POSTPONED: Blue Cactus Press Anniversary Reading & Open Mic

PLEASE NOTE: THIS EVENT IS POSTPONED.  NEW DATE TBD.

Please join Blue Cactus Press in celebration of three years of publishing under the belt, and another year already underway! On April 30, we’re welcoming poets and authors from our last year of publishing, as well as those whose work we’re featuring in the coming year.

Featured Readers include Robert Lashley, Gina Hietpas, Michael Haeflinger, Jonah Barrett, and more!

Following our featured readers, we’ll host a short open mic to celebrate art, community and damn fine literature.

About the Readers

Jonah Barrett is a filmmaker, writer, and multimedia artist. His writing can be found in Creative Colloquy, Everyday Genius, Lit.Cat, OlyArts, and the bestselling Portland anthologies City of Weird and Dispatches From Anarres. Jonah has directed and written three feature films, a dozen-ish short films, and four web series. He has worked as a literary magazine editor, journalist, marketing director, assistant director, script supervisor, and art conservator. Currently he works at a hundred year-old theater with a number of ghosts. His favorite genres are creature features and romantic comedies, and he has found they are pretty much the same.

Gina Hietpas is a self–taught poet, born and raised in Tacoma, Washington. Nowadays, she lives outside Sequim, Washington, on a small farm with her husband, a few cows and a passel of chickens. Her land is a habitat for elk, deer, coyotes and an occasional bear. It is, for the most part, a peaceful coexistence. Several seasons as a backcountry ranger for Olympic National Park shaped her deep connection to wilderness. She has worked professionally as the director of a non-profit and a middle school teacher. Now that she has retired, she focuses her efforts on writing. She has studied with Kelli Russell Agodon, Alice Derry, Holly Hughes, Susan Rich and Kim Stafford. Hietpas’ work has appeared in Minerva Rising, Tidepools, Spindrift and New Plains Review.

Originally from the Midwest, Michael Haeflinger is the author of two chapbooks, Love Poem for the Everyday (2011) and The Days Before (2014), both from Dog On A Chain Press. In 2016, he released Let’s Don’t Be Crazy, a spoken word and music album. He is the recipient of the Rutgers-Camden Award for Community Engagement (2013), The Amocat Award for Community Engagement (2017), and a Tacoma Arts Initiative Program Award (2015). He is the Executive Director for Write253, a literary arts organization in Tacoma, WA.

Robert Lashley is a writer and activist whose  was a 2016 Jack Straw Fellow, Artist Truat Fellow, and a nominee for a Stranger Genius Award. He has had work published in The Seattle Review of Books, NAILED,  Poetry Northwest, McSweeney’s, and The Cascadia Review. His poetry was also featured in such anthologies as Many Trails to The Summitt, Foot Bridge Above The Falls, Get Lit,  Make It True, and It Was Written. His previous books include THE HOMEBOY SONGS (Small Doggies Press, 2014), and UP SOUTH (Small Doggies Press, 2017). In 2019, The Homeboy Songs was named by Entropy Magazine as one of the 25 most essential books to come out of the Seattle area.