All shows start at 7:30 at The Mercury Cafe, 2199 California Street, Denver
May 16:
Host Leah Rogin-Roper Leah Rogin-Roper’s essay, “Honk if You Love Real Snow,” was featured in Mountain Gazette’s Best of the West, along with western literary icons like Charles Bowden. Her flash fiction has been performed by Stories on Stage and The Buntport Theater Group. Fiction and nonfiction pieces have been recently published in The Denver Post, Serenity Magazine, Cliterature, and Deep South Review. She is currently cheating on flash fiction to focus on her fourth novel. Please keep her infidelity a secret.
Featuring Stina French!
If you’d like the typical bio material for Stina French, go to paragraph 1 below.
If you’d like to hear what Gertrude Stein has to say about Stina, go to paragraph 2 below.
If you’d like to hear what really turns her on, go to paragraph 3 below.
Paragraph 1
Stina hails from North Carolina, and if you look closely, you can still see the welts from the Bible Belt. After a stint in San Francisco immersed in burlesque, slam poetry, and festival culture, she joined the faculty of Red Rocks Community College in the Denver area, where she teaches erotic literature, graphic novels, Shakespeare, and even technical writing. She is working on her first novel, Mistress Immaculate’s Murder Most Mildew, and a collection of flash memoir pieces calledBobby Pin Vortex. The poetry arrives in dreams, and sets off on postcards to friends, tortured late-night texts to exes, hopeful early morning texts to potential exes, and post-it notes woefully bereft of their sticky backing. You can read snippets of her work and her insights on the domestic life of a polyamorous, kink-oriented mother, writer, and educator at http://mistressimmaculate.blogspot.com/.
Paragraph 2:
The Southern Belle wants nothing so much as the opened door, except when she wants more than that and she knows how to get it. Abroad, she can gather more into herself. It will be squashed as soon as she returns South not fitting as it doesn’t in those big plantation rooms that have become doublewide trailer add-ons and track-lighting tract home step-down dens. It will never really change down there, even if some of them burn their bras and ask for equal pay for the same work. In their father’s houses, the women will still say Yes, Sir and fetch the dishes to the sink after dinner while the men go out on the porch and talk. Earl Pate, a cousin of the author’s on her father’s side, who lived with his mother and about 6 or 7 vicious hound dogs with nothing to do but eviscerate the author’s father’s Jack Russell terrier because now the farming’s dried up and Earl smokes and drinks and doesn’t run his dogs but runs his mother in the kitchen. She is old and sick with cancer now but it wouldn’t do to mess with their routine, his coming to the table dirty and drunk but performing his man role and her serving him food like the author will never eat again because she left that place and oh how she misses it but she don’t miss Earl and she don’t miss Southern men but for except for maybe their honey-slow drawl and strong working hands opening doors stretching wide their capable arms closing her in and oh no but she don’t really miss them.
Paragraph 3:
Stina’s interests include playing dress up with friends while doing X-rated literary madlibs, renting wrecker balls to stupid fucking breathless wolves, unpinning butterflies at ecstatic-dance cabarets, and serving sweet tea on swinging bridges. Oh, and that light in your eyes right now if any of that sounds like fun to you, too.
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Host Levi Andrew Noe! Levi Andrew Noe was born and raised in Denver, CO. He is a writer, wanderer, yogi, entrepreneur, and amateur oneironaut. His flash fiction collection Rain Checkwas published in August 2016 from Truth Serum Press. His works are in Connotation Press, Boston Literary Magazine, LitroNY, and Eunoia Review, among many others. Levi is the editor in chief and founder of the podcast Rocky Mountain Revival Audio Art Journal.
Host Nicholas B. Morris! Nick Morris has been many things: a grocery bagger, a knife salesman, an oil company stooge, and even one of those annoying people who asks if you have a minute for the environment. (The environment people never paid him, by the way.) Now he spends a lot of time talking about Batman and rock music under the auspices of higher education. When he can, he writes stories, and reads them every month at the F-Bomb Reading Series. If you look at just the right time, you can probably catch him singing along to the radio in his car.
Featuring SETH! Writer, performance poet, musician and actor SETH is a veteran of Denver’s performance art scene. SETH was a driving force behind Open Rangers (1989-2000), a dynamic, multi-dimensional network of poets, musicians, actors and dancers. Open Rangers won several Best of Westwords for their pioneering efforts intermingling spoken word with other performance arts.. In 1993, SETH joined Jafrika, a critically-acclaimed performance art trio melding “provocative music, exquisite dance and poignant poetry.” The Rocky Mountain News listed Jafrika as among Denver’s finest cultural offerings. Currently, SETH hosts the weekly Jam before the Slam with the musical ensemble, Art Compost & the Word Mechanics, Sunday nights at the Mercury Café. A published short story writer, SETH recently completed his first novel, now in the hands of a literary agent. His poetry collection, A Black Odyssey is a diverse, vibrant, poetic memoir modeled on Homer’s ancient epic. For spare change, SETH teaches children to write and adults to perform. He can be visited at 
Host Marcus If! Marcus If is the Headmaster and Guerrilla Ontologist for the Beyond Academia Free Skool. A veteran performance poet, Marcus has been reading along the Front Range for 28 years at open mics and featured events. He has hosted the Speakeasy reading series at the No Name Bar on the Hill, serves as editor at Boarhog Press, founded the Love Shovel Poetry Troupe, been the elected President of the Nederland Area Historical Society & Mining Museum, trained as a NEHA Certified Radiation engineer, was captured as a felonious POW in the Reagan-era Drug War, and currently reigns as Zen Tyrant of the meritocracy of Love Shovel Ranch in Nederland. Chapbooks include Contraband, Square Feet, The Comic Book Plague (w/ Rob Geisen), and Tail Spin: A Garter of Sonnets. End of the 20th Century Man (Collected Works 1989-2009) remains unpublished. An Obvious Ruse, a pioneering exploration of Projective Sonnets, will be soon forthcoming.
Featuring Rachel Ann Harding of Stories With Spirit! Traditional Storyteller and Musician, Rachel Ann Harding is passionate about telling the most beautiful folk, myth, and traditional tales. She has been a featured teller for the local Truth Be Told and a panelist for Intergenerational Storytelling at the National Storytelling Network Conference in 2015. Rachel Ann weaves story and song together to create unique and entertaining storytelling events, keynotes and workshops that display the relevance of storytelling in our lives. She believes that fairytales are for all ages and mesmerizes audiences with old tales woven into new.
Host Nancy Stohlman! Nancy Stohlman’s books include The Vixen Scream and Other Bible Stories, The Monster Opera, Searching for Suzi: a flash novel, and four anthologies including Fast Forward: The Mix Tape, a finalist for a 2011 Colorado Book Award. She is the creator and curator of the Fbomb Flash Fiction Reading Series in Denver, the impetus behind FlashNano, and her work was nominated for a 2016 Pushcart Prize. Find out more about her at
Featuring Monique Antonette Lewis! Monique Antonette Lewis is the founder of At The Inkwell, a New York City-based organization that supports published authors through book reviews, author interviews and readings. The reading series is hosted across Denver, New York, Richmond, San Francisco, Seattle and London.She is also an annual reader for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. Monique has more than a decade of journalism experience and received her MFA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University, and a B.A. in Journalism from Colorado State University. Monique lives in Denver.
Host Kona Morris! Kona Morris received her moral guidance from Kermit the Frog. She is originally from the foggy redwood hub of Humboldt County, California, though she has since lived everywhere from Boston to a remote village in northern Alaska. She has an MFA in Creative Writing, a slew of publications, and she currently teaches editing and letter regurgitation to college students in Denver. For more appallingly un-updated information, check out her website: 
Featuring Jack C. Buck! Jack C. Buck lives in Denver, Colorado, where he is a public school teacher. His debut book, Deer Michigan, a collection of 60 flash fiction stories is to be published fall of 2016 by Truth Serum Press. You can reach him on Twitter @Jack_C_Buck
Featuring Levi Andrew Noe! Levi Andrew Noe was born and raised in Denver, CO. He is a writer, wanderer, yogi, entrepreneur, and amateur oneironaut. His flash fiction collection Rain Checkwas published in August 2016 from Truth Serum Press. His works are in Connotation Press, Boston Literary Magazine, LitroNY, and Eunoia Review, among many others. Levi is the editor in chief and founder of the podcast Rocky Mountain Revival Audio Art Journal.
Host David Atkinson! David S. Atkinson! David S. Atkinson is the author of “Not Quite so Stories” (Literary Wanderlust), “The Garden of Good and Evil Pancakes” (2015 National Indie Excellence Awards finalist in humor), and “Bones Buried in the Dirt” (2014 Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist, First Novel <80K). His writing appears in “Bartleby Snopes,” “Grey Sparrow Journal,” “Atticus Review,” and others. His writing website is 
Featuring Karl Fischer! Karl Fischer is a writer and crazy person living in Colorado with his wife and their two fat dog children. He is the author of Towers (Eraserhead Press) and is part of the New Bizarro Author Series. He likes bad movies, fantastic movies, black coffee, and stories that make him cry.
His short fiction can be found all over the internet and in various anthologies, and he has contributed to Cracked.com and Atlas Obscura. He is an avid fan of both Shakespeare and fart jokes. His website is egumeny.com.
Host Hillary Leftwich! Hillary Leftwich grew up in Colorado Springs where Focus on the Family reigns supreme and Ted Haggard is currently hiding in his closet. Still. She survived Christian school where brainwashed fanatical classmates failed to save her soul and forced her to play Satan in the school play. Her English teacher accused her of practicing witchcraft and playing Dungeons and Dragons during lunch when really all she was doing was listening to The Melvins and writing strange stories that made her classmates feel “weird.” She later won the Colorado Young Writers Award and felt vindicated.
MA in Philosophy at Stanford University and his PhD from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Republic, Poetry, The Denver Quarterly, Hotel Amerika, The Chicago Review, The Kenyon Review, The Sewanee Review, and elswhere. He co-founded The Urban Theater Company in Houston and was Associate Director of Ad Hoc Theatre and Artistic Director of Tir Na nOg: An Irish Theatre in Denver. His play, “Joseph K,” earned the 2009 Denver Post Ovation Award for Best New Work. Having taught for Regis Univerity’s College for Professional Studies since 2007 and creating its MA in Creative Writing, McGovern is also now co-founder and co-director of that university’s Mile-High Low-Residency MFA program. His most recent book, Bad Fame, was a finalist for the Colorado Book Awards.
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