Aaron A. Abeyta is a Colorado native, Professor of English and the Mayor of Antonito, Colorado, his hometown. He is the author of four collections of poetry and one novel. For his book, colcha, Abeyta received an American Book Award and the Colorado Book Award.  In addition, his novel, Rise, Do Not be Afraid, was a finalist for the 2007 Colorado Book Award and El Premio Aztlan. Abeyta was awarded a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship for poetry, and he is the former Poet Laureate of Colorado’s Western Slope, as named by the Karen Chamberlain Poetry Festival. Abeyta is also a recipient of a Governor’s Creative Leadership Award for 2017. Abeyta was a finalist for Colorado Poet Laureate, 2019.

Peter Anderson’s most recent books include 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. 

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.

Carolina Brown roams the inner and outer landscapes of the Wild West, nests along South Crestone Creek. She has worn many hats in the world of words, currently a pink one. She earned an MA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and honors from various dark cafes in the old city. She taught at UC Berkeley and wrote a novel from her love of music, food and western history. She thanks Mick Dodge for sharing "landuage"; thanks pre-cliche Burning Man for reigniting her dance; and thanks Maggie McCall for giving her a newspaper column called Soapbox. While some words land in print, most are breathed into the wind.

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).

Joshua K. Concha, the current Poet Laureate of Taos (2022-2023), explores his creativity through various media, including the written and spoken word, music, painting, and metal and stone works. As a tribal resident, he lives on the lands of the ancient Taos Pueblo.

Sharon Corcoran is a native of St. Louis now living in Crestone.  At Washington University in St. Louis she studied psychology and linguistics as an undergraduate, and completed an MFA degree in writing there.  She has worked in the arts and in a university setting, and as an editor and book indexer.  She also translated (from French) the writings of North African explorer Isabelle Eberhardt in the works In the Shadow of Islam and Prisoner of Dunes published by Peter Owen Ltd., London.  Her poems have appeared in Kansas Quarterly, River Styx, Canary, The Buddhist Poetry Review, and One Art, among other journals. She has two collections of poems, Inventory published in 2019 and The Two Worlds published in 2021 by Middle Creek.

Julie Cummings is the President of National Federation of State Poetry Societies. She has been published in several anthologies both in print and online. She has a self-produced CD titled Be Heard and a book titled Ride of My Life.

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.

Juliana Aragón Fatula’s ancestors indigenous to Aztlan, migrated from New Mexico to Southern Colorado. In 2022 she was awarded the title of Corn Mother for the Return of the Corn Mothers Project funded by the Colorado Folk Arts Council, Chicano Humanities Arts Council, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Community Acts Fund, Mile High United Way, and US Bank. She is the author of The Road I Ride Bleeds, Crazy Chicana in Catholic City, and Red Canyon Falling on Churches (winner of the High Plains Book Award in 2016.) She has been a Macondista since 2011, and she taught writing workshops for Colorado Writers in the Schools K-12, Bridging Borders, Cesar Chavez Academy, and Cañon City Middle School. She performed in the nineties with Su Teatro Cultural Performing Arts Center and after Operation Desert Storm, she toured for the Department of Defense with the Latin Locomotions. She is shopping her first mystery, The Colorado Sisters, for a publisher. She believes in the power of education to change lives.

The truth is, Barbara Ford's best moments are with poets and all things poetic. She has produced a weekly radio hour, Poets and Minstrels, for over 15 years on KHEN, the Salida community radio station. Before the arrival of Covid-19 she organized a live and lively monthly poetry reading series. Her work has appeared in various journals and odd publications. She has presented her poetry on stage throughout the state, and occasionally teaches writing workshops when someone twists her non-writing arm. Chickens are her therapy animal, an immersion blender is her magic wand, and Sharpies are her hidden addiction.

CMarie Fuhrman is the author of Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems and co-editor of Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations. She has published, or forthcoming poetry and nonfiction in multiple journals, including Emergence Magazine, Platform Review, Yellow Medicine Review, Poetry Northwest, and several anthologies. CMarie is a regular columnist for the Inlander, Translations Editor for Broadsided Press, and Editor of High Desert Journal. CMarie is the Director of the Elk River Writers Workshop and Director of Poetry at Western Colorado University, where she also teaches Nature Writing. She is the current Idaho Writer in Residence. She resides in the mountains of West Central Idaho with her partner Caleb and their dogs Carhartt and Cisco.

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).

Judyth Hill, poet, editor, teacher, author of the acclaimed poem, Wage Peace, published world-round, set to music, performed, and recorded by choruses, orchestras and dance companies, lives in the aspened splendor of the Rockies, in Evergreen, Colorado. President of PEN San Miguel, Hill conducts poetry and memoir workshops, and leads global WildWriting retreats. Her nine poetry books include Dazzling Wobble and Tzimtzum. Hill was described by the St. Helena Examiner as, "Energy with skin” and by the Denver Post as, “A tigress with a pen”.

Laurie James is a 50 year resident of Salida who chases weeds, feeds birds, watches wondrous clouds. She's been here too long perhaps, and isolation has taken a toll on this introvert. She writes, paints and collages to keep the creative fires smoldering.

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.

Ariana Kramer's poetry is inspired by the natural world and the inner landscape. She has curated the Poetry Month celebration for SOMOS for the past four years which has enabled her to meet many of the wonderful poets of Taos and our region.

Lynda La Rocca’s poetry collections include The Stillness Between (2009, Pudding House Publications, Ohio) and Spiral (2012, Liquid Light Press, Colorado). 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.

Kyle Laws is based out of Steel City Art Works in Pueblo, CO where she directs Line/Circle: Women Poets in Performance. Her collections include Beginning at the Stone Corner (River

Dog, 2022), The Sea Is Woman (Moonstone Press, 2021, winner of its 2020 award), Uncorseted (Kung Fu Treachery Press, 2020), Ride the Pink Horse (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), Faces of

Fishing Creek (Middle Creek Publishing, 2018), This Town: Poems of Correspondence coauthored with Jared Smith (Liquid Light Press, 2017), So Bright to Blind (Five Oaks Press, 2015), and Wildwood (Lummox Press, 2014). With eight nominations for a Pushcart Prize and one for Best of the Net, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the

U.S., Canada, and Europe. She is editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press.

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.

David Anthony Martin 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. His work includes Environmental Educator, Hike Guide, Park Maintenance, Caretaker and article writer, newsletter contributor. He is the founder of Middle Creek Publishing. He flies kites far too infrequently, forages wild mushrooms when in season, collects feathers when he finds them, writes daily and dreams nightly.

Tori Miner is a feeler, a faller, a trier, and a writer living in Fruita, CO with her partner and their pup. She has self-published two chapbooks of her poetry, ATTN and thankyousorry. Her work can be found at toriminerpoetry.com and @toritoripoems on instagram.

Aaron M. Moe is the author of the book of poems, exhalations (2021), and two scholarly books—Ecocriticism and the Poiesis of Form: Holding on to Proteus (2019) and Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry (2014)—along with several chapters and articles on ecopoetics / zoopoetics. In 2015, he published a leaflet of aphorisms, Protean Poetics. His creative work can also be found at Twenty Bellows, in Counterclaims: Poets and Poetries, Talking Back, and is forthcoming in the projects Traces: Symphyses of Snow and Sand and The Despairimentalist Manifesto.

He and his family live near the foothills of the Colorado Rockies where they hike, climb, run trails, and write.

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.

Born and raised in upstate New York, essayist and poet John Nizalowski moved to Santa Fe in the mid-1980’s and has ever after lived west of the 100 th meridian. He has published six

books, most recently Chronicles of the Forbidden, which was a finalist for the 2020 Colorado Book Award in Creative Non-Fiction, and The Emergence of Frank Waters: A Critical Reader, a volume of scholarly essays he co-edited with Alexander Blackburn. In addition, his work has appeared in a wide range of literary, scholarly, and journalistic venues. Currently, he teaches

mythology, creative writing, and cultural studies at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction.

Jan Ohmstede was a “closet poet” before joining the Shavano Poets Society in 2017. Now she frequents open mics and freely expresses herself in poems and prose. Her writing is influenced by a decade of living in the mountains of Wyoming and twenty-one years of thriving in Interior Alaska before relocating to the creative town of Salida in 2013.

Claudia Putnam is a craniosacral therapist and animal communicator in western Colorado. Her debut collection, The Land of Stone and River, won the Moon City Press poetry prize and is expected to be out by the end of March 2022. Her personal essay, Double Negative, won the Split/Lip Press creative non-fiction chapbook contest and is forthcoming March 15, 2022. She also writes fiction. She’s had a few residencies, including the Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy.

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.

Risa Scott is a nomadic photographer, web designer, actor, and writer living in a self-built tiny home with her dog, Bread. She travels the country (and sometimes out of the country) discovering new places and people, endeavoring to engage creatively within communities but is primarily based in Colorado. In all her creative and professional pursuits, she endeavors to tell honest stories based on real people and experiences.Risa Scott is a nomadic photographer, web designer, actor, and writer living in a self-built tiny home with her dog, Bread. 

Sally Jane Seck grew up in the DC suburbs, Austin, Texas and Southwest Virginia. She 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's been a community college prof, she's a marketer and a business poet, a mom, and she runs this website. Sally and her family, which consists of more dogs than people, have been Crestoners for a few years now.

Joanna lives as caretaker on a 200-acre ranch outside of Telluride, Colorado, where she communes with the mountains, a sizable garden, bees, livestock, and no small parliament of great-horned owls. She came to this part of the wild west following her fierce love of climbing ice and rock, and stayed to work at Telluride’s Wilkinson Public Library, where she is currently Adult Programs coordinator. She has also been a private librarian, freelance writer, emcee presenter, and adventure nanny. 

Joanna believes that poetry is a place for everyone to feel welcome, a bridge to community, and is looking forward to passing the mic around San Miguel County and Watershed during her term as Poet Laureate. She has had poetry published in 85for85: Art Advocates for Public Lands, The Climbing Zine, Grits Quarterly, and sagegreenjournal.org.

Joanna found poetry as a very young soul and realized it taught her Freedom. She’s been chasing it ever since.

Susan Tichy is the author of seven books, most recently North|Rock|Edge: Shetland 2017/2019 and The Avalanche Path in Summer, a muscle-memory of a life in mountains. In Trafficke (2015) she mingled prose and verse to investigate race, language, and her family’s history, spanning from Reformation Scotland to the abolition of slavery in Maryland. She has written extensively about war and its human consequences, including Gallowglass (2010), Bone Pagoda (2007), and A Smell of Burning Starts the Day (1988). Her work has been included in the National Poetry Series and recognized by numerous awards, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Now Professor Emerita at George Mason University, she lives in Westcliffe and Colorado Springs.

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.

Political activist and wilderness advocate, Pam Uschuk has howled out six books of poems, including CRAZY LOVE, winner of a 2010 American Book Award, FINDING PEACHES IN THE DESERT (Tucson/Pima Literaature Award), and her most recent, BLOOD FLOWER, one of Book List’s Notable Books in 2015. Her new collection, Refugee, is due out of Red Hen Press.

Translated into more than a dozen languages, her work appears in over three hundred journals and anthologies worldwide, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Agni Review, Parnassus Review, etc.

Among her awards are the War Poetry Prize from winningwrites.com, New Millenium Poetry Prize, Best of the Web, the Struga International Poetry Prize (for a theme poem), the Dorothy Daniels Writing Award from the National League of American PEN Women, the King’s English Poetry Prize and prizes from Ascent, Iris, and AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL.

Editor-In-Chief of CUTTHROAT, A JOURNAL OF THE ARTS, Uschuk lives in Tucson, Arizona. In 2017, she edited and published the anthology, Truth To Power: Writers Respond To The Rhetoric Of Hate And Fear. Uschuk teaches writing workshops at the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center and is often a featured writer at the Prague Summer Programs and at Ghost Ranch.  She’s finishing work on a multi-genre book called OF THUNDERLIGHT AND MOON: AN ODYSSEY THROUGH OVARIAN CANCER.

Wendy Videlock lives on the western slope of the Colorado Rockies with her husband and their critters.  She's a four time recipient of the Keats Soul Making Prize, and is the founder and director of Trickster Ridge Presentations in Palisade.  Her work appears in Hudson Review, Poetry, Dark Horse, The New York Times, Best American Poetry, Oprah Magazine and other venues. Her upcoming collection of essays and haibun, The Poetic Imaginarium: A Worthy Difficulty, (Lithic Press), will appear in 2022 as well as a new collection of poems, Wise to the West (Able Muse Press).  Wendy is also a visual artist whose works appear throughout the Grand Valley.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer co-hosts Emerging Form (a podcast on creative process with Christie Aschwanden), Stubborn Praise (an online poetry reading series with James Crews) Secret Agents of Change (a surreptitious kindness cabal with Sherry Richert Belul), Talking Gourds Poetry Club (with Art Goodtimes) and Soul Writer’s Circle (with meditation teacher Augusta Kantra). Her poetry has appeared in O Magazine, on A Prairie Home Companion and PBS Newshour, Poetry of Presence, and in her daily poetry blog, A Hundred Falling Veils. Her most recent collection, Hush, won the Halcyon Prize. She teaches poetry for parents, scientists, mindfulness retreats. One-word mantra: Adjust.

Orlando White is from Tółikan, Arizona. He is Diné of the Naaneesht’ézhi Tábaahí and born for the Naakai Diné’e. White is the author of two books of poetry, Bone Light (Red Hen Press), which Kazim Ali described as a “careful excavation on language and letters and the physical body” and LETTERRS (Nightboat Books) which received the Poetry Center Book Award. His work has appeared in such journals as Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, Salt Hill Journal, and elsewhere. White teaches at Diné

College and lives in Tsaile, Arizona.

Everett Wilson  earned a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from SUNY-Binghamton in 1986. 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.

Allison Wonderland engages in the curious blessings and burdens of being human; tending soul through death mid-wifery, immersive installation creations, ritual theatre and poetic saturations.