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Photo credit: J. Michael Martinez

Courting Risk
a reading series curated by Khadijah Queen

Saturday, April 25, 2015
7 p.m.
$5 Suggested Donation

Please join Khadijah Queen, Bill Wetzel, Kristen Nelson, Shelly Taylor, Amy Lukau, TC Tolbert and Naomi Benaron for an evening of compelling poetry, fiction and nonfiction with material spanning multiple continents and time periods. The writers gathered here reflect the gamut of literary, artistic, personal and professional experience. Working in multiple modes and art forms – from drama and music to visual art, film and new media – they explore the limits of their talents with edge, grace, intelligence and a keen sense of what matters to humanity.

Reader Bios:

Naomi Benaron’s novel Running the Rift won the 2010 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. She holds degrees in geophysics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Scripps Institution of Oceanography and an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. She works extensively with African refugees and is an Ironman triathlete.

Amy M. Lukau is the daughter of immigrants from Angola. She graduated from Arizona State University with a BS in molecular biosciences and biotechnology and a BA in religious studies. She was runner up for the Brunel University African Poetry Prize founded by the African Poetry Book Fund and Commonwealth Writers in 2014.  Her chapbook is apart of the Eight New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set coming out in April 2015.  Lukau is the executive director of Girls Education International (girlsed.org), a nonprofit organization based in Colorado that supports educational opportunities for underserved females in remote and underdeveloped regions of the world. Her work has appeared in Fanzine and is forthcoming in other journals. She currently resides in Boulder, Colorado.

Kristen Elissa Nelson is the author of Write, Dad (Unthinkable Creatures Chapbook Press, 2012). She has published creative work in The Feminist Wire, The Volta, Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, Tarpaulin Sky Journal, Dinosaur Bees, Quarter After Eight, Spiral Orb, Glitter Tongue, The Dictionary Project, Trickhouse, In Posse Review, Cranky, and Everyday Genius, among others. She is a founder and the Executive Director of Casa Libre en la Solana, a non-profit writing center in Tucson, Arizona. www.kristenenelson.com 

Shelly Taylor is the author of two full-length collections: Lions, Remonstrance (Coconut Books Braddock Book Prize: 2014) & Black-Eyed Heifer (Tarpaulin Sky: 2010), as well as three chapbooks: Peaches the yes-girl (Portable Press at YoYo Labs: 2008), Land Wide to Get a Hold Lost In (Dancing Girl: 2009), Dirt City Lions (Horse Less: 2012). Hick Poetics, an anthology of contemporary American rural poetry co-edited with Abraham Smith, will be released from Lost Roads Press in early 2015. Born in deep south Georgia, Taylor is an instructor at the University of Arizona. She calls Tucson & horseback home.

TC Tolbert often identifies as a trans and genderqueer feminist, collaborator, dancer, and poet but really s/he’s just a human in love with humans doing human things. The author of Gephyromania (Ahsahta Press 2014), Conditions/Conditioning (a collaborative chapbook with Jen Hofer, New Lights Press 2014) I: Not He: Not I (Pity Milk chapbook 2014), Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (co-editor with Trace Peterson, Nightboat Books 2013), spirare (Belladonna* chaplet 2012), and territories of folding (Kore Press chapbook 2011), his favorite thing in the world is Compositional Improvisation (which is another way of saying being alive). www.tctolbert.com

Bill Wetzel is Amskapi Pikuni aka Blackfeet from Montana. He's a former bullrider/wrestler turned writer/obscure tweeter. His work has appeared in the American Indian Culture & Research Journal, Yellow Medicine Review, Studies In Indian Literatures, Hinchas de Poesia, Red Ink Magazine, Literary Orphans, and "Off The Path: An Anthology of 21st Century American Indian Writers Vol.2.” He's a co-founder of Indigipress, and curator for the Stjukshon Indigenous reading series at Casa Libre in Tucson, AZ.

Series founder and curator Khadijah Queen is the author of Conduit (Black Goat/Akashic Books 2008), Black Peculiar (Noemi Press 2011), and Fearful Beloved, due out from Argos Books in fall 2015. Her chapbooks include I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (Sibling Rivalry 2013) and Exercises in Painting (Bloof Books 2016). Individual poems and prose appear or are forthcoming in Fence, jubilat, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Memoir, Cutthroat, Tupelo Quarterly and widely elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2014 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers for her verse play Non-Sequitur, with full production to be staged by NYC theater company The Relationship in late 2015. Visit her website: khadijahqueen.com.