Join us for our new series, “Literary Living Room”, a literary series based in Ridgway, Colorado. We invite a featured writer to read or perform their work and then we host a community open mic. This series will run monthly from September-May.

Kierstin Bridger is a Colorado writer currently living near Telluride. She is the author of Demimonde (Lithic Press), the 2017 Women Writing the West’s Willa Award. She is also the author of a full collection, All Ember (Urban Farmhouse Press). Winner of the Mark Fischer Poetry Prize, the 2015 ACC Writer’s Studio award, and short-listed for the Manchester Poetry Competition in the UK. She co-hosts Poetry Voice with poet Uche Ogbuji. Find more of her work in December, Sugar House Review, Prairie Schooner and Painted Bride Quarterly. She earned her MFA at Pacific University.

Joining her in presenting is Sam Roxas-Chua and Lisa Allen Ortiz.

Sam Roxas-Chua 姚 (Yao) is a transracial/transcultural adopted person. He is the author of Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater, Echolalia in Script, Fawn Language and the podcast Dear Someone Somewhere, an audio-journal project. His open-form calligraphy, artworks, and writing have appeared in various journals and galleries. Sam is a poet in the periphery, a multimedia artist, field recordist, and an amateur radio operator. He’s read for PEN International, city government events, and is currently an artist-in-residence at the Portland Chinatown Museum. Poet Tyehimba Jess describes Sam’s poems as “surreal yet rooted in palpable color and history … it transcends oceans, blends geographies, and bleeds a multitongued heritage for us to better find ourselves.”

Lisa Allen Ortiz is the author of two poetry collections: Stem, winner of the 2021 Idaho Prize andGuide to the Exhibit winner of the 2016 Perugia Press Prize. Her short stories and poems have appeared in Prime Number Magazine, Colorado Review and The Literary Review. She is co-translator with Sara Rivera of The Blinding Star, selected poems of the Peruvian poet Blanca Varela which won the Northern California Book Award in 2022. Besides books, she also loves trees which really are early—often better— versions of books. and she serves as a counselor for Save the Redwoods League.