East Window’s Banned Book Club
presents
Writers on Resistance and Open Mic
Curated by Hillary Leftwich
Gather with us for an evening centered on writing that speaks directly to the moment we are living in. Julie Carr, Hillary Leftwich, and Crisosto Apache will each read short pieces that reflect their individual approaches to resistance, care, and truth telling. After the featured readings, the floor will open for an optional open mic where attendees can share brief pieces connected to resistance, creativity, or community. Conversation and questions will follow. The night is meant to bring people together through literature, reflection, and shared presence.
Writers on Resistance is a Substack series that invites writers, artists, and creatives to speak directly about how their work functions as resistance. Each piece considers what it means to create in a political climate that increasingly targets artists, diversity, education, and expression. Contributors reflect on the role of art during times of suppression, the pressures they face, and the choices they make to continue speaking, teaching, and creating. The series offers a space for testimony, strategy, and truth from those who refuse to be quieted or erased.
Read the series here: https://substack.com/@hillaryleftwich
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 (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, death worker, and speaks with the dead.
www.hillaryleftwich.com
IG @HillaryLeftwich
Julie Carr is the author of fifteen books of poetry and prose, including The Garden, book one of a trilogy titled Overflow (Essay Press and Pamenar Press 2025), Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West (University of Nebraska Press 2023) and Underscore (Omnidawn Books 2024). Earlier books include Climate, co-written with Lisa Olstein (Essay Press 2022), Real Life: An Installation (Omnidawn Books 2018), Objects from a Borrowed Confession (Ahsahta 2017), and Someone Shot my Book (University of Michigan Press 2018). In 2023 Omnidawn Books reissued her 2010 book,100 Notes on Violence. With Jeffrey Robinson she is the co-editor of Active Romanticism (University of Alabama Press 2015). Her co-translations (with Jennifer Pap) of Leslie Kaplan’s Excess-The Factory and The Book of Skies, were published by Commune Editions and Pamenar Press, respectively. Books two and three of Overflow will be published sequentially over the next few years. Carr has recently collaborated with dance artists K.J. Holmes, video artist and poet Carolina Ebeid, and musician Ben Roberts. With Tim Roberts she is the co-founder of Counterpath Press, Counterpath Gallery, and Counterpath Community Garden in Denver. She hosts the podcast Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone.
www.juliecarrpoet.com
www.counterpathpress.org
https://www.juliecarrpoet.com/return-the-key
Crisosto Apache is from Mescalero, New Mexico, on the Mescalero Apache reservation. Crisosto is Mescalero Apache, Chiricahua Apache, and Diné (Navajo) of 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. Crisosto is also an editor-at-large for The Offing Magazine. Apache’s books are GENESIS (Lost Alphabet)-Out-of-Print & 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 Teeth Publishing. Apache is also a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee.
https://crisostoapache.com
IG: @crisosto_apache