Poets Cynthia Parker-Ohene and Kevin Phan will be reading from their own works during the Mountain/West Poetry Series event in Longs Peak Room at the Lory Student Center on March 31 at 7:30 p.m.

This event will be live streamed on Zoom. The link will be available on the Creative Writing Reading Series program website the week of the event.

The Creative Writing Reading Series is spearheaded by the Department of English in collaboration with the College of Liberal Arts and Colorado State University Libraries.

A project of the Center for Literary Publishing, the Mountain/West Poetry Series publishes two poetry collections authored by U.S.-based poets living west of the Mississippi River every year.

Parker-Ohene’s forthcoming poetry collection, “Daughters of Harriet,” takes inspiration from the life of Harriet Tubman. It is a dedication to black consciousness, interrogating love, remembrance, humanity, the legacy of mistreatment and ownership of the Black body and Black identity.

Phan’s debut poetry collection “Dears, Beloveds” uses the prose poem to reflect and internalize the manifestation of grief. Phan meditates on his mother’s death to bone cancer, the severity of the current political climate, and the subtler moments of life, asking readers to balance loneliness with beauty, tenderness with pain in this journey toward healing.

Cynthia Parker-Ohene

Cynthia Parker-Ohene is an abolitionist, cultural worker and therapist, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Saint Mary’s College of California, where she was the Chester Aaron Scholar for Excellence in Creative Writing. Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Kweli, and Green Mountain Review, among others, and has been included in the anthologies Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South. She has received fellowships and support from Tin House, Callaloo, the Postgraduate Vermont College of Fine Arts, Juniper and the Hurston-Wright Foundation.

Kevin Phan

Kevin Phan is the author of Dears, Beloveds. He attended the University of Iowa and the University of Michigan. His poetry has previously appeared in Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, The Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, and other journals. He lives in Colorado, and for a living, works with the earth. Photography, biking, cooking and organic gardening are a few hobbies.

About the Creative Writing Reading Series

Each year CSU’s Department of English hosts the Creative Writing Reading Series that sees authors of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and hybrid works come to campus and interact with the Fort Collins community on all things literary. The reading series provides students, staff and community members the opportunity to listen to, meet and speak with published authors. For some, it’s a matter of networking or a chance to meet their favorite writer, and for others, these reading events offer a unique experience of discovering something brilliantly new.