All shows begin at 7:30 at The Mercury Cafe, 2199 California Street
Sept 17: Host Shelby Yaffe and featuring Renuka Raghavan and Brice Mauirro!
Shelby Yaffe is a queer author, poet, and singer-songwriter living in Denver. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Suspect Press, South Broadway Ghost Society, and OutFront Magazine. She will always read third at events and she will write a poem for your girlfriend (if you pay her). Find her at shelbyyaffe.com.
Brice Maiurro is a poet and writer from Denver, Colorado. He is the author of Hero Victim Villain (Stubborn Mule Press) and Stupid Flowers (Punch Drunk Press). He is the Poetry Editor for Suspect Press, the Editor-In-Chief of South Broadway Ghost Society and the Founding Editor of Punch Drunk Press. His writing has been featured by The Denver Post, Boulder Weekly, Birdy Magazine, Pussy Magic and Poets Reading the News. He is the co-founder of Punketry! and was recognized by Denver Westword as a Colorado Creative. He believes that artists should focus more on self-discovery than self-destruction. He has so many things that he is grateful for.
Renuka Raghavan is the author of Out of the Blue, (Big Table Publishing, 2017) a debut collection of short fiction and poetry. She has been published in literary journals across the country, with most recent work featured in Mom Egg Review and Gravel Literary Magazine. Renuka serves as the fiction book reviewer at Červená Barva Press, and is a poetry reader for Indolent Books and the Lily Poetry Review. She is also a co-founder of the Poetry Sisters Collective. Her second poetry collection is forthcoming from Nixes Mate Press.
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Host Kathy Fish! Kathy Fish has published five collections of short fiction, most recently Wild Life: Collected Works from 2003-2018, from Matter Press. Her award-winning short stories, prose poems, and flash fictions have been published in Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, Electric Literature, Guernica, and elsewhere. Her poem/flash fiction hybrid piece, “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild,” will appear in an upcoming edition of The Norton Reader. Additionally, this piece was selected for Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018 by Sheila Heti and by Aimee Bender for Best Small Fictions 2018. Fish’s work is also featured in the 2017 and 2016 editions of Best Small Fictions. She is a core faculty member for the Mile High MFA at Regis University in Denver, Colorado, and teaches her own intensive online flash workshop, Fast Flash©.
Featuring Randall Brown! Randall Brown is the author of the award-winning collection MAD TO LIVE, his essay on (very) short fiction appears in THE ROSE METAL PRESS FIELD GUIDE TO WRITING FLASH FICTION, and he appears in BEST SMALL FICTIONS 2015 & 2017 & 2019 and The Norton Anthology NEW MICRO: EXCEPTIONALLY SHORT FICTION & The Norton Anthology HINT FICTION. He founded and directs FlashFiction.Net and has been published and anthologized widely, both online and in print. Recent books include the prose poetry collection I MIGHT NEVER LEARN (2018), the novella HOW LONG IS FOREVER (2018), and the flash fiction collection THIS IS HOW HE LEARNED TO LOVE (2019). He is also the founder and managing editor of Matter Press and its Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. He received his MFA in Fiction from Vermont College.
Host David S. Atkinson! David S. Atkinson is the author of books such as “Roses are Red, Violets are Stealing Loose Change from my Pockets While I Sleep,” “Apocalypse All the Time,” and the Nebraska book award winning “Not Quite so Stories.” He is a Prose Assistant Editor for “Digging Through The Fat” and his writing appears in “Spelk,” “Jellyfish Review,” “Thrice Fiction,” “Literary Orphans,” and more. His writing website is 
Featuring Karen Stefano! Karen Stefano is the author of “What a Body Remembers: A Memoir of Sexual Assault And Its Aftermath” (Rare Bird Books, June 11, 2019), the short story collection “The Secret Games of Words” (1GlimpsePress, 2015), and the how-to business writing guide “Before Hitting Send” (Dearborn 2011). Her work has appeared in Ms. Magazine, California Lawyer, Psychology Today, The Rumpus, The South Carolina Review, Tampa Review, Epiphany, and elsewhere. She is also a JD/MBA with more than 20 years of complex litigation experience. To learn more about Karen Stefano and her writing, please visit 
Host Roseanna Frechette! Roseanna Frechetteis in love with words. Written. Spoken. Published. Or not. It’s all about words on page and energy on stage. Longtime member of Denver’s thriving literary community and former publisher of Rosebud Forum magazine, Roseanna believes in the power of small press and all things alternative and independent when it comes to art. Her writing has appeared on the pages of many small press publications including Lummox, Blink-Ink, Mad Blood, Punch Drunk, Semicolon, and Prairie Smoke Anthology. Featured on a variety of regional stages including Arise Music Festival, Colorado Poetry Rodeo, and Boulder Fringe Festival, she’s a guest host for Mercury Café’s Jam Before the Slam and a respected participant in the open mic scenes of Denver and Boulder. Roseanna’s integrative style reflects both a respectful love of nature and a bohemian appreciation for urban culture. She holds great passion for the beauty of creativity…expressed…live.
Featuring Susan Froyd! Susan Froyd started writing for Westword as the “Thrills Editor” in 1992 and never quite left the fold. These days she still freelances for the paper as an arts writer, in addition to walking her dogs, enjoying cheap ethnic food and reading voraciously. She’s also a slave to pop culture and every kind of music, and sometimes she writes poetry.
Featuring David Heska Wanbli Weiden! David Heska Wanbli Weiden,, an enrolled member of the Sicangu Lakota nation, is Associate Professor of Native American Studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. He’s an alumnus of VONA and the Tin House Summer Workshop, and is a 2018 MacDowell Colony Fellow. He received the 2018 PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship. His novel WINTER COUNTS is forthcoming in 2020 from Ecco/HarperCollins, as is the second book in the series, WOUNDED HORSE. WINTER COUNTS is the story of a local Native American enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation who becomes obsessed with finding and stopping the dealer who is bringing increasingly dangerous drugs into his community. It’s a Native thriller, an examination of the broken criminal justice system on reservations, and a meditation on Native identity. 
Featuring Jeff Campbell! Jeff Campbell has been a part of Denver’s creative community for over two decades, as a pioneering Hip Hop and spoken word artist, as well as a facilitator of arts in education programs for Colorado’s youth in public schools. In 2015, He was named one of Westword’s 100 Colorado Creative’s. He is also the writer of the critically acclaimed “Who Killed Jigaboo Jones?” a One Man Mockumentary on the Hip Hop Industrial Complex, and also “Honorable Disorder” the story of an Iraq war veteran from 5 Points, battling PTSD, and readjusting to civilian life. His brand of “Post Hip Hop Expressionism’flows from the influence of the culture, without having to conform to its conventional identity. His work is rooted in social commentary from his own personal experience.
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.
Host Kona Morris! Kona Morris is proud to be one of the original members of F-Bomb. She’s from the foggy redwood coast of Humboldt County and hasn’t stopped traveling the globe since she left. Kona was co-founder and editor of Fast Forward Press, as well as founder and writer of the satirical comic book company Godless Comics. She has been featured as a writer and editor at literary events and conferences across the country, and her stories have appeared in a variety of publications. Kona currently teaches letter regurgitation to college students in Denver, where she also dabbles in stand-up comedy, performs live drunk history lectures, and is the lone minister of the Secular Humanist Church of Freddie Mercury. 
Featuring Nick Morris! Nick Morris is the F-Bombingest F-Bomber who ever did F-Bomb, having only missed reading once in over six years. His work has been published online and in print in journals like Fast Forward, Cliterature, Danse Macabre, Connotation Press, and the Prose Podcast. He’s a professor of Humanities and the Community College of Denver, where he talks about Batman, rock’n’roll, and how women should have more pockets in their clothing under the guise of higher education. He’s originally from Arkansas, but lives and loves in the Mile High City with his partner Alyssa Piccinni.
Featuring Shelby Yaffe! Shelby Yaffe is a queer author, poet, and singer-songwriter living in Denver. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in the Fast Forward Anthology Flash 101: Surviving the Fiction Apocalypse, Suspect Press, and South Broadway Ghost Society. Her poetry is also featured on a continuing basis in a collaborative art project with Kate Carlton Photography, an award-winning photographer based in Colorado Springs. You can pay Shelby to write a poem for your girlfriend at: 
Featuring David Yaffe! David Yaffe is a Denver native who remembers “how it used to be.” He is a medical auditor and father of two amazing boys. David also blogs about motorcycles and navigating issues around depression and doing his best not to commit suicide. You can find David’s blog at: 
Featuring Crisosto Apache! Crisosto Apache, is the author of 
Barbara Henning is the author of four novels and seven collections of poetry and shorter prose. Most recent books are a novel, Just Like That (Spuyten Duyvil) and a book of poetry, A Day Like Today (Negative Capability Press). She is also the editor of a book of interviews, Looking Up Harryette Mullen, and The Collected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins. Barbara lives in Brooklyn, has taught for Naropa University and Long Island University where she is Professor Emerita. Her website is
Maureen Owen’s most recent book is Edges of Water, Chax Press. Other books include: Erosion’s Pull, Coffee House Press, finalist for the Colorado Book Award; American Rush: Selected Poems, finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize; and AE (Amelia Earhart), Before Columbus American Book Award. She was the publisher and editor of Telephone Magazine/Telephone Books. Maureen lives in Denver and has taught for Naropa University. Her readings can be found on PennSound.
Host Carol Covington! Carol is an English major attending MSU, She is a storyteller and poet. The best of her life occurs every day. Carol writes about her life , the good the bad and the bs in between.
Featuring Alexandra Jackson! Alexandra Jackson!holds a Bachelors of arts and a Masters of Social work. She hopes to bridge her MSW with her passion of creative writing to increase self-expression and self-esteem while breaking down systematic barriers for marginalized communities. You can find two of her published poems, Blacked out and In Real Life, in the anthology, Still Coming Home (Colorado Humanities, 2018). Her works look at the storage of trauma in the biopsychosocial body and the release through anti-oppressive work and counter-narratives.
Host Karl Fischer! Karl Fischer may or may not be three sharks in a trench coat. He will occasionally write something. He lives in Longmont, CO and co-manages Excession Press LLC with his wife, Whitney Fischer, and their two mini sharks (who look suspiciously like dogs).
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