Middle Creek Publishing & Audio

22/08/2024

21/08/2024

Winner of the 2024 Colorado Book Award for Poetry, Erin Block’s ( )comments on Echolocation by Sage Marshal ( ). Forthcoming October 2024. Preorder on our website to reserve your copy!

15/08/2024

I am pleased to inform you that How You Walk Alone in the Dark, by Erin Block, is a Finalist for The WILLA Literary Award for Poetry from Women Writing the West.

The WILLA Literary Awards, named in honor of Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Willa Cather, recognizes the best in literature, featuring women’s or girls’ stories set in the North American West that are published each year. Women Writing the West (WWW), a nonprofit association of writers and other professionals writing and promoting the Women’s West, underwrites and presents the nationally recognized award annually at the WWW Fall Conference.

Here’s a link to the site: https://www.womenwritingthewest.org/awards/the-willa-literary-award/

08/08/2024

Always nice to see MCP merch in the wild!

05/08/2024

One of Sarah Giragosian’s poems, “Fowl At Large,” from Mother Octopus (2024, Middle Creek Publishing & Audio) is featured on The Slowdown today.
The host, Major Jackson, says of “Fowl at Large”: “todays poem suggests a wildness of being that fires away from timidity and into the realms of the self as glamorous and unpredictable, as if you had the whole world shook.”

Read or Listen to it on their website. Link in our bio.

Link: https://www.slowdownshow.org/episode/2024/08/05/1176-fowl-at-large-by-sarah-giragosian

29/07/2024

Available for preorder now!

In *Gone*, Steven Wesley Law captures the essence of the American wilderness with a voice that merges the precision of a journalist and the soul of a poet. His essays, rich with personal reflections and vivid descriptions, transport readers through activities like backpacking, sea kayaking, surfing, and more, offering a visceral experience of America’s diverse landscapes. Law’s storytelling, particularly his evocative accounts of Desert Bathing, kayaking in the Pacific Northwest, and the exhilarating pursuit of the perfect wave, invites readers to slow down and savor the beauty of nature. This masterful exploration of awe, wonder, and reverence makes *Gone* a must-read for anyone seeking to experience the transformative power of the natural world.

Steven Law has been exploring and writing about the American West for more than 30 years. He’s the author of “Polished”, a collection of poems about exploring the Colorado Plateau by foot and by raft. He’s a Contributing Writer for Panorama: the Journal of Intelligent Travel. His travel writing has won numerous Gold and Silver awards at the Travelers Tales Solas Awards for Best Travel Writing. He is host and co-producer of Poetry Snaps!, a radio segment highlighting poets of the Colorado Plateau and American Southwest, for KNAU, Flagstaff, Arizona’s NPR station. He has worked as a farmer, short-order cook, waiter, journalist, travel writer, newspaper editor, magazine editor, Grand Canyon river guide, overland guide, and public relations coordinator. He lives in northern Arizona with his wife and two daughters.

20/07/2024

Also, in the Denver region, Amy Wray Irish, author of Breathing Fire (2021, Middle Creek Publishing & Audio) will be reading after this Open Mic at 7. Featured readers are Amy Wray Irish and Valerie A Szarek.

20/07/2024

Sarah Giragosian, author of Mother Octopus (2024, Middle Creek Publishing & Audio) will be hosting an amazing workshop via Orion Magazine! Check it out and grab a copy of Mother Octopus today.

Stay tuned to our news and releases via our newsletter.

20/07/2024

If you are in the area this Sunday, you have a chance to hear Linda Russo read from her new award-winning collection, “the verdant”!

16/07/2024

Matthew Cooperman’s flowing collection of poetry, Wonder About The has just been reviewed by Jami Macarty in New Pages.

Macarty says: “As Cooperman’s poems prompted me to consider “what the river’s for,” I thought about the Diamond-Water Paradox which poses the question: If we need water to survive and we do not need diamonds, why are diamonds expensive and water cheap?”

Wonder About The highlights the beauty and fragility of the Cache La Poudre River (Colorado’s last un-dammed and free-flowing river) and the damages we have inflicted upon it which have come back to haunt us.

Link to the interview in the Linktree in our bio.

Link:

https://www.newpages.com/tag/reviews/

12/07/2024

Colorado Book Award for Poetry winner, Erin Block, was interviewed by Noah Davis for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. Read her story now on their blog!

The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership is a united front dedicated to amplifying our partners’ voices to advance America’s legacy of conservation, habitat, and access.

In 1912, Roosevelt said, “There can be no greater issue than that of conservation in this country.” While in the political arena, he succeeded in making conservation a top-tier national issue. T.R. had the foresight to address these issues still so significant to sportsmen today, understanding that if we want to safeguard critical habitat, productive hunting grounds, and favorite fishing holes for future generations, we must plan carefully today.

29/06/2024

Upcoming poetry reading for the Colorado Poets Center include two MCP&A poets, Matthew Cooperman, and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer!

If you can attend you’ll be treated to a few styles of amazing poetry that prove the depths of our outer and inner ecosystems.

.trommer

23/06/2024

MIDDLE CREEK PUBLISHING & AUDIO ZOOM
LITERARY WORKSHOP SERIES

TONIGHT! SUNDAY JUNE 23RD, 6-8PM MDT

Exploring the Art of Show & Tell:
Writing poems of nature and human nature.

[link in bio the bio Linktree]

When we enter the natural world with a pen in our hands, there’s an invitation to notice not only what is happening all around us, but what is happening inside us. The practice of writing poems can be a bridge between these two worlds. In this 2-hour playshop, we’ll read poems by some of the finest nature poets of our time that balance sensory detail (show) and
emotional/intellectual observation and wonder (tell), we’ll talk about how they work, write poems of our own, discuss process, and have a chance for optional sharing.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer co-hosts Emerging Form (a creative process podcast), Secret Agents of Change (a surreptitious kindness cabal) and Soul Writer’s Circle. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app for your phone. Her poetry has appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, and Carnegie Hall stage. She has 13 poetry collections, including Hush, winner of the Halcyon Prize. The newest is All the Honey. She’s been writing a poem a day since 2006 and she shares these on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils.

22/06/2024

Just got to keep celebrating! Colorado’s Winner of the Colorado Book Award for Poetry! Woohoo!

humanities

22/06/2024

Middle Creek Press’s Vice President of the Board (of the newly forming nonprofit) also took Winner of the Colorado Book Awards for Nonfiction with Reading Colorado: A Literary Road Guide!

22/06/2024

And a sticker! A big milestone for Middle Creek Publishing! Congratulations to for winning the Colorado Book Award for Poetry! How You Walk Alone in the Dark is available via Amazon or via the MCP& A website. Get yours now and enjoy some award winning Colorado based poetry. We feel it’s a great step in recognition of the type of ecopoetry we enjoy. We hope you do as well. If you’ve read it, comment below about it and congratulate Erin Block!

22/06/2024

Colorado Book Awards! Here to celebrate on her status as Finalist with How You Walk Alone in the Dark, and hoping her book places as winner. But one of three finalists isn’t bad either!

20/06/2024

Erin’s collection How You Walk Alone in the Dark is her first collection of poetry, and is one of three finalists for the Colorado Humanities Book Award for Poetry 2023.
This Friday we will be at the Colorado Book Awards ceremony to see if she moves from one of three Finalists to Winner!

“Block has stated, “As I age, it increasingly seems like all of my life is about learning how to die”. Her poetry addresses this loss, loneliness, and remorse as she wonders, “how does one survive the hunger of someone else?”

Like a meditation, her poetry reveals that she needs to take life one footstep at a time: “One / after another / after another / in each other’s footprints” (13). This is how we hang on through the winter, “like we all have this year” (13). Block seeks companionship, but instead choses isolation as a means of self-preservation as she watches, “everything we love turn to ice” (15).

Block speaks of past loves and her weariness. Her isolation is a survival tactic, because “we think they’ll all be the same, / like you think all men’ll be /after you get rid of a lemon” (18).

Block not only grieves upon the page, but also creates a call for environmental justice. This is where she gains the title of her collection, How You Walk Alone in the Dark. In “Where the Body Is”, she contrasts her Midwest childhood amid cornfields, to where she has chosen her home on “the north-facing slope” of her Colorado mountains. She explains a western controversy regarding reintegration of big predators into the community. This poem addresses mountain lions, for “Everyone has a story about a lion here” (30); but it could easily be replaced with grey wolf or grizzly. “Everyone has an opinion… Because in the West they’re like water, / worth fighting for or against. / And I can tell which side you’re on / by how you walk alone in the dark” (30). Block learns to walk aware, tread lightly, and leave no trace.

Erin Block is an accomplished author. Her essays can be read in Cutbank Literary Journal, River Teeth, and Guernica. She has two nonfiction nature writing texts, The View from Coal Creek (Whitefish Press, 2013) and By A Thread (Whitefish Press, 2016).”

—Shelli Rottschafer

20/06/2024

A small haiku with unique arrangement. Martin is a poet who finds immense beauty, wisdom and solace in the smallest of things, and singular moments, often capturing them in small, acorn sized poems. His collection, Bijoux, collects many of his small poems together in one volume. He is presently working on another collection of what he calls micro-poems, as well as some larger collections of his poetry.

15/06/2024

COMING SOON IN 2024

The Sanctuary
by Sofia Batalha

In this collection of revived Portuguese eco-mythologies, Sofia invites us moderns to reconsider our relationship with the living landscape. The invitation is a profound gesture of soul-recovery, for the ideologies of denial underpinning modernity do not give credence to such stories; there is no seeing, no affection for, and no chance for participation with the other-than-human world or the spiritual dimensions holding all worlds together. Our souls yearn to consciously travel the intricate webs of intersubjective relationships weaving coherence from chaos while all around, there throbs a mutual craving for attention and enlivenment. These stories are rooted here. Storied landscapes alive and pulsing with meaning invite participatory ways of living in and with the world that are as ancient as we are.

As a gift, an offering, and an invitation then, the stories collected here become a sacred sanctuary, a place to upend and recover from modern ways of thinking and perceiving. In calling to repressed and overlooked aspects of reality, most especially those that exist beyond our human-made temporal frameworks, these stories also nourish lost and denied aspects of ourselves, raising them from the shadows.

—DR. JACQUELINE KURIOS, PHD,
Northumberland, March 2024.

14/06/2024

MIDDLE CREEK PUBLISHING & AUDIO ZOOM
LITERARY WORKSHOP SERIES
SUNDAY JUNE 23RD, 6-8PM MDT

Exploring the Art of Show & Tell:
Writing poems of nature and human nature.

DONATION-BASED Suggested Donation: $25 - $250

CALLING ON OUR COMMUNITY TO HELP MCP RAISE FUNDS FOR OUR TRANSFORMATION INTO A NONPROFIT LITERARY ORGANIZATION.

[link in bio the bio Linktree]

When we enter the natural world with a pen in our hands, there’s an invitation to notice not only what is happening all around us, but what is happening inside us. The practice of writing poems can be a bridge between these two worlds. In this 2-hour playshop, we’ll read poems by some of the finest nature poets of our time that balance sensory detail (show) and
emotional/intellectual observation and wonder (tell), we’ll talk about how they work, write poems of our own, discuss process, and have a chance for optional sharing.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer co-hosts Emerging Form (a creative process podcast), Secret Agents of Change (a surreptitious kindness cabal) and Soul Writer’s Circle. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app for your phone. Her poetry has appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, and Carnegie Hall stage. She has 13 poetry collections, including Hush, winner of the Halcyon Prize. The newest is All the Honey. She’s been writing a poem a day since 2006 and she shares these on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils.

14/06/2024

A poem from the freshly released collection, the verdant, by Linda Russo.

With her unique pronoun, ( , and organic layout and pacing the poems of this collection are immersive and invitational in perspective.

09/06/2024

”How do these biologically and imaginatively intimate poems manage to weave reckonings with whiteness, q***r love across borders, the loss of a beloved mother, human history and deep time, climate collapse, migration, and the end of empire with the worlds of wings, fins, and paws of our animal kin? I don’t know, but I’ll be studying to learn from the brilliant leaps and sonically stitched imagery of these haunting, beautiful poems that stun into blazes of feeling and thought. In their traverse of worlds and speakers and species, we learn the poetic magic of empathy, of metaphor, of seeing deeply into other beings and into our own animal bodies. Sarah Giragosian has written poems we need in this moment of precarious cruelty and persistent wonder.

—Anne Haven McDonnell, author of Breath on a Coal, winner of the Halcyon Prize (2022)

Available now ($18) at our website (www.middlecreekpublishing.com) or on Amazon.com.

***r ***rlove

09/06/2024

Rain Taxi has just published a review of Matthew Cooperman’s collection, Wonder About The. Grateful to Joe Safdie for reading, writing and submitting it and being a vital part of the greater MCP community!

Link in the Linktree in our bio.

https://raintaxi.com/wonder-about-the/

09/06/2024

MIDDLE CREEK PUBLISHING & AUDIO ZOOM
LITERARY WORKSHOP SERIES
SUNDAY JUNE 23RD, 6-8PM MDT

Exploring the Art of Show & Tell:
Writing poems of nature and human nature.

[link in bio the bio Linktree]

When we enter the natural world with a pen in our hands, there’s an invitation to notice not only what is happening all around us, but what is happening inside us. The practice of writing poems can be a bridge between these two worlds. In this 2-hour playshop, we’ll read poems by some of the finest nature poets of our time that balance sensory detail (show) and
emotional/intellectual observation and wonder (tell), we’ll talk about how they work, write poems of our own, discuss process, and have a chance for optional sharing.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer co-hosts Emerging Form (a creative process podcast), Secret Agents of Change (a surreptitious kindness cabal) and Soul Writer’s Circle. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app for your phone. Her poetry has appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, and Carnegie Hall stage. She has 13 poetry collections, including Hush, winner of the Halcyon Prize. The newest is All the Honey. She’s been writing a poem a day since 2006 and she shares these on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils.

07/06/2024

Forthcoming from Middle Creek Publishing & Audio / Middle Creek Press!

NONFICTION
The Sanctuary, by Sofia Batalha

POETRY
Accidental Hope by Diana Kurniawan
Echolocation by Sage Marshall

FICTION -SHORT STORIES
The Ghost Town Collectives by Brittney Corrigan

FICTION - NOVELLA
Catbird by Julia Marie Davis

As well as:
POETRY
The Next Noise Is Our Hearts by Kathleen Willard
Cover reveal with amazing art by artist Johanna Mueller!

03/06/2024

Middle Creek Publishing had a good presence at the 35th annual Denver Poetry Rodeo at the Mercury Cafe yesterday. did a lot of planning and organizing as well as reading the collective prompt poem from Podeo participants at the reading later in the evening. Sold some books and introduced three of our Fledge Poetry Chapbook winners for a reading from each. Later in the night MCP founder David Anthony Martin got to read some of his own poetry as a featured reader.

03/06/2024

MIDDLE CREEK PUBLISHING & AUDIO ZOOM
LITERARY WORKSHOP SERIES
SUNDAY JUNE 23RD, 6-8PM MDT

Exploring the Art of Show & Tell:
Writing poems of nature and human nature.

[link in bio the bio Linktree]

When we enter the natural world with a pen in our hands, there’s an invitation to notice not only what is happening all around us, but what is happening inside us. The practice of writing poems can be a bridge between these two worlds. In this 2-hour playshop, we’ll read poems by some of the finest nature poets of our time that balance sensory detail (show) and
emotional/intellectual observation and wonder (tell), we’ll talk about how they work, write poems of our own, discuss process, and have a chance for optional sharing.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer co-hosts Emerging Form (a creative process podcast), Secret Agents of Change (a surreptitious kindness cabal) and Soul Writer’s Circle. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app for your phone. Her poetry has appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, and Carnegie Hall stage. She has 13 poetry collections, including Hush, winner of the Halcyon Prize. The newest is All the Honey. She’s been writing a poem a day since 2006 and she shares these on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils.

03/06/2024

Middle Creek Publishing & Audio's Zoom Literary Workshop Series returns with Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer as guide! Check out the event on our Eventbrite page.

With a sliding scale from $25 to larger donations, your registration will help MCP&A in it's transition to nonprofit status this year. The process has begun, but we'll need a lot of community support to make it through and do the work necessary to keep putting out the work we have scheduled this year as well as the new work of nonprofit organization, and finding and filling our key Board of Directors positions.

We have SO much in store coming this year as far as new publications, but this workshop is an amazing opportunity to join our community and be inspired and soulfully encouraged to bring your voice and experience to the world through the literary arts.

Join our newsletter to stay abreast of upcoming 2024 releases, literary workshops and events, our annual contests, and the progress and impact Middle Creek Publishing & Audio is making in it's metamorphosis to Middle Creek Press!

Writing poems of nature and human nature, a workshop and reading with Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and Middle Creek Publishing