Curated by the Literary Ladies
Toni Oswald & Sarah Elizabeth Schantz
Friday's Fable Releases Anxiety in
the Mosh Pit of Empowerment
$5.00 Suggested donation, no one turned away for lack of funds
Featuring: Suzi Q. Smith, Natalie Hodges, Nancy Stohlman, Shannon Malloy
Visual Art: Kelsey Cruz-Martin
Music: Max Davies
Toni Oswald is a writer, singer, and visual artist who has performed and shown her work across the United States and Europe. She has released four albums under the altar ego The Diary of Ic Explura & writing publications include The Oyez Review, Bombay Gin, Heroes are Gang Leaders Giantology, The Tattered Press, Zani UK, HOAX & Shame Radiant. She is currently working on a novel about a girl clown set in the 1950s entitled The Gorgeous Funeral, as well as a collection of short stories set in Los Angeles called Dying on the Vine. Her book Sirens, was released by Gesture Press in 2020. She likes gold teeth, cats, and trees, and lives with her husband Max, and their cats Kiki Pamplemousse Fontaine and Charlie Chaplin in Boulder, Colorado.
Sarah Elizabeth Schantz is primarily a fiction writer living on the outskirts of Boulder, Colorado with her family in a Victorian-era farmhouse they rent from the city where they are surrounded by open sky, century-old cottonwoods, and coyote. Her first novel Fig debuted from Simon & Schuster in 2015 and was selected by NPR as A Best Read of the Year before winning a 2016 Colorado Book Award. She is currently working on a collection of short stories titled Tales of Dead Children and two novels, Roadside Altars and Just Like Heaven. She teaches creative writing as an adjunct at Naropa University, faculty for Lighthouse, and through her own workshop series and author services, (W)rites of Passage.
Suzi Q. Smith is an award-winning poet, author, interdisciplinary artist, music maker, and dreamer of dreams who lives in Denver, Colorado. While primarily known for her poetry, Suzi is also an organizer, an educator, a singer-songwriter, playwright, and interdisciplinary creative. She has created, curated, coached, organized, and taught for over 25 years, touring throughout the United States. The author of poetry collections Poems for the End of the World, A Gospel of Bones (winner of the 2019 Electric Press Award), and the chapbook collection, Thirteen Descansos, Smith is the Lead Editor for Creative Nonfiction for Revolute! Literary Magazine. Smith is also the co-editor of two anthologies, Tell It Slant: An Anthology of Creative Nonfiction by Writers from Colorado's Prisons and All the Lives We Ever Lived, Volume I, both Finalists for the Colorado Book Award.
Born and raised in a Korean-American family in Denver, Natalie Hodges has performed as a classical violinist throughout Colorado and in New York, Boston, Paris, and the Italian Piedmont, as well as at the Aspen Music Festival and the Stowe Tango Music Festival. She graduated from Harvard University and writes about music, science, religion, racial politics and cultural assimilation, and Korean and Korean-American history. Her first book, Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time, was published by Bellevue Literary Press and was longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award. She is currently at work on a novel about postwar Korean immigration to Colorado.
Nancy Stohlman is the author of six books including After the Rapture (2023), Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities (2018), The Vixen Scream and Other Bible Stories (2014), The Monster Opera (2013), Searching for Suzi: a flash novel (2009), and Going Short: An Invitation to Flash Fiction (2020). Her books have been awarded in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, The Foreword Indies, The International Book Awards, Reader Views Book Awards and the Colorado Book Awards. Her stories have been anthologized widely, appearing in the Norton anthology New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction and The Best Small Fictions 2019, as well as adapted for both stage and screen. She teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder and holds workshops and retreats around the world.
Shannon Malloy is a neurodivergent, crip poet. She studied poetry at the College of Santa Fe and English Lit and Sociology at University of Denver, though after an accident where she was internally decapitated, a traumatic brain injury erased most of that education. She has been writing poetry for as long as she can remember, but after she regained some of her brain power post-injuries, shifted from love angst and depression based work to poetry that centers more around trauma—from sex, gender, and emotional trauma, to the trauma that causes and lives in a broken body. She has battled mental illness and addiction for much of her life. She has found writing as a way to process tragedy and answer, “Why me?” She believes poetry is her way to connect to and give a voice to other survivors, but also often to make others as uncomfortable as she is. She lives in Denver with her crazy pups, Gertie Stein and Fanny Howl. She comes with her own trigger warning.
Kelsey Cruz-Martin is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans writing, sound, sculpture, and print. Her work explores themes of experiential knowledge, ancestral lineage, the voice, and the relationship between language and the body. Interested in the voice as both a tool of transmission and a marker of culture and identity, Cruz-Martin merges seemingly disparate subjects to challenge conventional perceptions of the public and private, interior and exterior, and human and non-human forms. Through the visceral power of repetition, she confronts the fragility of the body and reflects on the cyclical nature of life and death. Often examining rituals and belief systems, Cruz-Martin investigates how these frameworks adapt and persist alongside humans during times of uncertainty. Working with clay, metal, sound, and light, she creates immersive installations that encourage deep listening and immersion. Her recent work focuses on protective patterns, human behaviour, and bodily boundaries. Kelsey Cruz-Martin (b. 1991, Walyalup, Fremantle, Western Australia) is a UK based artist. She completed a BA (Hons) in Fine Art at Bath School of Art and Design in 2018. Selected exhibitions: Clouds of Abstract Information, 2024, +1ART, Osaka, Japan, HERE, NOW, BayArt, Cardiff, 2024, A Flowing Body of Snake, 2023, SHIFT, Cardiff, Stunning, Fierce & Yellow Vol.2, The Auxiliary, Middlesborough. She was awarded the Culture West Creative Freelancer Grant, 2024, a-n Artist Bursaries, 2023, Developing Your Creative Practice, Arts Council England, 2022, Scottish Sculpture Workshop residency, 2022. She is currently artist in residence at Cardiff Met University, on the Freelands Studio Fellowship 25/26.
Max Davies is known for his diverse musical work on guitar and as a producer and multi-instrumentalist. His music has been featured in Artforum, Guitar World and Guitarist magazines, at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the American College Dance Festival, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and the Everest Awakening benefit album. He has worked with a variety of artists, musicians, and writers including: Thurston Moore, Anne Waldman, Lydia Lunch, Toni Oswald, Clark Coolidge, Cecilia Vicuna, Eleni Sikelianos Gregory Alan Isakov, and many others.
FRAME is funded in part by the Boulder Arts Commission / City of Boulder
Photography: Dona Laurita
