press, 2015), a collection of essays on wildness, mountain places, and the life of the spirit. Peter was the Bennett Fellow Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy for the 2015-16 school year. He lives with his family on the western slope of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southern Colorado.
Esther Belin is among the myriad of indigenous peoples on the planet to survive in urbanized areas. She is a graduate from the following institutions: UC Berkeley, IAIA, Antioch University. She considers the following locations her homeland: LA, Durango, Diné bike'yah. Her writing and art grows from and is an offering to the collective humanity, bila' ashdla'ii.
Jimi Bernath is a poet and essayist living in Trinidad Colorado USA. His poetry has appeared in newshole, frogpond, Heiwa: Peace Poetry Across the Pacific, Brussels Sprout, point judith light, Soliloquy, Modern Haiku, tangents, Alura, the Small Pond magazine of literature, The Mercury Reader, Stick, Sight Unseen, and Life Scribes.
Kierstin Bridger is a Colorado writer currently living near Telluride. She is the author of Demimonde (Lithic Press), the 2017 Women Writing the West's Willa Award. She is also the author of a full collection, All Ember (Urban Farmhouse Press). Winner of the Mark Fischer Poetry Prize, the 2015 ACC Writer’s Studio award, and short-listed for the Manchester Poetry Competition in the UK. She co-hosts Poetry Voice with poet Uche Ogbuji. Find more of her work in December, Sugar House Review, Prairie Schooner and Painted Bride Quarterly. She earned her MFA at Pacific University.
John Calderazzo is retired from Colorado State University, where he won a Best CSU Teacher Award, co-founded a university-wide teaching climate change initiative, and helped develop the nonfiction track of the MFA Creative Writing program. He’s also taught scientists to communicate with the public through story telling. His poems and essays have appeared in Audubon, Brevity, Georgia Review, High Country News, Orion, The Normal School, Witness, and elsewhere. His books include a freelance-writing guide and Rising Fire: Volcanoes & Our Inner Lives. He’s won a Colorado Arts Council Fellowship and a Traveler's Tales Solas award for an essay about Buddhism and mountains in Bhutan. His work has appeared in Best American Nature Writing, Best Travel Adventure Stories, and Copper Canyon Press’s 2019 Here: Poems for the Planet. John has just published his first poetry collection, The Exact Weight of the Soul (Red Mountain Press).
A poet since childhood, Lawton’s first poetry submission was published in An Anthology of High School Poets. Originally from New England, she has lived in the mountain hamlet of Salida, Colorado for 20 plus years. It was there she discovered an audience for performance poetry. She is an original member of the performance poetry troupe River City Nomads with whom she has performed at festivals and as featured artists in numerous Colorado events and venues since 2005. She is at home with her four- legged companions Gracie and Fio in earshot of the Arkansas River with the Sangre De Cristo and Collegiate Peaks mountains as their backdrop.
Chasing Grace is Lawton’s first published collection. In it she pleasures in the practice of capturing word play and rhythm to infuse the ordinary stuff of life with mystical musings. The emotion and enigma of intimate relationship is here. The present moment delight of a wondering mind are infused in the work. The yearning for home and the yearning to leave home tussle in the work. Lawton invites you in as a reader as if to say Here I am if you care; if you dare. We have things in common.
Eric Raanan Fischman is an MFA graduate of Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Colorado. He is an instructor for the Beyond Academia Free Skool, which hosts monthly writing workshops at the Boulder Public Library plus a 1-2 week free summer program, and has also taught for the Firehouse Art Center in Longmont and Mi Chantli in Boulder. His work has appeared in Bombay Gin, The Boulder Weekly, Twenty Bellows, New Feathers Anthology, Jasper’s Folly Poetry Journal, and many more, as well as in local community fundraising anthologies from South Broadway Ghost Society and Punch Drunk Press, benefiting Denver Food Rescue and the Mutiny Information Cafe. He also curates the Boulder/Denver metro area poetry calendar at boulderpoetryscene.com and is a regular contributor to the BPS blog. His first book, Mordy Gets Enlightened, was published through The Little Door in 2017.
Barbara Ford lives in Poncha Springs. She has produced and hosted a weekly poetry show on the community radio station in Salida for seventeen years, bringing the world's poetry to her listeners. Before the pandemic struck she organized a monthly poetry reading series with invited poets and an open mic segment. Her work has appeared in regional and national publications and anthologies, and her chapbook, Once Familiar, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016. She collaborated with artist Roberta Smith on the book In Pursuit of Happenstance, published in 2022. The book, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, pairs 32 poems with a variety of images. It must be mentioned that chickens are her therapy animal.
Art Goodtimes was an Earth First! poetry editor before getting elected to five terms as a Green county commissioner in Southwestern Colorado, where U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Rifle) now represents the Third Congressional district in Congress. Art is co-director of Talking Gourds, a local and regional poetry program under the non-profit aegis of the Telluride Institute. His lastest book is Dancing on Edge (Lithic Press, Fruita, 2019).
Forrest Hendricks is a poet who's made Colorado his home for the last 6 plus years. Previously published in Spit Poet Zine, Forrest is the author of his own chapbook Baggage Claim. He hosts the local event Jazzetry which combines poetry and improvised music. Professionally he talks about whiskey and changes flat bicycle tires.
Dustin Hyman is dyslexic and loves nuerodiversity. He has worked as a freelance writer and a journalist. Now, after earning a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana, Dustin finds himself teaching English at a tiny college in Colorado. His fiction has appeared in shady places and his first novel, Island Folks, was published in 2014 by Black Rose Writing. Dustin won the Chicago Tribune’s 2018 Nelson Algren award for literature.
Amy Wray Irish grew up in the Chicago area, received her MFA from the University of Notre Dame, then fled the Midwest for Colorado sunshine. She has two contest-winning chapbooks—Down to the Bone (Wild Rising Press, 2023), which reimagines fairy tales and myths as sources of strength for women; and Breathing Fire (Middle Creek Publishing, 2020), which is an intimate response to a year of national combustion.
Amy’s poetry has also appeared in various anthologies and lit magazines, including We are the West (Twenty Bellows), Chiaroscuro (Northern Colorado Writers), Food for Thought (Broadway Press), and Tiny Spoon.
Rachel Kellum lives with her family at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo mountains and teaches art to valley children and writing at Adams State University. Kellum earned a BFA in Art from Millikin University and an MA in English from Colorado State. Her career began as an English and art instructor at Morgan Community College for eleven years, during which time she served six years as director of the MCC CACE Gallery of Fine Art and host of Open Mic Poetry Nights. A Pushcart Prize nominee and NFSPS award winning poet, her poetry has been featured in several online journals and print collections. She leads writing workshops, performs her poetry around Colorado and blogs at wordweeds.com. Her first book, ah, published by Liquid Light Press, was released in 2012.
Kate Kingston’s most recent book of poems, Shaking the Kaleidoscope, published by Lost Horse Press, 2012, was a finalist in the 2011 Idaho Prize for Poetry. Previous collections of her poetry include In My Dreams Neruda, El Río de las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio, and Unwritten Letters. Kingston has been awarded fellowships from Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, the Colorado Council on the Arts, the Harwood Museum, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and Fundación Valparaíso in Mojácar, Spain, among others. She is the recipient of the W.D Snodgrass Award for Poetic Endeavor and Excellence awarded by Kathleen Snodgrass. She was also a finalist in the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and the Arts and Letters Rumi Prize for Poetry and has received several Push Cart Prize nominations. Her poems can be found in the Atlanta Review, Ellipsis, Great River Review, Hawai’i Review, Hunger Mountain, Margie, Nimrod, the Pinch, Rattle, Runes, and Sugar House Review. Kingston received her MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Norwich University.
Lynda La Rocca’s poetry collections include The Stillness Between (Pudding House Publications, 2009), Spiral (Liquid Light Press, 2012) and Unbroken (Kelsay Books, 2023). Her individual poems have been published in numerous state and national poetry-society anthologies, along with venues that include The Wall Street Journal, The New York Quarterly, Frogpond (Haiku Society of America), U.S. Catholic, Colorado Life Magazine, and Children’s Playmate. She is the 2007 winner of the Arapahoe Community College (Colorado) Writers’ Studio Literary Contest Award for Poetry and the 2020 winner in poetry of the National League of American Pen Women’s Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition. A journalist, freelance writer, and editor, La Rocca performs her poetry solo and as a member of the River City Nomads, a five-person, performance-poetry troupe based in Salida, Colorado, where she lives with her writer- photographer husband Steve Voynick.
Brooke Larson is a writer and performer. A book of her ecological essays, Pleasing Tree, is available from Arc Pair Press, and chapbooks of her poems, Origami Drama and Daughter Particles, from Quarterly West and Dancing Girl Press. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana. Brooke recently returned to Colorado after 12 months in Kosovo with a Fulbright Scholarship, where she worked on collaborative translations of Albanian poetry.
Anne MacNaughton is a poet, author and artist based in Northern New Mexico. Co-Founder of S.O.M.O.S. and director of the long-running Taos Poetry Circus, she teaches writing and coaches recitation and performance around the Southwest. Her easygoing voice has been described as reminiscent of Mary Oliver’s. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including The Notebook, Minerva Rising, The Best American Poetry, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, Thus Spake the Corpse, In Company: An Anthology of New Mexico Poets After 1960, and most recently the Santa Fe Literary Review. Her essays on poetry are included in Spoken Word Revolution and Poetry Flash.
Amalio Madueño is one of Taos’ favourite poets. Most recently hosting the ‘Mexican Bob’ poetry workshops at the Taos Poetry Circus he is part of the jazz/poetry ensemble ‘Luminous Animal’.
His work has been widely published in journals including Exquisite Corpse, Strong Coffee and Saludos: Poets of New Mexico.
David Anthony Martin is a professional nemophilist afflicted with acute werifesteria who practices the ancient arts of shikantaza and shinrin-yoku to overcome his sense of hiraeth. He flies kites far too infrequently, forages wild mushrooms when in season, collects feathers when he finds them, writes daily and dreams nightly. He has been published in an assortment of journals and anthologies, is the author of four collections of poems ( Span, Deepening the Map, Bijoux, and The Ground Nest). He works in several capacities for the Nature & Wildlife Discovery Center in Beulah and Pueblo, Colorado including Environmental Educator, Hike Guide, Park Maintenance, Caretaker and writes a weekly column for them in the Pueblo Chieftain. He is the founding editor of Middle Creek Publishing.
Brice Maiurro is a neurodivergent poet from Lakewood, Colorado. He is the Editor-in-Chief of South Broadway Press, a publisher focused on poetry in relationship with local social causes. His poetry has been featured by The Denver Post, Boulder Weekly, and Tilt West. In 2020, his partner and he started the nationwide ""Go Outside and Howl at 8"" movement, where all over the country (and the world) people would step aside to howl as a part of our bigger community in a time of isolation. His fourth collection of poetry, The Heart is an Undertaker Bee, was recently released from Middle Creek Publishing, a press focused on the literature of human ecology. He is happy to be an amateur apiarist and mycophile. You can find him on Instagram at @maiurro.
Darci Meyers is a somatic psychotherapist and chaplain in private practice in Crestone. She is a longtime Buddhist practitioner and explorer of consciousness, as well as, until recently, a closet writer and poet. Her writing often explores topics very personal to her, such as grief and loss, death and dying, and spirituality. As a lover of nature and open spaces, she feels deeply at home living at the base of the Sangre de Cristo mountains in Crestone.
Adrian H Molina, aka Molina Speaks, is an Artist, Live Scribe Poet, and Master of Ceremonies. He explores themes of humanity, technology, and sustainability through a futurist lens. He resides in Denver, Colorado, with roots in Wyoming, southern Colorado, and northern Mexico. Molina’s creative work has been shaped by Chicano art, Hip-Hop, and the natural world. Molina’s artistic legacy includes serving as Creative Director of Youth on Record during the establishment of its Youth Media Studio, being named a Westword Mastermind, and building a permanent installation at Meow Wolf Denver that commemorates the life and art of late Chicano painter Stevon Lucero. Molina left all social media from 2020 to 2023 to focus on the human dimension.
Molina delivered the poetic invocation for the Denver Art Museum’s Martin Building in 2021. He was an Artist in Residence with the Breckenridge Creative District in 2022. His Living Word Scroll, 2015-2020 was recently on display at the History Colorado Center and El Pueblo History Museum. Molina is an honoree of the Lalo Delgado Poetry Festival, and a room has been named for Molina at the Denver Foundation’s Casa Grande on Poet’s Row. Molina’s newest installation Dreams Life and Times premiered at Understudy at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts in December, 2022. He is currently building Future Town Tour with Warm Cookies of the Revolution—the mission is to inspire creative health and civic health outcomes in small towns in the American West.
Juan J. Morales is the son of an Ecuadorian mother and Puerto Rican father. He is the author of three poetry collections, including The Handyman’s Guide to End Times, winner of the 2019 International Latino Book Award. Recent poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, The Laurel Review, Breakbeats Vol. 4 LatiNEXT, Acentos Review, Collateral, terrain.org, and Poetry. He is a CantoMundo Fellow, a Macondo Fellow, the editor/publisher of Pilgrimage Press, and Professor of English and the Associate Dean of the College of Humanities Arts & Social Sciences at Colorado State University-Pueblo.
Shaina A. Nez is a Diné mother, writer, and doctoral student. She is Táchii’nii born for Áshįįhi. She earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from IAIA in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Yellow Medicine Review, Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World from Woodhall Press, Chapter House Magazine, Abalone Mountain Press, and Between Pleasure and Pain: An Authentic Voices Anthology. She is an alum of Tin House and a recipient of the 2021 Open Door Career Advancement Grants for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) women writers. She guest read for events like Montana Book Festival, NOAZBOOKFEST, and Emerging Diné Writers Institute (EDWI). She is a member of Saad Bee Hózhǫ: Diné Writers’ Collective. Shaina is now a second-year doctoral student in Justice Studies for the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Her work is in the field of Native American and Indigenous Creative Nonfiction (CNF).
Judith Oakland, MA, CHP is a graduate of Naropa’s Contemplative Psychothery Master’s program, a somatic therapist for 30+ years, an explorer of 7 decades of life, a lover of silence and beauty, a practitioner of meditation, and a late bloomer to creative arts! Soul collage came into my life joyfully 10 years ago. Wild writing and soul collage have been pathways for a deeper inward dive….Carl Jung offers that midlife is the best time for individuation and transformation— I agree! and I look forward to sharing this process with you!
Sarah Rodriguez is a poet, educator, stage-practiced liar, bubblegum enthusiast, wine-led wanderer, failed manic pixie dream girl, Atlantic Ocean runaway, and the editor-in-chief of Punch Drunk Press. She organizes, hosts, and performs at arts events all over the Front Range. Her most recent publications include Spit Poet Zine and Stain’d Magazine.
Danny Rosen started Lithic Press in 2008 and opened Lithic Bookstore and Gallery in 2015, in Fruita, Colorado. He has worked in geology, astronomy, construction, and education. From 1995 to 2014, he gave astronomy presentations in schools throughout western Colorado in the portable Western Sky Planetarium. Part of each year between 2003 and 2008 he ran an astronomical observatory in Namibia in southern Africa. In a previous life, he was a climber. His full length collection, Primate Poems, was published in 2016.
Therese Samson is a new resident in Crestone, but not a newcomer to poetry. Therese raised her family in Denver and has been involved in the Lighthouse Writers community for many years. On the weekends, she explores the backcountry of Colorado or snuggles with a grandbaby. On weekdays, she works with children of the northern San Luis valley as a school speech language therapist.
Maggie Saunders: Executive Director of Beyond Academia Free Skool. Boulder County Arts Alliance Programs Coordinator. Accepted to CU Boulder’s Theatre Program, couldn’t afford it; became a performance poet. Front Range C.C. Summa Cum Laude Graduate in Early Childhood Education. Once upon a time Chancellor's Scholar at CU Denver studying Human Development. University Drop Out. PHD in Now. Forever Student.
Darci Schummer hails from the village of Fall Creek, Wisconsin. Primarily a fiction writer, she is the author of the story collection Six Months in the Midwest (Unsolicited Press), co-author of the poetry/prose collaboration Hinge (broadcraft press), and author of the forthcoming novel The Ballad of Two Sisters (Unsolicited Press). Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Ninth Letter, Folio, Jet Fuel Review, MAYDAY, Matchbook, Necessary Fiction, Sundog Lit, and Pithead Chapel, among many other places. She has been nominated both for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and her work has also been selected as a Longform Fiction Pick of the Week.
Sally Jane Seck has an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa. Her work has been published in Bombay Gin, The Lune, Gesture Literary Journal, Taco Bell Quarterly, and Twenty Bellows. She has run out of copies of her letterpress chapbook, Rivers and Swans. She lives with her family in Crestone, and they can be found swimming at Hooper Pool or in Lake Atitlán in Guatemala.
Jesse Tsinajinnie Maloney grew up on the Leeward side of O’ahu. He went to the same High School as Israel Kamakawiwo’ole. His work has appeared in Turtle Island Quarterly, Peach Velvet Lit Mag, About Place, Cutthroat and other places. His debut full length work Health Carefully was released through Cyberwit press 2019.
2020 he co-hosted the late night virtual reading series Midnight Transmission with poet Orlando White.
2021 he was nominated for the Pushcart Prize for his poem ‘Eyes of the Leper’ featured in Cutthroat Vol. 26.
He’s producing a collaborative spoken word/instrumental album featuring poets Pamela Uschuk and William Pitt Root to be released spring 2022.
Jesse Tsinajinnie Maloney teaches at Dine’ College and lives with his wife and cats on the Navajo Nation.
Eli Whittington is a queer, poet, painter, parent, singer/songwriter and event organizer out of Denver, Colorado. Raised on the high plains of Northern Colorado and the Western slopes of the Rocky Mountains, they have a deep connection to the natural world and acute aching for the state of the world and environment. Eli has hosted and co-hosted events such as annual erotic poetry festival, Denver Annual Podeo (poetry rodeo) and hosted and curated a monthly music and poetry showcase, Heard at Hub. Eli has been a long-time featured poet with Art From Ashes, a non-profit that teaches poetry workshops to struggling youth in the Denver Metro Area. They have been featured in multiple Denver zines and publications including Stain'd Magazine and Suspect Press and have taught at Beyond Academia Free School Poetry Summer Camp. A regular feature with the Punk band Black Market Translation they have built a reputation of being an outspoken feminist with a passion and fearlessness for political and social themes. Their first book, Treat Me Like you Treat the Earth is out this year with Suspect Press.
Kathleen Willard’s first publication was in her high school literary magazine, Beverwyck and she has not stopped writing since her poetry debut. Public school teacher and poetry event organizer, Willard’s two books are available at Middle Creek Publishing and Audio. Find Cirque & Sky, a series of pastorals and anti-pastorals set in the Rocky Mountain West, and This Incendiary Season documents both her travels to India on a Fulbright-Hays fellowship and her anxiety as her mother battled cancer an ocean away during her trip. In the face of her mother’s terminal illness, Kathleen was going to decline the opportunity to travel and study in India, but her mother insisted, “Go, you must go.”
Her awards include three Pushcart Prize nominations, fellowship to attend the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, twice, the Disquiet International Literary Festival in Lisbon, Portugal, residencies at Vermont Studio Center, twice, and at the Breckenridge Creative Arts Artist-in-Residence Program. She received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to study the New England Renaissance and travel to New England, and a Fulbright to study and write poetry in India.
Everett Wilson earned a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from SUNY-Binghamton in 1988. Since then he’s been a bank teller, legal secretary, adjunct writing instructor, lover, husband, grieving widower, Zen monk, waiter, baker, chef, poet, bookkeeper, editor, memoirist, tantrika, chef (again?!!!), a/v tech, and husband all over again, because apparently once is just not enough.
He’s been all of these things, but is none of them.
Most recently, he finds himself meditating a lot more than is probably healthy, writing for the sake of his sanity, and baking bread again, because people gotta eat, and though you can’t eat a poem, or a menu, you can devour a good book.
