Reading: Ruth Danon, Nathan Alexander Moore, Dan Beachy-Quick, Ben Claus, Amy Bobeda, Jeffrey Pethybridge, Saturday, March 2, 2024, 7pm
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.