Winter 2024 Resident
Marissa Forbes
Marissa Forbes (she/her) is an artist, writer of all genres, a creative instructor, and mother. In 2023, she published Surviving Peter Pan, based on J.M Barrie’s Peter Pan and her journey healing from an abusive relationship (Beyond the Veil Press) and Brief & Bleeding Margins, a raw feminist collection of poetry & lyric essays (World Stage Press). Other published poems and short stories can be read on marissaforbes.com and @word_nerd_ris. She is the Managing Editor for Twenty Bellows, a Colorado based literary magazine, and a teacher for the Denver Chapter of Community Literature Initiative’s 10 month Poetry for Publication program. She was awarded an Author Fellowship from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing in 2021 and a Pushcart Nominee in 2023. Forbes has resided all over the country but now lives a colorful life with her two children, father, dog, and cat in Denver, CO, where she hones her personal mission of amplifying marginalized voices through the healing power of art and community.
Multi-sensory Poetics is a generative workshop that explores poetry through concepts of synesthesia (the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body). This Ekphrastic (so-to-say) experimental workshop uses the work of Kandinsky as a jumping off point then expands on imagery and metaphor techniques by examining and mixing our senses in fruitful and unexpected ways. Prompts will incorporate various sounds, color theory (through art theory/psychology scope), and our sense of touch and taste. We will hone in on fresh paths for creation by blending our senses to create experimental poetry. Participants will find answers to the question: How can we push the envelope for creating experimental poetry?
The workshop will be held February 24 & 25: 3-5 PM MST via Zoom. Register now!
Spring 2024 Resident
brooklyn baggett
brooklyn baggett (she/her) is a trans poet and artist living in New York City with her wife, Cora. She holds an MFA from Goddard College, and her work has appeared in Yellow Arrow Journal, Samfiftyfour, engine(idling, Broken Lens, Impossible Archetype, Big Muddy, and River Styx, among others. Her chapbook, we cast shadows & other true stories, is available through Bottlecap Press. brooklyn is also the founder and managing editor of new words {press} – a trans and gender-expansive poetry press.
brooklyn has held teaching positions at Washington University-St. Louis and St. Louis Community College, as well as working as Editor in Chief at The Pitkin Review and as Associate Editor for River Styx Magazine. Above all, brooklyn is dedicated to the radical act of being herself and lifting the voices of trans poets.
The Tactile: Touch Your Writing. Is poetry words only? Or is it a concept, an experience, a conduit? Some stories want more than words; some poems yearn to be something else. So, why should poetry limit itself to one medium when its essence is liminal? In this workshop, we’ll explore ways to weave richer stories and dimensional layers, not always achievable with words alone, by using our hands and physical materials. We’ll ignite our minds and hearts in a new way. There will be no use of digital elements in any part of this class, but you may get a cute package in the mail.
The workshop will be held May 25 & 26: 3-5 PM MST via Zoom. Register here!
Summer 2024 Resident
Anne Marie Wells
Anne Marie Wells (she/they) is an award-winning and Pushcart nominated poet, playwright, memoirist, and oral storyteller. She is the author of Survived By: A Memoir in Verse + Other Poems (Curious Corvid Publishing, 2023) and Mother, (v), winner of Cinnamon Press’ 2023 chapbook contest. She is a freelance copy and content editor, writing coach, and workshop facilitator. Find her online @AnneMarieWellsWriter or on her website AnneMarieWellsWriter.com
Form Fetish: Celebrating defiance against convention: In this two-day workshop Anne Marie Wells will guide participants through a brief history of traditional poetic forms before diving heart first into modern poetic forms that give a throbbing middle finger to convention. Together, the group will explore constraint as a means of defying constraining societal structures as well as a means of experimentation and fun! Poetic forms don’t have to be metered or rhyming or trite. Poetic forms can be cultural, they can be political statements, they can contain secret messages, they can be puzzles, they can be math, they can be nonsensical, and they can be even more than all that when the participants in the class invent their own forms, adding to the diversity and beauty of the literary universe. This workshop is for the established form fetishist, the form curious, and form skeptics.
Saturday and Sunday September 28 & 29 from 10 AM to Noon MST via Zoom. Register here!
Fall 2024 Resident
hanta t. samsa
hanta t. samsa (he/hanta) is a genrequeer, transgenre poet and writer who situates his work in a genealogy of autofiction, ecopoetics, transpoetics, and post-colonial futurisms. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Bennington College and an MFA in Poetry from Virginia Tech. His writing appears or is forthcoming in smoke and mold, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Salt Hill Journal and elsewhere, sometimes under my dead name. He was a 2023 LAMBDA Emerging Voices Fellow. His micro chapbook, Transcolonial Poem, is forthcoming from MAYDAY Press in 2024. In his free time I walk through the forests of south central Appalachia, attempt to regenerate soil, and grow obscure vegetables.
Seeding your neurononcompliant writing practice: A generative multi-genre workshop for envisioning neurononcompliance on the page and in your life. Neurononcompliant writers are seers, visionaries. We see where and how the world could be better, and often, just how easily the world could become better. We see just how we are meant to create in this world but often, early neurocompliant conditioning, unmet access needs and basic needs, and self-policing prevent us from creating authentically.
In developing workshops specifically for neurononcompliants based in anti-colonial and mad liberation frameworks, I hope to help neurononcompliant writers rediscover their unique strengths as artists and thinkers. The strengths we might have buried in our struggles to hide our neurodivergence, chronic illness, disablement, and difference.
This workshop will be a space for you to work through the ways you might censor yourself in your writing. It will be a space to silence your inner neurotypical critic. It will be a space to play with different forms and genres on the page, and write into neurononcompliant world building.
Friday & Saturday, November 15 & 16 from 6-8 PM MST. Register here!