East Window’s Banned Book Club
presents
Writers on Resistance and Open Mic
Curated by Hillary Leftwich
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
Manuel Aragon is a Latinx writer, director, and filmmaker from Denver, CO. He is currently working on a short story collection, Norteñas. Norteñas is a collection of speculative fiction short stories centered in the Northside, a Mexican and Mexican- American centered part of Denver, and the people, ghosts, and demons that live there. His work has appeared in ANMLY. His short story, "A Violent Noise," was nominated for the 2020 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. He is a 2021 Periplus Collective Fellow, a 2021 NYFA IAP Mentor, and a 2023 Tin House Residency winner. He is also a Colorado Book Award finalist as editor of the anthology, All The Lives We Ever Lived: Vol 2. He is a graduate of NYU’s Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film and Television. His film work - writing and directing - has been featured on MTV, Pitchfork, and Stereogum. He most recently won the CineLatino Pitch Latino Award for Emerging Filmmakers with my web series, Welcome to the Northside, a comedic take on gentrification and Latino displacement in North Denver.
Franklin Cruz is a queer latin poet born in Idaho, raised in Texas, and polished in Denver. Born from an immigrant family, he works at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, is an emcee, and dances. A TedxMileHigh performer, he has taught and performed in the southwest, Peru, Puerto Rico, for universities and environmental leadership camps, and has had poetry in the Denver Art Museum. His work encompasses self love, immigration, culture, nature, and more. Franklin always aims to address intersectional liberation, confronting our complicity to privilege and oppression, and the pressing lesson of specificity over simplicity.