Program Information
The Living Thread :: Week Three
Week 3 Schedule
All events will be held in the Performing Arts Center on Naropa University’s Arapahoe Campus, unless otherwise noted.
Schedule is subject to change.
Monday, 6/23
1:00–2:30 PM :: Opening Panel:
Panelists: Anne Waldman (chair);
3:00–4:00 PM :: MFA Lecture ::
Tuesday, 6/24
1:00–2:00 PM :: Lecture ::
2:30–3:30 PM :: Lecture ::
4:00–5:30 PM :: Artist Talk ::
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading ::
Wednesday, 6/25
1:00–3:00 PM :: Dharma Arts :: Aikido w/ Jude Blitz
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading ::
Thursday, 6/26
1:00–2:30 PM :: Panel :
Panelists: TBD(chair);
3:00–4:00 PM :: Lecture ::
4:30–5:30 PM :: Student Panel
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading ::
Friday, 6/27
1:00–2:30 PM :: Lecture ::
3:00–4:00 PM :: Colloquium
7:00–9:30 PM :: Student Reading
Saturday, 6/28
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading ::
Workshop Faculty for Week 3
Workshop :: Steven Dunn & Katie Jean Shinkle
Workshop description forthcoming.
Katie Jean Shinkle‘s books include Tannery Bay (FC2/University of Alabama Press, coauthored with Steven Dunn, forthcoming). Other work can be found in or is forthcoming from Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance (Sarabande Books), The Nation, American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literary Arts from the University of Denver, and she serves as co-poetry editor of DIAGRAM.
&
Steven Dunn (a.k.a Pothole, cuz he’s deep in these streets) is a Whiting Award winner who was shortlisted for Granta Magazine’s Best of Young American Novelists. He’s the author of three novels: Potted Meat (Tarpaulin Sky, 2016), water & power (Tarpaulin Sky, 2018), and Tannery Bay (FC2/University of Alabama Press, 2024), which is co-authored with his homie Katie Jean Shinkle. Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan.
Workshop :: Tongo Eisen-Martin
Workshop description forthcoming.
Tongo Eisen-Martin is a movement worker, educator, and poet who has organized around issues of human rights and self-determination for oppressed people throughout the United States. His curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, titled We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as a teaching and organizing tool throughout the country. His poems have been published in Harper’s Magazine and the New York Times Magazine. His book someone’s dead already was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book of poems Heaven Is All Goodbyes was published in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and won the California Book Award and the American Book Award. In 2020, he co-founded Black Freighter Press to publish revolutionary works. He was San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate.
Workshop :: Angel Dominguez
Workshop description forthcoming.
Angel Dominguez is a Latiné poet of Yucatec Maya descent born in Hollywood and raised in Van Nuys, CA, by their immigrant family. They now live amongst the redwoods of Bonny Doon, CA. They’re the author of several books of poetry and prose including Desgraciado (Nightboat Books, 2022) and most recently, the 10 year anniversary edition of their debut work, Black Lavender Milk (Noemi Press, 2024). They were the 2023 Poet in residence with the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson, the 2021 Mazza writer in residence for San Francisco State University, and currently serves as managing editor for Lilac Press. You can find Angel’s work online and in print in various publications including BOMB Magazine, The Berkeley Poetry Review, FENCE, Prolit Magazine, SFMOMA Open Space, and elsewhere. You can find Angel in the redwoods or ocean.
Workshop :: Valerie Hsiung
Workshop description forthcoming.
Valerie Hsiung is a poet, performer, and the author of eight collections of poetry, prose, and hybrid writing, including The pedestrian (Nightboat Books, forthcoming 2026), selected for the Nightboat Books Prose Prize, The Naif (Ugly Duckling Presse), The only name we can call it now is not its only name (Counterpath), To love an artist (Essay Press), selected by Renee Gladman for the Essay Press Book Prize, and outside voices, please (CSU), selected for the CSU Open Book Prize. Her writing has appeared in publications (Annulet, BathHouse Journal, The Georgia Review, mercury firs, The Nation, Paperbag, Verse), in performances (Treefort Music Festival, Common Area Maintenance, The Poetry Project), in sound waves (Montez Press Radio, Hyle Greece), and other forms of particulate matter. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts, PEN America, Lighthouse Works. Born in the Year of the Earth Snake and raised by Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in Cincinnati, Ohio, she now lives in the mountains of Colorado where she makes fragrance & teaches alchemical writing at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
Workshop :: Lydia Lunch
Workshop description forthcoming.
Lydia Lunch was voted by Time Out magazine as one of the most influential performers to have emerged from New York City. She has taught workshops in Performance Art at The San Francisco Art Institute, along side Meredith Monk as part of Davis Moss’ Institute of Living Voice in Ghent Belgium. She has presented From the Page to the Stage in Rennes France, Ojai California, Berlin Germany, Malmo and Uppsala Sweden, Manchester England and New York City. She has produced spoken word records, curated performance series in America and Great Britain, worked with dozens of luminaries in film, music and literature. She has written five books translated into seven languages, released over thirty LPS, and continues to be a driving force in art, music and literature and her special forte—performance.
No other artist of the 20th century has fought, forged, punched, and sculpted their own artistic vision in such a uniquely original way. Defying categorization, Lydia Lunch has actively conquered new territories and gained international recognition for the innovative quality of her work.
Through music, books, spoken word performances, film, video, photography, poetry and a multitude of creative endeavors, Lydia Lunch has proven to be one of the most daring artists of the current era. Sexual icon, radical and unclassifiable, Lunch has never ceased to denounce conformism, the exploitation of misery, American politics and violence against women. Her spirit of revolt, her independence, and her prolific collaborations continue to influence new generations of artists.
Workshop :: Julian Talamantez Brolaski
Workshop description forthcoming.
Julian Talamantez Brolaski (it / xe / them) is a poet and country singer, the author of Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books 2017), Advice for Lovers (City Lights 2012), and gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011). Julian is a 2023 Bagley Wright lecturer, a 2021 Pew Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of the 2020 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry. Its poems were recently included in When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020) and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat 2020). With its band Juan & the Pines, it released an EP Glittering ForestLinks to an external site. in 2019; Julian’s first full-length album It’s Okay HoneyLinks to an external site. came out in August 2023.
Dharma Arts :: Aikido :: Jude Blitz
Jude Blitz, M.A., a co-founder leader of Women in Power, is a psychotherapist and coach in private practice, working with women and men both in person and by phone from her home office in Boulder, Colorado. Her work with people integrates her lifetime of study and application of several methods in which she is certified: Hakomi therapy, Shadow Work® group facilitation, Systemic Constellation work, and her decades of dream analysis, moon lodge and ceremonial weavership. Jude’s approach to healing evokes embodied wisdom and strengths, ancestral and archetypal insights and support, to generate courageous action from our deep soulful natures.
With her husband, Tom Daly, Jude co-facilitates groups in Systemic Constellation work, Dynamic Dialogue® and 4 Gateways Coaching programs. With Shadow Work® colleagues Cliff Barry and Mary Ellen Whalen, Jude and Tom co-created the Inner Sovereign Leadership Training. These programs are inspired by the unique contributions of Shadow Work®.
Jude is a practicing 6th degree black belt in Aikido, which she has taught at Naropa University for approx. 30 years.
MFA Lecture :: TBA
Announcement coming soon!
Special Guest :: Will Alexander
Will Alexander works in multiple genres. In addition to being a poet, he is also a novelist, essayist, aphorist, playwright, philosopher, visual artist, and pianist. His influences range from poetic practitioners, such as Aimé Césaire, Bob Kaufman, Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Philip Lamantia, to the encompassing paradigm of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga, and the Egyptian worldview as understood by Cheikh Anta Diop and R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz. The latter is central to Alexander’s expanding inner range, which has allowed him access to levels of mind beyond the three-dimensional as boundary. He thereby explores the full dimensionality of each word. For him, each word has access to not only the median level of three-dimensional experience, but also partakes of experience on both the supra and subconscious planes. His praxis of language is not unlike the Mayan numerical world, where each letter of the alphabet spontaneously engages in non-limit. Thus, all fields of experience are open for exploration: art, physics, botany, history, astronomy, architecture, and poetics. Alexander’s books include Asia and Haiti, The Sri Lankan Loxodrome, Compression and Purity, Sunrise In Armageddon, Diary As Sin, Inside the Earthquake Palace, Towards The Primeval Lightning Field, and Mirach Speaks To His Grammatical Transparents. He lives in The City of Angels.
Harry Smith Recording Studio
Summer Writing Program participants (in select workshops each week) may have the opportunity to work in Naropa University’s Recording Studio. Sometimes the projects entail setting their work to music, or recording spoken word poetry, or recording their own poetic songs; oftentimes the recording studio projects are group collaborations, collective sound installations, and other experiments withthe phonotext. Over the year Fast Speaking Music has produced several audio anthologies of student and guest faculty’s recorded work; the Harry’s House cd compilations; here is the link to Volume III: https://spoti.fi/3v19mQP
Ambrose Bye is a musician, engineer, and producer living in Mexico City, and is the co-founder of Fast Speaking Music with Anne Waldman. He has produced over 20 albums and frequently collaborates with poets. Recent productions include “Among the Poetry Stricken” (Clark Coolidge and Thurston Moore) and “Artificial Happiness Button” (Heroes are Gang Leaders). He has worked and performed at Masnaa and the Ecole de la Literature in Casablanca, Le Maison de Poesie in Paris, the fieEstival Maelstrom in Brussels, the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, Pathway to Paris at Montreal POP 2015, and Casa Del Lago in Mexico City. He has also been involved in the recording studio and workshops at the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University since 2009.
Fast Speaking Music
