Date: Saturday, April 29
Time: 7 pm
Place: The Mercury Cafe, 2199 California Street
It’s the 10-year anniversary of the Fbomb, the first and longest running flash fiction reading series in the country, and we are thrilled to celebrate at our original home with a very special Fat Tuesday reading and release at The Mercury Cafe with featured readers Jomil Ebro, Krystal Summers, special guest Kona Morris, PLUS a one-night-only opportunity to buy signed copies of After the Rapture before the official release date!
The Mardi Gras season is upon us, celebrating the life, death, and resurrection theater, 40 days in the desert, rising again after the rapture. It reminds us to balance lightly on the edges of change with flair and panache, and it invites us to try on new masks as we celebrate our history and look to our future with hands thrown high, like a gorgeous parade float holding our Fbomb community and rolling into the creative horizons.
Join us live on Tuesday, February 21 from 7:30-10 pm at The Mercury Cafe! . Open mic spots are 4 mins and first come first served. We will pass the hat in gratitude for the Mercury Cafe.
Masks/flair encouraged!
Featuring Jomil Ebro! Jomil Ebro is a professor of Composition, Creative Writing, and Journalism, Philosophy and the Humanities at Arapahoe Community College. He is also an ABD Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature and Consciousness Studies at the University of Iowa, where he also trained at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. At New York University, he received an M.A. in Communication and an M.A. in Cultural Studies. His poetry and critical essays include “Seizure of Happiness, Or, Two Almonds” in Cobra Milk (Fall 2020); “A State of Otonomy: Henry Miller’s Obscene Autobiographical Form” in the Modern Horizons Journal (June 2018); “The Calligraphy of Trees: Towards an Ethics of ‘Mysreading’ in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy” in the Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies Vol. 3, Issue 2 (February 2018); “I’ll-iterate Thinking: Poetry, Perception, and the Dissolution of Center/Periphery Duality” in the Peripheral Matters Journal from the City University of New York (CUNY, Fall 2017); and “The Nearness of Elsewhere: Place and the Ethics of Remembrance in The Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin and Li Po” in the Modern Horizons Journal (June 2012).
He resides in Golden, Colorado where laughter, verve, and hope come in the form of his partner and son, walking by purple sunsets, steeping two different tea bags, trying to imitate Paul Simon’s guitar playing, and watering the long vineyards of desire. Jomil thinks in all sincerity and without hyperbole that poetry—in particular, the way it can teach us to give a name to the nameless so that it can be thought and sensed more fully—that poetry, as such, can save the world.
Featuring Krystal Summers! Krystal Summers is a writer and nanny more magical than Mary Poppins. When she isn’t taking children through chalk paintings, she’s outside somewhere with her dog, relaxing at her home in Denver with her husband, or starting more stories than she finishes. She will be published in the forthcoming Listen to Your Skin anthology from Q Publishing in 2023.
Special guest Kona Morris! Kona Morris is a writer, storyteller, and comedian. She has performed at storytelling events for The Moth, and most recently for the live RISK! show at The Hotel Cafe in Los Angeles. She was a regular on Monday Night Live L.A., a starring cast member of Denver’s Live Drunk History Comedy Troupe, and the Founder and Head Writer of the satirical comic book company Godless Comics. Kona has been featured at events around the world, and her stories have appeared in a variety of publications. https://www.instagram.com/kona_morris/
https://www.youtube.com/@konamorris
https://www.facebook.com/konamorris/
Hosted by Nancy Stohlman! Nancy Stohlman is the author of six books including After the Rapture (2023), Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities (2018), The Vixen Scream and Other Bible Stories (2014), The Monster Opera (2013), Searching for Suzi: a flash novel (2009), and Going Short: An Invitation to Flash Fiction (2020), winner of the 2021 Reader Views Gold Award and re-released in 2022 as an audiobook. She is a fan of the short and the strange, and her work has been anthologized widely, appearing in the Norton anthology New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction and The Best Small Fictions 2019, as well as adapted for both stage and screen. She teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder and holds workshops and retreats around the world. Find out more at http://www.nancystohlman.com
In The Monster Opera, a writer travels to Mexico City in search of a new story, but the monsters are already waiting for her. The more she writes, the more their whereabouts, as well as their desperation, are revealed. The result is a gothic literary noir, a genre-bending novel-meets-libretto that combines recitative with dialogue, aria with prose, and ultimately asks the question: Who owns a story?
The Monster Opera started as a “flash novel,” a phrase coined by its writer, Nancy Stohlman, then mutated into a postmodern, compressed extravaganza that has grown into a hearty full-length production under the command of Stohlman and composer Nick Busheff. Originally staged as part of the book’s release in 2013, The Monster Opera is back for one night only, with the original cast, at the Mercury Cafe.
“It’s about a writer who steals stories,” explains Stohlman. “She steals the wrong story in search of a new story from these opera singers, and she’s telling their story and they’re trying to get it back. And they’ve been in hiding, and as she’s writing their story, she’s revealing them…. It’s about who owns the story.”
The presentation takes place at 7:30 p.m. October 30 at the Mercury, 2199 California Street. For tickets, $12 to $15, and information, visit nancystohlman.com/monsteropera.
Nancy Stohlman 
