Join us at 7:30 PM on Tuesday May 16 at The Mercury Cafe for the May F-bomb! Our host will be Shelby Yaffe, with Amanda EK as the featured reader. 4-minute open mic spots available to all who wish to share their work. We hope to see you there!
HOST SHELBY YAFFE is a nerd for devotion, a witch, a death doula, and a Lover archetype according to Carl Jung. As an author, her work has been featured in some of Denver’s most beloved publications, such as OutFront Magazine, South Broadway Ghost Society, and Suspect Press (RIP Suspect). As a musician, Shelby’s first EP was produced by Dan Konopka of the pop-punk band Ok Go. Her ukulele, Zoë, is her best friend. In her free time, Shelby likes to talk about death and accidentally ruin birthday parties (these two things are related). Shelby developed stage fright during the social-anxiety summer of 2020, and overcame it just to continue to hang out with her favorite writing crew at the F-Bomb Denver, a celebrated gathering of flash fiction authors that she has joyfully frequented for a whole-ass decade. She is living in Denver with her daughter and a lot of family members, except when she is living in Los Angeles with her partner and a lot of roommates.
FEATURED READER AMANDA EKis a writer, filmmaker, Creative Coach and Reiki master, and the former editor-in-chief of Suspect Press. She’s the author of The Risk it Takes to Bloom: Queer Erotica Stories, published by Q Publishing House, and she’s the creator of the award-winning Pandemic in Pollyville webseries. She’s founded several Denver community groups, including the Creative Curiosity Circle, as well as a weekly writing class, and a cannabis-inspired creative writing class called Lit on Lit that’s been the first and only of its kind.
The F-bomb returns to The Mercury Cafe on Tuesday April 18 at 7:30 PM. Our theme for the night will be Blurry Lines, playing with the intersection between poetry and prose in honor of National Poetry Month. April host K.B. Jensen says “I’ve always been fascinated by the space between poetry and flash and sometimes lack thereof,” so bring your best poetic prose (or prose-y poetry) and share it as part of our 4-5 minute open mic spots!
Our feature for April is the wonderful Stina French! We hope to see you there!
HOST K.B. JENSEN is an award-winning author, with two novels, Painting With Fire, an artistic murder mystery, and A Storm of Stories, which veers literary and handles love, craziness and impossibility. Her recent collection of short stories, Love and Other Monsters in the Dark, is out. K.B. lives in Littleton with her family and rescue mutt. She enjoys skiing and writing poetry. Her work has appeared in Progenitor, Cherry Magazine, New Feathers Anthology, Poetry Potion, and more. A former crime reporter and journalist, K.B. shifted to the publishing world in 2014, and is a senior publishing consultant and youth writing camp director for My Word Publishing.
FEATURE STINA FRENCH is a performer who specializes in vulnerable and graphic representations of sexuality, repression, and the healing process. She writes erotic mystery, magic-realist flash memoir, and poetry. She’s featured in many Colorado venues, and her work has appeared in Jen Pastiloff’s Manifest Station, Heavy Feather Review, South Broadway Ghost Society, Punch Drunk Press, among others. She leads monthly generative writing workshops and hosts the event, “listen to your skin: an erotic open-mic series” (last Sunday of each month). She wears welts from the Bible Belt, and is currently editing Take The Fruit, Flood The Desert: A Religious Trauma Abuse Anthology. She’s working on a manuscript, Also Arc, Also Offering, a Southern-queerdo memoir. Find her on IG at sister_rainbow_scream or visit her website, sisterrainbowscream.com.
The F-Bomb returns to The Mercury Cafe again on Tuesday March 21, starting at 7:30 PM. Open mic sign-up starts around 7:00. Since we’re not having a feature this month, open mic readers will get a 6-7 minute spot, instead of our typical 4-5 minute spots. Admission is free, but we encourage you to contribute when we pass a hat for The Merc.
Lynn Brewer will host, and our theme for this month is Spring Break. Please join us if you can!
HostLynn Brewer is a writer living near Denver. Her first novel was so blasphemous she had to self-publish “She Bears a King,” the story of one ordinary woman who gets impregnated by Jesus Christ—only this Christ is a gay celebrity living the elite life in Hollywood. In 2006, Lynn founded Cliterature Journal and went on to edit and publish more than fifty issues over 14 years. The bastard literary child of Sylvia Plath and Jack Kerouac, her writing oscillates from the hilarious to the tragic, often in the same sentence.
The Mercury Cafe: 2199 California Street, Jungle Room
It’s the 10-year anniversary of the Fbomb, the first and longest running flash fiction reading series in the country, and we are thrilled to celebrate at our original home with a very special Fat Tuesday reading and release at The Mercury Cafe!
The Mardi Gras season is upon us, celebrating the life, death, and resurrection theater, 40 days in the desert, rising again after the rapture. It reminds us to balance lightly on the edges of change with flair and panache, and it invites us to try on new masks as we celebrate our history and look to our future with hands thrown high, like a gorgeous parade float holding our Fbomb community and rolling into the creative horizons.
Join us live on Tuesday, February 21 from 7:30-10 pm at The Mercury Cafe! With featured readers Jomil Ebro, Krystal Summers, special guest Kona Morris, and your host and Fbomb founder, Nancy Stohlman with a Denver-only pre-release for After the Rapture.Open mic spots are 4 mins and first come first served. We will pass the hat in gratitude for the Mercury Cafe.
Masks encouraged!
Featuring Krystal Summers!Krystal Summers is a writer and nanny more magical than Mary Poppins. When she isn’t taking children through chalk paintings, she’s outside somewhere with her dog, relaxing at her home in Denver with her husband, or starting more stories than she finishes. She will be published in the forthcoming Listen to Your Skin anthology from Q Publishing in 2023.
Featuring Jomil Ebro! Jomil Ebro is a professor of Composition, Creative Writing, and Journalism, Philosophy and the Humanities at Arapahoe Community College. He is also an ABD Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature and Consciousness Studies at the University of Iowa, where he also trained at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. At New York University, he received an M.A. in Communication and an M.A. in Cultural Studies. His poetry and critical essays include “Seizure of Happiness, Or, Two Almonds” in Cobra Milk (Fall 2020); “A State of Otonomy: Henry Miller’s Obscene Autobiographical Form” in the Modern Horizons Journal (June 2018); “The Calligraphy of Trees: Towards an Ethics of ‘Mysreading’ in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy” in the Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies Vol. 3, Issue 2 (February 2018); “I’ll-iterate Thinking: Poetry, Perception, and the Dissolution of Center/Periphery Duality” in the Peripheral Matters Journal from the City University of New York (CUNY, Fall 2017); and “The Nearness of Elsewhere: Place and the Ethics of Remembrance in The Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin and Li Po” in the Modern Horizons Journal (June 2012).
He resides in Golden, Colorado where laughter, verve, and hope come in the form of his partner and son, walking by purple sunsets, steeping two different tea bags, trying to imitate Paul Simon’s guitar playing, and watering the long vineyards of desire. Jomil thinks in all sincerity and without hyperbole that poetry—in particular, the way it can teach us to give a name to the nameless so that it can be thought and sensed more fully—that poetry, as such, can save the world.
Special guest Kona Morris! Kona Morris is a writer, storyteller, and comedian. She has performed at storytelling events for The Moth, and most recently for the live RISK! show at The Hotel Cafe in Los Angeles. She was a regular on Monday Night Live L.A., a starring cast member of Denver’s Live Drunk History Comedy Troupe, and the Founder and Head Writer of the satirical comic book company Godless Comics. Kona has been featured at events around the world, and her stories have appeared in a variety of publications. https://www.instagram.com/kona_morris/
Hosted by Nancy Stohlman! Nancy Stohlman is the author of six books including After the Rapture (2023), Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities (2018), The Vixen Scream and Other Bible Stories (2014), The Monster Opera (2013), Searching for Suzi: a flash novel (2009), and Going Short: An Invitation to Flash Fiction (2020), winner of the 2021 Reader Views Gold Award and re-released in 2022 as an audiobook. She is a fan of the short and the strange, and her work has been anthologized widely, appearing in the Norton anthology New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction and The Best Small Fictions 2019, as well as adapted for both stage and screen. She teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder and holds workshops and retreats around the world. Find out more at http://www.nancystohlman.com
FEATURED READER ELAN BARNEHAMA’s new novel, Escape Route (Running Wild Press, May 2022), is set in New York City during the tumultuous late 1960s and told by the first-generation son of Holocaust survivors, and NY Mets fan, who becomes obsessed with the Vietnam War and with finding an escape route for his family for when he believes the US will round up and incarcerate its Jews. Barnehama’s words have appeared in 10 x10 Flash Fiction, Boog City, Jewish Fiction, Drunk Monkeys, Entropy, Rough Cut Press, Boston Accent, Jewish Writing Project, RedFez, HuffPost, Public Radio, and elsewhere. Elan was the flash fiction editor for Forth Magazine LA, has taught college writing, worked with at-risk youth, had a gig as a radio news guy, and did a mediocre job as a short-order cook. He splits time between Pasadena and Boston.
HOST NICK MORRIS is the curator of the F-Bomb Reading Series, as well as a professor of humanities at Community College of Denver, a musician, the author of the short story collections Tapeworm and The Boy in the Well, the Dungeon Master for the D&D real-play podcast We Slay Things, an expatriate of the Deep South, a graduate of Arkansas Tech University and Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, a former editor of the literary journals Nebo and Bombay Gin, a resident of Denver, and a mostly-capable moderator of F-bomb Zoom Rooms.
F-bomb returns for the last reading of 2022, hosted by Krystal Summers and featuring Nancy Stohlman and Serena Chopra. Plus, 4-5 minute open mic slots available to all who want to share their work.
The theme for November F-Bomb is: Flash Nano! Read a piece that you wrote during Flash Nano, past or present, or even a piece that has nothing to do with Flash or Nano at all. It all goes down 11/16 at 7:30 PM Mountain Time on Zoom. Please join us!
If you can, take a few minutes to fill out our survey. We want your feedback to make 2023 the best F-bomb year yet!
HOST KRYSTAL SUMMERS is a fiction writer and nanny (it’s been said that she’s more magical than Mary Poppins) from Colorado. When she isn’t taking children through chalk paintings, she’s outside somewhere with her dog, relaxing at her home in Denver with her husband, or starting more stories than she finishes.
FEATURED READER NANCY STOHLMAN’s flash novel, After the Rapture, is forthcoming from Mason Jar Press in 2023. She is a fan of the short and the strange, and she has been a leader in the flash fiction literary movement for more than a decade. Her book Going Short: An Invitation to Flash Fiction won a Reader Views Gold Award and was recently re-released as an audiobook. Her other books include The Vixen Scream and Other Bible Stories, Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities (finalist for a 2018 Colorado Book Award), and her avant garde operetta The Monster Opera. Her work has been included in the Norton anthology New Micro, The Best Small Fictions, and adapted for both stage and screen. She teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder and runs creative workshops and retreats around the world.
FEATURED READER SERENA CHOPRA (Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, Seattle University) is a teacher, writer, dancer, filmmaker and a visual and performance artist. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Denver and is a MacDowell Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar. She has two books, This Human (Coconut Books 2013) and Ic (Horse Less Press 2017), as well as two films, Dogana/Chapti (Official Selection at Frameline43, Oregon Documentary Film Festival, QueerX and Seattle Queer Film Festival) and Mother Ghosting (2018). She was a featured artist in Harper’s Bazaar (India), Revry, as well as in the Denver Westword’s “100 Colorado Creatives” and has recent creative publications in Sink, Foglifter as well as in the anthology Alone Together: Love, Grief and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19 (Central Avenue Publishing, 2020). She also has critical essays in Matters of Feminist Practice (Belladonna Collective),Rehearsing Racial Equity: A Critical Anthology on Anti-Racism and Repair in the Arts (forthcoming 2023) and in the republication of Judy Grahn’s The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition (Sinister Wisdom, forthcoming fall 2022). In October 2020, Serena co-directed No Place to Go, an immersive, artist-made queer haunted house with Kate Speer and Frankie Toan. Serena is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Seattle University. You can find out more at SerenaChopra.com
Hello, F-bomb community! As I’m trying to prepare for the 2023 F-bomb season, I wanted to hear from as many members of our community as possible so that I can best curate your literary experience. Please take just a few minutes to fill out this survey so that I can get as much feedback as possible. Feel free to forward this to as many people as you can, especially to anyone who has been to an F-bomb in the past. As always, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out!
OCTOBER FBOMB! Friday, 10/21 at The Roxy. 7pm. Featureless Reading. Open mic spots galore. You all get an extra minute to read creepy headless horseman stories or whatever. Host: Leah Rogin. Bring some candy!
Leah Rogin was raised on sugary cereal and Saturday morning cartoons. She believes in ghosts and thinks Marilyn Monroe was an intellectual. Her work has been recently published in 3cents Magazine and Rumpus. Her prize-winning chapbook Two Truths and a Lie was published by Horseless Press in 2016. She recently joined the Great Resignation and is exploring the World Beyond Teaching.
September FBomb! Special event: new venue concept, same beautiful people (and always, new beautiful people), and same sicktastic f*cking flash!
When: Friday, September 23rd @ 7pm Where: Friend of FBomb Jomil Ebro’s crib in Golden, CO (676 Kendrick Street Golden 80401) Theme: Saturday Morning Cartoons (you do not have to write to the theme to read)
Hosted by: Jamey Trotter Featured Reader: Leah Rogin-Roper Open Mic Slots @ 4-5 min per: Aplenty Important Note: BYOB (snacks will be served)
Jamey Trotter, who has survived the FBomb from its inception, hosts the one and only Leah Rogin-Roper.
There was a time not too long ago when children had to wait for Saturday morning to watch some of their favorite cartoons. Saturdays MEANT something, by god. Was the 24/7 access to any damned cartoon we want (not to mention the fanporn) the beginning of the end of western civilization? Let’s use the magic of flash fiction to find out! (You do not have to write to the theme to read.)
To those special Saturdays: that’s the theme. Cartoons need not be involved, but they can be. And any interpretation or twist you want to bring to it, step right up.
Leah Rogin was raised on sugary cereal and Saturday morning cartoons. She believes in ghosts and thinks Marilyn Monroe was an intellectual. Her work has been recently published in 3cents Magazine and Rumpus. Her prize-winning chapbook Two Truths and a Lie was published by Horseless Press in 2016. She recently joined the Great Resignation and is exploring the World Beyond Teaching.
Her newest novel, Burying Norma Jeane, explores the various names, fantasies, and projections of Marilyn Monroe and hopes to spark the Free Marilyn Movement to extract Marilyn’s corpse from the lecherous grasp of Hugh Hefner.
Jamey Trotter watched his Saturday morning cartoons in the family home deep in the woods in Gatlinburg TN, yet Trotter cannot bring himself to click on the ad depicting Bugs Bunny boning Daisy Duck—that shit is just too sacred.
Venue Note: We’re trying something new, a first in Fbomb history: the reading at a private residence. Parking is limited-street parking, and you may have to walk a block or two—please respect private driveways and the like on the narrow streets of this tucked away OG Golden neighborhood near Colorado Mills Mall. Light hors d’oeuvres will be served—BYOB (!).
The home (a duplex) is accessed by crossing a small bridge over a small creek. It’s tucked away a bit—we’ll put out some balloons on the mailbox or some shit. We’ve had open mics here before—always a glorious time.
Many thanks to Jomil for allowing us to stage our reading at his home!
The FBomb is Fproud to present our August featured reader: Poet/Professor/Bluebird Reality Traveler Jonathon Montgomery. Hosted by Rob Geisen. 3-4 minute open mic slots available until they’re no long available. Show up a little early and sign up at the Roxy (down in the Speakeasy Basement) before showtime (6 PM). This month’s theme will be THE FUTURE!
“Greetings, my friends! We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friends; future events such as these will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable; that is why you are here. And now for the first time we are bringing to you the full story of what happened on that faithful day. We are giving you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimonies of the miserable souls who survived this terrifying ordeal.” –Criswell
FEATURED READER Jonathan “Bluebot”Montgomery is a robot which will be manufactured in New New Akron, New New Ohio on Earth 3 in 2980. It will be programmed for creative writing at Naropa Laboratories and will serve New New New Boulder on Earth 4 until it breaks down or is decommissioned. Works will include Spacepizza and Spacemermaid, The Reality Time Traveler, and Nine Binary Codes at Once! As a day job the Robot will download English software into other newer Robots at Front Asteroid Community Star Station. Its hobby will be droning, and it will observe 237 different types of drones in New New New Boulder County.
HOST Rob Geisen is the author of Beautiful Graveyards, Paper Thin, Avenge Me, The Aftermatch etc, and The Night We Called Dennis. He plays guitar and broken-romantic for the pop-poetry band Girls Just Wanna Have Us. Once upon a time he was the co-host of a weekly open mic series that took place at Album’s Bistro, The Burnt Toast, and The No Name Bar in Boulder, Colorado on The Hill. Currently, he’s focused on writing science fiction novels and learning everything there is to learn about the 1979 Disney classic The Black Hole.
fbombdenver.com 