Old Growth Northwest Reading And Open Mic Series Volume Xii

Old Growth Northwest is excited to present Volume XII of our series! For this series we are thrilled to have talented writers Doug Nufer, Michelle Peñaloza and Chelsea Bolan. The prompt is "Steam rose, melting the frost." Read more about our headliners below: Doug Nufer is the author of three books of poetry and seven novels, the most recent of which are Lounge Acts (Insert Blanc), a list poem consisting of the names of bar bands inspired by the lingo of cocktail culture, and the forthcoming Lifeline Rule (Spuyten Duyvil), a novel where consonants and vowels alternate one-by-one throughout the book. Since last year, he has been performing his homophonic mystery narrative poem The Dammed (ubu.com) with video by Amy Billharz. Michelle Peñaloza grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. Her poetry can be found or is forthcoming from The Asian American Literary Review, The New England Review, TriQuarterly, Pleiades, Pinwheel, and INCH. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the University of Oregon, Kundiman, Artist Trust, Jack Straw, the Richard Hugo House, and Literary Arts, as well as scholarships from VONA Voices, PAWA (Philippine American Writers and Artists), Vermont Studio Center, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Napa Valley Writers' Conference. She lives in Seattle. Her chapbook, landscape / heartbreak, is forthcoming from Two Sylvias Press on Valentine's Day, 2015. Chelsea Bolan is a fiction writer and poet based in Seattle. She writes a lot about people who long for alternate worlds where they would better belong. In the meantime, they make kites, change genders, cross cultures, play piano, stalk flautists, jump off bridges, and dream of UFOs. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review Online, CutBank, Fourteen Hills, Borderlands, Poetry Northwest, Bayou, The Ledge, and other journals. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where she completed a novel, In the Place of Silence. In 2010 she was Artist-in-Residence at Milkwood International in Český Krumlov, Czech Republic, to further research on a novel, Where Is Here, that is still in progress. In 2011, she was awarded a GAP grant (Grants for Artist Projects) from Artist Trust to work on short stories.