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HILLARY LEFTWICH is a multi-media writer and the author of Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock (Agape Editions, 2023), Aura (Future Tense Books, 2022), and Saint Dymphna’s Playbook (forthcoming from Limit Zero, 2025). She teaches creative writing, business writing, and environmental writing and storytelling at several universities, writing organizations, and nonprofits for adults, previously incarcerated and hospitalized youth, and unhoused populations. She centers her writing around themes of class struggle, the impact of disease, mental illness, ritual, and the supernatural. On the outskirts of the writing world, she teaches Tarot and Tarot writing workshops focusing on strengthening divination abilities along with writing. She is a professional Tarot reader, an Usui Reiki Master Teacher, death worker, and speaks with the dead.
Find her author services here: Alchemy Author Services & Writing Workshop
She is currently working on a series of hermit crab/collage essays and video poems investigating gun violence along with her background and experience growing up in Colorado and its history with mass shootings.
GUEST READERS
CAROL GUESS is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including Sleep Tight Satellite and Infodemic. In 2014 Guess was awarded the Philolexian Award for Distinguished Literary Achievement by Columbia University. Guess teaches Queer Literature and Creative Writing at Western Washington University, and lives in the Skagit Valley.
BRENDA S. TALIAN is a writer and professor living in New Orleans. She is the author of the Elgin Award-nominated Bestial Mouths and Blood Mountain. Her forthcoming nonfiction, American Magdalene: The Life Behind the Scandalous Book Madeleine: An Autobiography, is expected in 2025.
ALEX DIFRANCESCO is the author of Psychopomps, All City, Transmutation, and Breaking the Curse. Their work has appeared in New York Times, The Guardian, Electric Lit, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Lit Hub, and more. They are the recipient of a 2022 Individual Excellence award from the Ohio Arts Council, and the first transgender awards finalist in over 80 years of the Ohioana book awards. They live in Philadelphia with their dog, Roxy and their cat, Jack.
CHRIS CAMPANIONI was born in Manhattan and grew up in a very nineties New Jersey. His work on migration and media theory has been awarded the Calder Prize for interdisciplinary research and a Mellon Foundation fellowship, and his writing has received the Pushcart Prize, the International Latino Book Award, and the Academy of American Poets College Prize. Recent books include a novel named VHS (CLASH Books, 2025), a creative nonfiction called north by north/west (West Virginia University Press, 2025), a notebook titled A and B and Also Nothing (Unbound Edition, 2023), the poetry collection Windows 85 (Roof Books, 2024), and Drift Net (Lever Press, 2025), a monograph on migrant subjectivity and works of art born in translation. He is the writer in residence at Pace University in New York City, where he teaches creative writing and media studies.
JEFF ALESSANDRELLI is most recently the author of the novel And Yet (Future Tense Books, 2024). The Kenyon Review called his 2019 poetry collection Fur Not Light an “example of radical humility…its poems enact a quiet but persistent empathy in the world of creative writing.” Recent work by Alessandrelli appears or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Chicago Review, and Buckmxn Journal.
ERIN K. BARNES is a Denver-based writer whose work blends synesthetic musings, punk-rock memories, and sharp explorations of rebellion and subversion. By day, she weaves narrative magic in the immersive arts world as Senior Public Relations Manager for Meow Wolf. By night, she transforms into her alter ego, Gogo Germaine—self-proclaimed punk slutbunny and author of the award-winning memoir Glory Guitars: Memoir of a ’90s Teenage Punk Rock Grrrl.
From punk exploits to bedtime novels for her neurodivergent kids, Erin’s writing paints vivid, unforgettable scenes. She has been featured in The New York Times, The Denver Post, Westword, The Rumpus, Razorcake, Louder Than War, and her memoir is immortalized at the Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas. As a journalist, she has written for Men’s Health, BUST, Syfy, and others.
Previously, Erin was the Burrito Fairy for Illegal Pete’s, PR storyteller for the haunted Black Monarch Hotel, and co-led The Haunted Writer’s Retreat with author Josiah Hesse. She speaks on writing, branding, and creative PR at events like UMS, Fan Expo, Warm Cookies of the Revolution, and SIGGRAPH. Named one of Westword’s 100 Colorado Creatives and 303 Magazine’s 70 Colorado Creatives, she has won two “Best of Denver” awards from Westword’s annual roundup (Best Blog, 2009 and Best Punk-Rock Memoir, 2023). She lives in Denver’s creative vortex with her family, a menagerie of pets, and a love of all things delightfully weird.