Join us on Monday, March 18, 2024, at 7pm at Counterpath (7935 East 14th Ave. in Denver) for a reading and performance by Saretta Morgan, celebrating the publication of Alt-Nature, and poupeh missaghi, Jeffrey Pethybridge, remy malik, and Bo Hwang. Free and open to the public.

Saretta Morgan was born in Appalachia and raised on military installations. Her work considers the ecologies and intimacies that materialize in the shadows of U.S. militarization. From 2018-2023 she lived between the Sonoran and Mohave Deserts where she organized with the grassroots humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths, as well as several community-based initiatives that centered wellness for BIPOC and immigrant communities. Her first full-length book of poems, Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press, 2024), emerged from those experiences. She is also the author of the chapbooks Feeling Upon Arrival (2018) and room for a counter interior (2017). More at sarettamorgan.com.  

poupeh missaghi is a writer, translator, and editor. Her debut book trans(re)lating house one was published in 2020 and her second book Sound Museum is forthcoming in 2024 (Coffee House Press). Her most recent translation In the Streets of Tehran, a book of witness narrative about the current Woman Life Freedom uprising in Iran, was published by Bonnier Books, UK, in October 2023. She also has another novel in translation forthcoming in 2024. An assistant professor of literary arts and studies at the University of Denver and a faculty mentor at Pacific Northwest College of Art MFA, she is currently based in Denver, Colorado. (photo credit: Howard Romero)

Mary Margaret Alvarado is the author of American Weather, a book-length essay in collaboration with the artist Corie J. Cole, forthcoming from NewLights Press; Chrome of Iris, winner of the Burnside Review’s 2023 chapbook contest; and Hey Folly (Dos Madres), a book of poems. Mia (as she’s known) was an Iowa Arts Fellow and Provost’s Post-Graduate Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa, where she received her MFA. A mother, teacher, and muralist, Mia leads her local shape-note singing group, and farms her yard.

Jeffrey Pethybridge is a poet, editor, curator, and sound artist; he is the author of Striven, The Bright Treatise (Noemi Press 2013), which was selected as one of ten best debuts of 2013 by Poets & Writers. His second book Force Drift, an essay in the epic is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2025. He teaches in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University where he is Director of the Summer Writing Program. In 2025 he’ll serve as the curator of Enclave, a transdisciplinary poetry festival held in Mexico City each year.He lives in so-called Denver with the poet Carolina Ebeid, and their son Patrick; together they edit the online zine Visible Binary.

remy malik is a Black Trans nonbinary poet and performance artist from St. Louis, Missouri. They are the 2022 Allen Ginsberg Fellow at the Jack Kerouac School. Their work has been published in Nat Brut, Sleepingfish, and as part of the 2021 Transformation Residency in Portland, OR. malik’s work is centered on blackness and abstraction.

Bo Hwang is an artist and writer working in poetry, movement, and things so mundane, nothing happens and that’s narrative. She grew up in Indonesia, lived in Los Angeles, and is currently based in Colorado where she is the 2022 Anselm Hollo Fellow at the Jack Kerouac School. Previously, she was a 2022 Periplus Fellow. Her short fiction can be found at Wildness and the Poetry Project.

Brian Alarcon is a Colombian-American poet, performance and visual artist from Queens, New York, currently an Allen Ginsberg fellow at the Jack Kerouac School. His poetry crosses the borders between mediums and industries, having performed at art galleries, for media clients such as Versace and Drome Magazine, nonprofits like the Queer | Art Foundation and City Artists Corps, and so on.

Counterpath is excited to host a residency, taking place in February and March, 2024, for Stefan Chavez-Norgaard and Victor Chen, who will be researching urban planning policy affecting the East Colfax neighborhood, where Counterpath is located in Denver. They will have a closing event March 12, 2024, 6pm-8pm, details here.

Researching how local-government planning, fiscal, and urban policies have affected the community served by the East Colfax Neighborhood Association, historically and in the present, Stefan Chavez-Norgaard and Victor Chen seek to learn from local residents and others how current developments such as the East Colfax Urban Renewal Area and East Area Plan may impact the community in the future. The specific historic, contemporary, and future local-government policies they study will be informed by engagements with and feedback from residents and resident associations. However, possible issues and policies may include: housing supply and affordability; the provision of public goods and services (streetlights, urban furniture, water, sewer); local-government property assessment and taxation; commercial development and anti-displacement; comprehensive (master) planning and neighborhood or precinct planning; and/or zoning and land-use controls.

Aligned with the mission of Counterpath, this research residency is intended to critically engage planning and other local government policies as they touch down in a specific community. The research residency is also grounded in goals of learning with and alongside residents about the impacts of those policies on the community geographically centered around Colfax Avenue between Quebec St. and Yosemite St. They expect research outputs produced from the residency to elucidate the historical afterlives of top-down planning and other 20th century policy regimes that shaped this neighborhood. Drawing on our their previously published Mapping Inequality work, they aim to provide historical context into how issues such as redlining and racist planning impacted the East Colfax neighborhood, and continue to do so today.

Specific Activities:

• Deep dive into planning and local government policies and programs affecting these communities, including property tax assessment and other programs, engaging their recent history and today (see: East Colfax URA’s housing value trend analysis with assessor data)
• Critical study of specific historical plans and planning processes that affected the neighborhoods and areas of this part of Denver, and of contemporary planning and governance issues affecting the areas (see: the recent Colfax rezoning proposal, Colfax Ave Design Overlay-8, Bus Rapid Transit project est. completion 2026 at earliest).
• Planning, hosting, and convening community members for an event in March 2024 presenting their current desk research to-date and seeking to learn from local residents and resident associations about the neighborhood and specific planning and local-government policies of interest to them.

Stefan Chavez-Norgaard is a PhD Candidate in Urban Planning at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP). His research interests include urban and planning theory, local-government and planning law, and mixed-methods research focused on planning practice and urban governance in the related but distinct late-liberal contexts of South Africa and the United States. Stefan is passionate about participatory democracy and how cities’ public/private arrangements affect equitable urban development. His dissertation examines areas of apartheid-era forced relocation in South Africa and how master plans have been implemented and repurposed in these geographies by residents and planners.

Victor Chen is a community researcher and local musician. He works as a Finance and Research Analyst at the Colorado Department of Local Affairs where he works with local governments all over Colorado on financial issues such as budgeting, property tax, and water system financing. He volunteers with two local nonprofits: the Spring Institute for Intercultural Learning, which serves our immigrant and refugee community, and also Soul Stories, whose mission is to use storytelling to facilitate human connection, personal healing, and social change. He is also a pianist and keyboardist who has performed at local venues such as Mozart’s Lounge, Dazzle, and on-air on KUVO.

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Join us on Sunday, February 4, 2024, at 7pm at Counterpath (7935 East 14th Ave. in Denver) for a reading by Rachel Wood, Matthew Cooperman, and Poupeh Missaghi. Free and open to the public.

Rachel Franklin Wood grew up in Laramie, WY. Currently she’s an adjunct lecturer and bookseller in Boulder, CO. Her poems have appeared (or will soon appear) in Annulet, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Hayden’s Ferry Review, smoke and mold, We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, and elsewhere.

Matthew Cooperman is a poet, educator, editor and ecocritic. He is the author of, most recently, Wonder About The, winner of the Halcyon Prize (Middle Creek, 2023) as well as NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified), w/Aby Kaupang, (Futurepoem, 2018), Spool, winner of the New Measure Prize (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2016), Still: of the Earth as the Ark which Does Not Move (Counterpath, 2011), and other books. His eighth book, the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless, will appear in 2024 (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press). A Founding Editor of the exploratory prose journal Quarter After Eight, Cooperman received his PhD in English from Ohio University. He is Co-Poetry Editor for Colorado Review, and Professor of English at Colorado State University. He lives in Fort Collins with his wife, the poet Aby Kaupang, and their children. More info at http://matthewcooperman.org

poupeh missaghi is a writer, translator, and editor. Her debut book trans(re)lating house one was published in 2020 and her second book Sound Museum is forthcoming in 2024 (Coffee House Press). Her most recent translation In the Streets of Tehran, a book of witness narrative about the current Woman Life Freedom uprising in Iran, was published by Bonnier Books, UK, in October 2023. She also has another novel in translation forthcoming in 2024. An assistant professor of literary arts and studies at the University of Denver and a faculty mentor at Pacific Northwest College of Art MFA, she is currently based in Denver, Colorado.

Join us on Saturday, March 2, 2024, at 7pm at Counterpath (7935 East 14th Ave. in Denver) for a reading by Ruth Danon, Jeffrey Pethybridge, Nathan Alexander Moore, Dan Beachy-Quick, Ben Claus, and Amy Bobeda. Free and open to the public.

Ruth Danon’s Turn Up the Heat, her fourth collection of poetry, was published by Nirala in 2023. Her previous books are Word Has It  (Nirala Series 2018), Limitless Tiny Boat (BlazeVOX, 2015), Triangulation from a Known Point (North Star Line, 1990), a chapbook, Living with the Fireman (Ziesing Brothers, 1980), and a book of literary criticism, Work in the English Novel (Croom-Helm, 1985), which was reissued by Routledge in 2021. Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies., including Eternal Snow (Nirala, 2017), Resist Much, Obey Little (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017) Noon: An Anthology of Short Poems (Isobar Press, 2019). CAPS 20 Anthology (CAPS 2020), Stronger than Fear: Poems of Compassion, Empowerment and Social Justice (Cave Moon Press, 2022), and is forthcoming in the Poetry is Bread Anthology (Nirala Publications, 2023.) Her work was selected by Robert Creeley for Best American Poetry, 2002.  Her poetry and prose have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Florida Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Post Road, Versal, Mead, BOMB, the Paris Review, Fence, the Boston Review, 3rd Bed, Crayon, 2Horatio, Barrow Street, and many other publications in the U.S. and abroad. She has worked in collaboration with musicians David Lopato and John Nichols III and has just learned that her work was set to music by Elizabeth Swados (unperformed) and will be available through the New York Public Library soon. She has been a fellow at the Ragdale Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Ora Lerman Foundation, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. In September she will be a fellow at the Desert Rat Residency in Palm Desert. For 23 years she taught in the creative and expository writing programs that she directed for The School of Professional Studies at New York University and was founding Director of their Summer Intensive Creative Writing Workshop.   Those workshops ran from 1999 to 2016.  She is the founder of Live Writing: A Project for the Reading, Writing, and Performance of Poetry, which has been operating since 2018.  Before the pandemic she curated the Spring Street Reading Series for Atlas Studios in Newburgh, New York. In 2021 she was co-curator of the Newburgh Literary Festival in Newburgh, NY and is currently one of the curators for the Beacon LitFest, which had its inaugural show in 2023.  She lives n Beacon, NY and teaches through Live Writing and New York Writer’s Workshop.

Nathan Alexander Moore is a Black transfemme writer. Currently she is the Assistant Professor of Black Trans and Queer Studies in the Department of Women & Gender Studies at University of Colorado Boulder. Her debut poetry chapbook, small colossus, was published in 2021 by above/ground press. Their fiction was a Semifinalist for the 2021 Screencraft Cinematic Book Competition, as well as shortlisted for the 2022 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award. They were also a 2023 Lambda Literary Fellow in poetry. Her debut fiction collection, The Rupture Files, is forthcoming from Hajar Press in Summer 2024.

Jeffrey Pethybridge is a poet, editor, curator, and sound artist; he is the author of Striven, The Bright Treatise (Noemi Press 2013), which was selected as one of ten best debuts of 2013 by Poets & Writers. His second book Force Drift, an essay in the epic is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2025.  His work appears internationally in journals such as diSonare (MX); White Wall Review (CA); Writing Utopia (UK); the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day; Chicago Review, Volt, Best American Experimental Writing, Manifold Criticism; The Iowa Review, New American Writing and others.  He teaches in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University where he is Director of the Summer Writing Program. In 2025 he’ll serve as the curator of Enclave, a transdisciplinary poetry festival held in Mexico City each year. He lives in so-called Denver with the poet Carolina Ebeid, and their son Patrick; together they edit the online zine Visible Binary.

Dan Beachy-Quick is the author, most recently, of a collection of essays, fragments, and poems, Of Silence & Somng (Milkweed, 2017).? He has written six books of poetry, gentlessness, Circle’s Apprentice, North True South Bright, Spell, Mulberry, and This Nest, Swift Passerine, six chapbooks, Shields & Shards & Stitches & Songs, Apology for the Book of Creatures, Overtakelesness, Heroisms, Canto and Mobius Crowns (the latter two both written in collaboration with the poet Srikanth Reddy), ?a book of interlinked essays on Moby-Dick, A Whaler’s Dictionary, as well as a collection of essays, meditations and tales, Wonderful Investigations. Reddy and Beachy-Quick’s collaboration has recently been released as a full-length collection, Conversities, and he has also collaborated with the essayist and performance artist Matthew Goulish on Work From Memory. In 2013, University of Iowa Press published a monograph on John Keats in their Muse Series (editor Robert D. Richardson) titled A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work, and Coffee House Press published his first novel, An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky. He is a contributing editor for the journals A Public Space and West Branch. After graduating from the University of Denver, he attended the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He has taught at Grinnell College, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently teaching in the MFA Writing Program at Colorado State University. His work has been a winner of the Colorado Book Award, and has been a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Prize, and the PEN/USA Literary Award in Poetry. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency, and taught as Visiting Faculty at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in spring 2010. He was one of two Monfort Professors at CSU for 2013-2015, and his work has been supported by the Guggenheim Fellow and by a Creative Fellow of the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University. 

Ben Claus is a poet, playwright & printer originally from the Midwest. Plays include Them: A Hero’s Journey, Mr. Kotomoto Is Definitely Not White (2019 Strawdog Theatre), and 52-Hertz (2017, DePaul University, O’Neill Conference Semi-Finalist). Currently an MFA candidate at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (Naropa University), where they also teach as adjunct faculty. Turn-ons: Vandercook 4s, herbal cigs, Gertrude Stein. Turn-offs: Twitter, high altitudes, Marcus Aurelius. More @benclaus93

Amy Bobeda is a multidisciplinary poet & artist raised on the Amah Mutsun land of the Pajaro Valley. With a background in costume, wig, and makeup design, Amy’s work often focuses on textiles, the female body, and the process of making/unmaking through the menstrual cycle. Amy is the author and artist behind Red Memory (Flowersong Press), What Bird Are You? (Finishing Line Press) and a forthcoming book from Spuyten Duyvil. Amy’s manuscript Symptomatic of the Make Believe was a 2023 Electric Book Award finalist. Currently, Amy runs the Naropa Writing Center, and teaches pedagogy and process-based arts. A member of The New Local Nonprofit in Boulder, the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research, Radial Anthropology Group, and the founder of Wisdom Body Collective, Amy’s current project is a collection of cut-up call-and-response poems for the election year that are also somehow about Shakespeare. 

Substrata is the first monograph by Berlin-based, US American artist Erik Smith. The book presents six seminal projects from the past decade of working in locations as diverse as Berlin, Miami, Denver, Krems, and Palermo, and offers critical insights into the nature of his site-focused, interdisciplinary practice.

Smith’s work is about and emerges from investigations of place. Ruins, excavations, found objects, material remnants, casts, and room fragments serve as the material traces of what may be called an archaeology of performative gestures. In making conscious those features that exist on the margins of awareness, Smith questions what constitutes a sense of place and the role of less visible, hidden, or subliminal aspects in its perception. With author contributions by Jeremiah Day, David Komary, Christian Teckert, Chiara Valci Mazzara, and Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro, and an interview with Bettina Klein. Co-published by permanent Verlag, Berlin, U. Porto–i2ADS, Porto, and Counterpath, Denver/New York, and kindly supported by Stiftung Kunstfonds Bonn. 

Erik Smith studied comparative literature and art in the US and Italy and lives and works in Berlin. His site-based projects and other works have been presented in various venues internationally including the University of Porto, Academy of Fine Arts, Porto (2023), Galerie Stadtpark, Krems (2021), de Appel Center for Contemporary Art, Amsterdam (2016), Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum (2012), SculptureCenter, NYC (2008). Smith is the recipient of various grants and fellowships including a Neustart Kultur grant from Stiftung Kunstfonds Berlin (2021), a project grant from Stadt findet Kunst, Berlin (2020), and was a guest of AIR – Artist in Residence Niederösterreich, Krems (2021). His work was recently featured in fort da, a California-based journal of psychoanalytical psychology (2023); Smith was awarded a catalog grant in 2023 from Stiftung Kunstfonds Bonn.

Substrata
Erik Smith
April 2024
copublished with permanent and U. Porto-i2ADS
$35.00; 23cm x 17cm
256 pgs.
ISBN 978-3-910541-11-5

An anthology of seven decades of English-language outputs from computer generation systems, chronicling the vast history of machine-written texts created long before ChatGPT.

The discussion of computer-generated text has recently reached a fever pitch, but largely omits the long history of work in this area—text generation, as it happens, was not invented yesterday in Silicon Valley. This anthology, Output, thoughtfully selected, introduced, and edited by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort, aims to correct that omission by gathering seven decades of English-language texts produced by generation systems and software. The outputs span many different types of creative writing and include text generated by research systems, along with reports and utilitarian texts, representing many general advances and experiments in text generation.

Output is first and foremost a collection of outputs to be encountered by readers. In addition to an overall introduction, each of the excerpts is introduced individually and organized by fine-grain genre including conversations, humor, letters, poetry, prose, and sentences. Bibliographic references allow readers to learn more about outputs and systems that intrigue them. Although Output could serve as a reference book, it is designed to be readable and to be read. Purposefully excluded are human–computer collaborations that were conceptually defined but not implemented as a computer system.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is the author of Travesty Generator, a book of computational poetry that was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry, and several other poetry books. They direct the MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of Maryland.

Nick Montfort is a poet and artist who uses computation as his medium. He is the series editor of Counterpath’s Using Electricity series, and author of The Truelist and #!, both from Counterpath. His MIT Press publications range from The New Media Reader (coedited) and Twisty Little Passages to, most recently, The Future and the second edition of Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities. He is Professor of Digital Media at MIT and Principal Investigator in the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen, Norway.

Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023
October 2024
co-published with MIT Press
edited by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort
$40.00; 7″ x 9″
500 pgs.
ISBN 978-0262549813

Join us on Saturday, April 20, 2024, at 7pm at Counterpath (7935 East 14th Ave. in Denver) for a Black Lawrence Press feature, with Emily Pérez, Lisa Fay Coutley, Jackie K. White, and Wayne Miller. Free and open to the public.

Emily Pérez is the author of What Flies Want, winner of the Iowa Prize and a finalist for a Colorado Book Award; House of Sugar, House of Stone, and two chapbooks. She co-edited the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, also a finalist for a Colorado Book Award. A CantoMundo fellow and Ledbury Critic, her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Copper Nickel, The Guardian, and Poetry. She teaches high school in Denver, where she lives with her family.

Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of HOST (Wisconsin Poetry Series, 2024), tether (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), Errata (2015), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition, In the Carnival of Breathing (BLP, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition, and Small Girl: Micromemoirs (Harbor Editions, 2024) She is editor of In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (BLP, 2024) and Associate Professor of Poetry & CNF in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.  

Jackie K. White has published three previous chapbooks–Bestiary Charming, Petal Tearing & Variations, and Come clearing–and, with Simone Muench, Hex & Howl, Black Lawrence Press, 2021. Their full-length book, The Under Hum, is forthcoming in 2024, also with BLP. Their work has also appeared in the anthologies In the Tempered Dark, The American Sonnet, Between Paradise and Earth: Eve Poems, and Odes to Our Undoing: Writers Reflecting on Crisis. Professor Emerita at Lewis University, Jackie’s poems, translations, and collaborative poems appear in such journals as APR, Bayou, Pleiades, and Shenandoah.

Wayne Miller is the author of six poetry collections, including We the Jury (Milkweed, 2021) and The End of Childhood, which is forthcoming in 2025. He has co-translated two books by Moikom Zeqo, most recently Zodiac (Zephyr, 2015), and he has co-edited three books, most recently Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (Milkweed, 2016). His awards include the UNT Rilke Prize, two Colorado Book Awards, an NEA Fellowship in Translation, six awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Bess Hokin Prize, and a Fulbright to Northern Ireland. He teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, co-directs the Unsung Masters Series, and edits Copper Nickel.

Join us on Saturday, April 20, 2024, at 7pm at Counterpath (7935 East 14th Ave. in Denver) for In The Away Time: A Book Release Celebration with Front Range Friends. Free and open to the public.

Join us to hear Kristen E. Nelson read from her new book of epistolary prose poems, In the Away Time (Autofocus, 2024) Come and celebrate uncanny devotion, the syntax of desire, and ruinous love! Nelson will be accompanied by Front Range writers, Teré Fowler-Chapman, Hillary Leftwich, and Frankie Rollins, with MC, Selah Saterstrom.

Kristen E. Nelson is a queer writer, scholar, and performer. She is the author of two books In the Away Time (Autofocus Books, April 2024) and the length of this gap (Damaged Goods, August 2018); and two chapbooks sometimes I gets lost and is grateful for noises in the dark (Dancing Girl, 2017) and Write, Dad (Unthinkable Creatures, 2012). She has published creative and critical writing in Feminist Studies, Bombay Gin, Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, Tarpaulin Sky Journal, Trickhouse, and Everyday Genius, among others. Kristen founded Casa Libre en la Solana, a non-profit writing center in Tucson, Arizona, where she worked as the Executive Director for 14 years and co-founded Four Queens, a platform for divinatory poetics with Selah Saterstrom. Kristen is currently a Ph.D. student and professor of creative writing at the University of California – Santa Cruz in the Literature Department’s creative/critical writing concentration. 

Teré Fowler Chapman (pronouns: they/them & he/him) is a black trans migrant—by way of Sonoran Desert, by way of Boot’s Bayou.  As a creative practitioner and educator, he has worked with thousands of community members nationwide on centering the needs of LGBTQIA+ youth and adults in K-12 education, universities, non-profit organizations, and prison industries. His work utilizes equitable practices and policies to liberate under-supported populations and foster social change.  He is a National Arts Strategies’ Creative Community alumni, a member of the Marsha P. Johnson Institute’s 2020 Cohort, and a Rocky Mountain Southwest Emmy nominee.  You can find his work in the Huffington Post, University of Arizona’s VOCA, TEDxTucson, Tucson Weekly, Arizona Public Media’s PBS & NPR & more. Teré is most recently the author of MOONSHiNE (R&R Press, 2023).

Hillary Leftwich (she/her) is the author of Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock and Aura. She owns Alchemy Author Services and Writing Workshop and teaches writing at several universities and colleges along with Lighthouse Writers, a local nonprofit for adults and youth. She focuses her writing on class struggle, single motherhood, trauma, mental illness, the supernatural, ritual, and the impact of neurological disease. On the outskirts of the writing world, she is also a professional Tarot and Bones reader and teaches Tarot and Tarot writing workshops focusing on strengthening divination abilities and writing.

Frankie Rollins is the author of Do You Feel Like Writing? A Creative Guide To Artistic Confidence (Fifth Brain Collective, 2023), and two books of fiction, The Grief Manuscript (Finishing Line Press, 2020) and The Sin Eater & Other Stories (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2013). After 25 years of teaching in academic settings, Rollins started the Fifth Brain Collective, a radiant space for cultivating artistic confidence featuring classes, coaching, and conversations on creativity.

Selah Saterstrom is thrilled to MC this event! She has lived in Denver for almost twenty years, where she has been on writing faculty at the University of Denver. She is leaving DU (and Colorado) this Spring to live fulltime on Vashon Island where she will teach writing and Divinatory Poetics through Four Queens.

Join us on Saturday, April 20, 2024, at 7pm at Counterpath (7935 East 14th Ave. in Denver) for a reading and by Aby Kaupang, Aerik Francis, Meca’Ayo (Tameca L Coleman), and Nadia Colburn. Free and open to the public.

Nadia Colburn is the author of the poetry books I Say the Sky and The High Shelf, and her poetry and prose have appeared in more than eighty publications, including The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Spirituality & Health, Lion’s Roar, and the The Yale Review. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University, is a yoga teacher and serious student of Thich Nhat Hanh and is the founder of Align Your Story Writing School, which brings traditional literary and creative writing studies together with mindfulness, embodied practices, and social and environmental engagement. The school has a community of over 30,000 people. Nadia lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and two children. Find her at nadiacolburn.com, where she offers meditations and free resources for writers.

Aerik Francis is a Queer Black & Latinx poet & teaching artist based in Denver, Colorado, USA. Francis is the author of the chapbooks MISEDUCATION (New Delta Review, May 2023), and BODYELECTRONIC (Trouble Department, April 2022). They have received poetry fellowship support from SAFTA, the Chrysalis Institute, CantoMundo, and The Watering Hole. They are also a poetry reader for Underblong poetry journal and MICRO podcast, as well as a coordinator with Slam Nuba. Francis has poetry published widely, links of which may be found at linktr.ee/aerik as well as their website phaentompoet.com . Find them on IG/TW/youtube/soundcloud @phaentompoet.

Meca’Ayo (Tameca L Coleman) is a singer, multi-genre writer, itinerant nerd, intermittent zine maker, massage therapist, and point and shoot art dabbler in Denver Colorado. Their multi-genre writing and digital photography are featured in literary magazines, art exhibits, newspapers, and other venues and publications. Their first book an identity polyptych debuted from The Elephants in 2021, and it considers familial estrangement, being in-between things as a mixed-race Black person, and moving towards reconciliation. Meca’Ayo leads community-centered projects with a collaborative bent, and they have been working in the healing arts since 2011. For more information about Meca’Ayo’s work, you can find them on social media with the handle @sireneatspoetry.

In addition to Radiant Tether, Aby Kaupang is the author of & there’s still you thrill hour of the world to love, selected by Brenda Hillman as the winner of Free Verse Editions’ New Measure Prize; NOS, (disorder not otherwise specified), with Matthew Cooperman; Little “g” God Grows Tired of Me, and several other collections. Aby lives in Fort Collins, CO, where she assists in organizing an annual book festival, co-hosts the reading series, EveryEye, and has served as Poet Laureate. More information can be found at abykaupang.com

Join us on Sunday, April 14, 2024, at 7pm at Counterpath (7935 East 14th Ave. in Denver) for a reading and by Donna Stonecipher, Catherine Kim, Candace Nunag Tardío, and Tony Mancus. Free and open to the public.

Donna Stonecipher is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Ruins of Nostalgia, which was named a best book of 2023 by NPR, and Transaction Histories, which was listed by The New York Times as one of the 10 best poetry books of 2018. She has also published one book of criticism, Prose Poetry and the City (2018). Her poems have been published in many journals, including The Paris Review, and have been translated into seven languages. She translates from German, and her translation of Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker’s trilogy études, cahier, and fleurs, for which she received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, is being published by Seagull Books. She lives in Berlin.

Catherine Kim is a Korean Canadian writer studying in the United States. Her work can be found in Black Warrior Review, Fairy Tale Review, Nat. Brut, the Transcendent series, the Nameless Woman anthology, and elsewhere. Her writing has been awarded the Frances Mason Harris ’26 Prize, shortlisted for the Sunburst Award, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She earned an MFA at Brown University and is currently a PhD student at the University of Denver, where she is a prose editor for Denver Quarterly.

Candace Nunag Tardío is the author of the forthcoming book A Solar Flare (FC2, 2025). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado Boulder and is currently working on a PhD in Literary Arts & Creative Writing at the University of Denver. Candace is also the founder and director of Last Writes, a project centered around eulogy and obituary writing advocacy for people with no prior writing or public speaking experience. 

Tony Mancus is the author of Same After Life (Gasher, 2024) and All the Ordinariness (The Magnificent Field, 2022) along with a handful of chapbooks. He works as an instructional designer and serves as chapbook editor for Barrelhouse and lives in Lakewood with his wife, son, and a little old lady cat.