All shows begin at 7:30 at The Mercury Cafe, 2199 California Street, Denver.

Host Jay Halsey! Jay Halsey moved to the Denver area twelve years ago and soon after his prose, poems, and photos were being published in several online and print journals and a handful of anthologies. In 2018, his writing was nominated for a Best of the Net award and a Pushcart Prize. His photography has been used as cover art for poetry collections and novels, featured in fundraising campaigns for the Rocky Mountain Land Library in Fairplay, Colorado, and was part of a touring exhibit featured at libraries and bookstores throughout France to represent Editions Gallmeister’s American authors.

Featuring Byron F. Aspaas! Byron F. Aspaas uses images of landscape, etched onto white space, to create experience. He is Diné. With a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts, Aspaas hopes to teach and become a storyteller, and influence those along his journey. His work is scattered throughout journals and anthologies. Amongst those are: RedInk, Yellow Medicine Review, 200 New Mexico Poems, Weber: The Contemporary West, As/Us: A Space for Women of the World, Semicolon, The Denver Quarterly, International Writing Program Collections, The Rumpus, and CloudThroat. He is Red Running into the Water; born for Bitter Water. He resides northeast of the Four Sacred Mountains with his partner, Seth Browder, their three cats, and six puppies. He is working on a collection of essays, short stories, and poems.

Featuring Mairead Case! Mairead Case is a teacher, writer, and editor in Denver, Colorado. She publishes widely, and wrote the novel SEE YOU IN THE MORNING (featherproof), the poetry chapbook TENDERNESS (Meekling), the forthcoming novel TINY, and, with David Lasky, the forthcoming Georgetown Steam Plant Graphic Novel.  Mairead holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD from the University of Denver, and she teaches English full-time in DPS, and part-time at the Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and the Denver Women’s Jail. She is a Legal Observer with the NLG and volunteers for a community response team supporting queer and trans survivors of violence. Previously Mairead lived in Chicago for a decade, where she worked and wrote for places like Pitchfork and the Poetry Foundation.