In Conversation: Native Writers and Scholars from Colorado’s Front Range, Part II

Counterpath is excited to host a 2-part series, curated by Jennifer Foerster, that highlights Native writers and scholars from Denver, Boulder, and Colorado Springs. The ten Native authors featured over two evenings—Saturday, September 16, 7 pm, and Saturday, November 11, 7pm—are producing creative and critical work in various genres that is engaged with indigenous activism and a range of today’s political and ecological concerns. Each evening will be a gathering of stories, poetry, scholarly work, and conversation. September 16 will feature Erika T. Wurth, Penelope Kelsey, Clint Carroll, David Heska Wanbli Weiden, and Jennifer Elise Foerster. November 11 features Natanya Pulley, Tanaya Winder, Crisosto Apache, Janice Gould, and Byron Aspaas. The series will also be complemented by an additional reading, curated by Tanaya Winder and featuring Hannabah Blue and Gregg Deal, at Counterpath’s Unseen Festival on October 1 at 7:30pm.

We hope you will join us for each of these inspiring evenings with some of our region’s most exciting writers.

Natanya Ann Pulley is a Diné writer and an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Colorado College. She teaches creative writing, Native American literature, and experimental/innovative fiction. She has published fiction and non-fiction in numerous journals, including Waxwing, As/Us, The Collagist, and The Offing. Natanya has been an editor for Quarterly West and South Dakota Review, and she was a guest editor for the all-female issue of the annual literary horror journal, Black Candies. She is currently the founding and managing editor of Colorado College’s Hairstreak Butterfly Review. Natanya is Kiyaa’áanii and Táchii’nii through her mother. She and her husband and two dogs love living near the mountains.

Tanaya Winder is a poet, vocalist, writer, educator, and motivational speaker from the Southern Ute, Duckwater Shoshone, and Pyramid Lake Paiute Nations. She received a BA in English from Stanford University and a MFA in creative writing from the University of New Mexico. Since then she has co-founded As/Us: A Space for Women of the World, a literary magazine publishing works by Indigenous women and women of color. A winner of the 2010 A Room Of Her Own Foundation’s Orlando prize in poetry, her poems from her manuscript “Love in a Time of Blood Quantum” were produced and performed by the Poetic Theater Productions Presents Company in NYC. West End Press published her debut poetry collection Words Like Love in 2015; her next collection Why Storms are Named After People and Bullets Remain Nameless is forthcoming in 2017. She is the Director of the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Upward Bound program, which serves approximately 103 Native high school youth from across the country. She co-founded the Sing Our Rivers Red traveling earring exhibit to raise awareness about murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls. She is a 2016 National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development “40 Under 40” list of emerging American Indian leaders recipient and a 2017 First Peoples Fund Artists in Business Leadership fellows. Finally, she is the founder of Dream Warriors, an Indigenous artists management company where she manages artists Tall Paul, Mic Jordan, and Frank Waln. Learn more about her work at www.tanayawinder.com

Crisosto Apache is an enrolled member of the Mescalero Apache Tribe from New Mexico. He earned his MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) for Creative Writing. He teaches English writing at various colleges in the Denver Metro area. He lives in Lakewood, CO (USA) with his spouse of 17 years. His social justice work includes Native LGBTQI / ‘two spirit’ advocacy & public awareness. His work is published in Black Renaissance Noiré, Yellow Medicine Review, Denver Quarterly (Pushcart Prize Nominee 2014), Hawaii Review, Red Ink Magazine, Cream City Review, Plume Anthology, Common Place and most recently Tending the Fire, by photographer Christopher Felver. He is currently working on three manuscripts of poetry. Crisosto also appeared on MTV’s Free Your Mind (1993) ad campaign for poetry. His book reviews are for the Native American Anthology Visit Tee-Pee Town (Coffee House Press, 1999), published in the Poetry Project publication, Issue 175. http://crisostoapache.com/portfolio/

Janice Gould’s tribal affiliation is Koyoonk’auwi.  As an Associate Professor in the Women’s and Ethnic Studies Program at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, she teaches courses in Native American Studies.  Her latest book of poetry, The Force of Gratitude, was published this Spring. Janice is also the author of Doubters and Dreamers, Earthquake Weather, Beneath My Heart, and Alphabet, and she co-edited a volume of essays on American Indian poetry, Speak to Me Words. Janice served as Poet Laureate for the Pike’s Peak region from 2014–2016.

Byron F. Aspaas creates stories using images of landscape, which are etched upon white space with words of experience. Aspaas, who is Diné, has earned his BFA and MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. His ambition is to incorporate writing towards teaching and becoming a storyteller by influencing readers along this literary journey. His work is scattered through journals and anthologies; among them are Red Ink, Yellow Medicine Review, 200 New Mexico Poems, Weber: The Contemporary West, As/Us: A Space for Women of the World, Semicolon, The Denver Quarterly, and International Writing Program Collections. He is Red Running into the Water; born for the Bitter Water People. He resides with his partner, Seth Browder, his three cats, and four puppies in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he is working on his memoir.