East Window Journal of Written and Visual Arts
Release Party
We're getting ready to release East Window's Journal of Written and Visual Arts Volume 3 into the wild and we're having a party! Join us for live readings, performances and refreshments.
Our Journal is a space where raw truths and the arts of resistance collide, ignite and illuminate. In one way or another, all of the works gathered in this volume subvert icons of power. Some do this by interrogating the narratives that govern childhood and desire, others do so by unpacking the dissonances of memory and the precarity of citizenship. Some contributors celebrate forms of euphoria that arise when a body is allowed to exist on its own terms, despite the many social and cultural forces that conspire to dictate which of our stories will endure and which will not. Others move across geopolitical and emotional terrains, mapping a child’s experience of war with devastating intimacy; a poetic meditation reimagines the concept of belonging beyond dispossession. Tonight we’ll be honoring the many brave and brilliant contributors whose words and images forge new connections, provoke, disrupt, inspire, and heal. Journals will be available for purchase.
Volume 3 contributors include:
Melody Melamed is an Iranian- American, Brooklyn-based photographer who explores themes of gender identity, sexuality, and the human experience through contemporary portraiture. She holds a BFA from UCLA and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts (SVA). Her powerful images are recognized for their authenticity and provocative nature. Melamed’s work has been featured in publications like Paper Magazine and The New Yorker, aiming to provoke thought and initiate dialogue on gender and self-discovery. Over the past five years, Melamed has been working on her most personal project yet, The Book of Skin: Shangri-la, which focuses on "gender euphoria", the feeling of joy that trans and other genderqueer people can experience when their gender expression aligns with their gender identity. Melamed has been working with transbodies and trans identities for more than a decade, exploring the emotionality behind transitioning and stepping into one’s true self.
Jay Halsey, born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, has lived on the Colorado Front Range since 2007. His poetry and prose have been published in many online journals and print anthologies. His photography has been featured as cover art for several poetry collections and novels, and exhibited in the US and France. In 2023, Agape Editions published the second edition of his photography and multi-genre writing collection Barely Half in an Awkward Line. He is currently submitting his second completed collection of hybrid pieces, Bury Us From Sun, and is working on a third collection of poetry. His writing and photography are an exploration and voice for the disenfranchised.
Rory Fitzgerald Bledsoe is an interdisciplinary scholar, writer, and curator. She has shown artistic work and performed at various galleries and institutions including EFA Project Space (New York City), Boston Center for the Arts, and Distillery Gallery (Boston). She founded and directed the experimental domestic gallery project Space One Two One (SOTO) when based in Boston. She then completed an artist residency at Flux Factory (Queens, New York) where she also curated shows. Fitzgerald Bledsoe currently lives in Boulder, Colorado, while teaching courses in the Media Studies department at the University of Colorado (CU) on digital culture and politics, surveillance studies, media history and policy, remix cultures, and the legal gray areas produced by media technologies. She founded Space__Space, an experimental art space, in 2024 in East Boulder. Space__Space focuses on cultural issues, especially those produced by advancing technologies. She has presented papers at various conferences, including the International Communication Association and Surveillance & Society. She holds a JD from the University of Alabama, a BA from Rice University, and is currently a PhD candidate in Media Studies at CU.
Lyric Haworth is a queer teen poet, filmmaker, and storyteller with a passion for raw emotion and vivid imagery. Featuring themes of love, transformation, trauma, and living in a world on fire, Lyric has been featured at the CCIFFY film festival, published in Screaming at America: An Anthology of Disobedience, and performed in Slay the Runway, and so much more.
Jessica Lawson (she/her/hers) is a Denver-based writer, teacher, and queer single parent. Her debut book of poetry, Gash Atlas, is a nightmarish cartography of violence from Columbus to Trump, a work that Joyelle McSweeney says “turns the logbook of patriarchy inside out.” Gash Atlas was selected by judge Erica Hunt for the Kore Press Institute Poetry Prize. Lawson’s chapbook,Rot Contracts explores the heated aftermath of family rupture through the cold lens of the law, asking what we have left when our most primal bonds are broken. Twice nominated for the Pushcart, Lawson’s work has appeared in The Iowa Review, The Rumpus, Entropy, Paperbag, Dreginald, and elsewhere.
Crisosto Apache, 2026 poet laureate of Colorado, is from Mescalero, New Mexico, on the Mescalero Apache reservation. Crisosto is Mescalero Apache, Chiricahua Apache, and Diné (Navajo). Apache’s clanships are the Salt Clan, born for the Towering House Clan. Apache attended and earned an MFA at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing. Apache is also an editor-at-large for The Offing Magazine. Apache’s books are GENESIS (Lost Alphabet, out-of-print) and Ghostword (Gnashing Teeth Publishing), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s 2023 Betty Berzon Emerging Writers Award and a finalist for the 2023 Colorado Authors League Award in poetry, with a new poetry collection, is(ness), from Gnashing TeethPublishing. Apache is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and continues to be an advocate for the Two-spirit/ Indigiqueer community for the past twenty years, working in grassroots nonprofit organizations both locally and nationally.
Leroy F. Moore, Jr. is founder of the Krip-Hop Nation and has more than twenty years of activism, journalism, writing, and lecturing on race and disability. He is a Black disabled poet and author of three books on Black disabled issues—from poetry to children’s books to his graphic novel, Krip-Hop Vol. 1, published in 2019. Moore is a founding member of the National Black Disability Coalition and helped start organizations like the Disability Advocates of Minorities Organization and Sins Invalid. Leroy has won many awards for his advocacy, including from the San Francisco Mayor’s Disability Council under Willie L. Brown and the KQED Local Heroes program, and he was chosen for a 2022 United States Artists award for his writing. In 2021, UCLA recognized Leroy’s work in hip-hop and disability, accepting him as a PhD candidate in their anthropology department.
Suzi Q. Smith is an award-winning poet and author who lives in Denver, Colorado. 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 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. While primarily known for her poetry, Smith is also an organizer, an educator, a singer-songwriter, a playwright, and an interdisciplinary creative. She has created, curated, coached, organized, and taught for over twenty-five years, touring throughout the United States. Smith is also a Pushcart-nominated essayist with an MFA in Creative Writing from Randolph College. Recipient of the 2023 Beacon Award for Excellence in Teaching, she is currently a faculty member with Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and the Writing Director with Chateau d’Orquevaux in France. As an organizer, Smith is the recipient of the 2024 Social Impact Artist Award from Bonfils-Stanton Foundation and Denver Arts & Venues, as well as the 2018 Denver Foundation Swanee Hunt Leadership Award, and she has worked with arts and cultural organizations for over twenty-five years, in Denver and around the US.
Tara Evonne Trudell (Santee Sioux/Rarámuri/Xicana) is a multimedia artist, poet, photographer, videographer, creative consultant, prayer bead-maker, and trained Special Victims/District Attorney Advocate. Tara weaves handmade paper beads, poetry, photography, film, and audio components into her work to express her creative visions that address the social issues she sees as a continuance of generational trauma needing to be shared in all communities. Tara offers her personal experience of being a grandmother, granddaughter, daughter, mother, sister, and future ancestor as an opening to bear witness to others who are struggling with their own intergenerational abuse and trauma. Tara shares her own healing journey for others to relate to and join her in the navigation of changing painful and harmful narratives. Tara is on a lifelong journey in the reclamation of her identity to earth and spirit by remembering her Indigenous connection and ceremonies. As an artist, she represents and advocates for earth and humanity to stimulate action and a sense of community care that needs to be shared between all nations.Tara has done extensive prayer bead workshops with women survivors of sexual assault, human trafficking, and domestic violence, as well as with community and youth groups, immigrants, and refugees.
Usama Alshaibi was born in Baghdad, Iraq, and spent his formative years living between the United States and the Middle East. He’s an active filmmaker and artist who works in documentary and fiction, often blurring the line between the two. His films have screened widely at underground and international film festivals, media exhibitions, and museums including Sundance TV, Boston Underground Film Festival, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, and the PBS WORLD Channel. He’s received grants from organizations such as the MacArthur Foundation, the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, the Playboy Foundation, and Creative Capital. Usama lived in Chicago for over seventeen years and worked as a digital archivist at the Chicago History Museum and a radio host and producer for Chicago Public Media. Currently, Usama is a Teaching Professor at Colorado State University.
Valerie Hsiung writes between worlds, where language meets ritual and abolition meets afterlife. Her books dissolve the borders of poetry, prose, and philosophy into a single listening body, drawing on diasporic, ecological, and metaphysical inquiry. She is the author of eight full-length books, including The pedestrian (Nightboat Books, forthcoming 2026), 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), and outside voices, please (CSU). Her writing has appeared in Annulet, BathHouse Journal, The Georgia Review, mercury firs, The Nation, Paperbag, and Verse, and her work has been presented internationally at Double Change (Paris), Hyle (Athens), and the Jaipur Literature Festival. Recipient of support from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, PEN America, and Lighthouse Works, she teaches revolutionary mysticism and writing at the limits of language at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Born to Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in Cincinnati, Ohio, she now lives in the foothills of Colorado.
Oli Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, photography, performance, installation, and writing. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in the Art Department (Photography) at California State University, Los Angeles. His intersectional research and interdisciplinary projects conceptually focus on queerness, notions of passing, visualizing the performativity of gender, explorations in appropriation, performative interactions with the public as a collaborator, and visualizing other representations of the AIDS pandemic while referencing historical movements in gender, racial, and feminist histo- ries. He curated the exhibition, The Great Refusal: Taking on New Queer Aesthetics at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). He is a part of the monograph Confronting the Abject, named from his research- themed class that he co-taught with Catherine Opie at SAIC. His forthcoming publication, Papi, archives the AIDS pandemic through his queer family in Chicago during the 1980s. He also just finished his short documentary film, LYNDALE, exploring toxic masculinity, cyclical familial trauma and queerness, currently distributed by Video Data Bank (VDB). Rodriguez has screened, performed, lectured, and exhibited his works internationally and nationally.
This event is sponsored in part by The Colorado Health Foundation