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The Poets' Co-op Spring 2008 Open Reading Series will be held on Thursday, February 7th , March 6th & May 1st at the Loveland Museum on the corner of Fifth & Lincoln. Readings will be downstairs at the Foote Gallery/Auditorium from 7:00 - 9:00 p.m. Complimentary snacks will be graciously provided by HENRY'S PUB (234 E. 4th St.).

Readers & listeners embrace all styles of original poetry and range in experience from first time readers to published and polished “professionals.” Poets can sign up to read the night of the reading or ahead of time by email. Our Fall Series Featured Readers represent a diverse mix of some of Colorado’s finest poets.

Our Featured Reader for Thursday, February 7th is Amy Irish.

Amy Wray Irish's chapbook of poems and art --- Creation Stories--- will be available from Green Fuse Press this spring. Join her for poetry, art and live music (aka a release party) at the Mercury Café, April 18, 2008 th at 7pm.

Amy earned a BA in English from the University of Iowa , then attended the University of Notre Dame, where she was Managing Editor of the Notre Dame Review and a teacher of undergraduate poetry classes while she earned her MFA in creative writing. She now lives in Colorado with her husband, also a writer, and their son. Amy 's work has been seen in 100 Words, Apocalypse, Ariel, The Bend (formerly Dánta), Neologisms, the Notre Dame Review, Poetry Motel, River King Poetry Supplement and Wazee Journal. She was featured poet in Wazee's Spring 2003 edition and won 1 st place in Chicago 's Hirshfield Memorial Poetry Contest. Amy's novel-in-progress, titled Her Fertile Crescent, is set in ancient Iraq amidst goddesses, belly dancing and sacred sexuality.

Please check out www.myspace.com/amywrayirish for more information or contact her at lunablue_girl@msn.com.

Our Featured Reader for Thursday, March 6th is Vortex Drive with Katherine West & Jeff Finer with dancer Ixchel Whitcher.

After living most of her adult life in Latin America, Katherine West now makes her home in the mountains near Loveland, Colorado. She teaches poetry workshops at the Loveland Museum, Aims Community College, and The Colorado Contemporary Music College in Ft. Collins. She also works as contributor and poetry editor for CRONE magazine and as a member of the editorial collective of Green Fuse Community Press. She has published one bi-lingual chapbook Native Speakers in 1998, and in 2006 published a full-length collection of dreams poems, Scimitar Dreams, with original artwork by Tom Katsimpalis Curator of Interpretation at the Loveland Museum. Her new collection The Bone Train, published by Howling Dog Press, is due out in 2008. Her work also appears on a regular basis in New Verse News, an online poetry newspaper, as well as in numerous journals such as White Pelican Review, Lalitamba Poetry Journal, Omega, Calyx Journal, Crone, and Poets Against War.

Jeff Finer has been accompanying poets in performance since 2003. First on bottleneck and more recently on lap-style slide guitar, Jeff has performed with poets in both ensemble and solo performances at the Loveland Museum, The Dairy Center for the Arts, The Art Center of Estes Park, Stage C at the Cameron Café in Denver, and on CCTV54's series on local poets. In 2008 Jeff will expand his efforts, co-teaching two Loveland Museum workshops that focus on performance, one with poet Hilary DePolo in her musician-meets-poet series, and another as part of the Green Fuse Summer Poetry Festival.

Ixchel Whitcher has been a part of the dance scene in northern Colorado since 1990. She has taught ballet in Longmont, Greeley, Fort Collins, and Denver at private and non-profit studios as well as Colorado State University and the University of Northern Colorado. Ixchel has performed with several northern Colorado groups, including the title roles in Cinderella and Coppelia, the Sugar Plum Fairy as a guest with Classical Dance Theatre, as well as many contemporary ballet and modern dances. Her choreography has been performed by several local companies in productions in Denver, Greeley and Fort Collins and has been selected repeatedly for inclusion in the annual New Visions Dance Festival. Recently Ixchel choreographed a production for the Loveland Museum Gallery. She currently teaches at Canyon Concert Ballet, Mountain Kids/Dance and the Westin Arts Academy – all in Fort Collins.

Together poet Katherine West, slide guitar player Jeff Finer and dancer Ixchel Whitcher they make up the poetry-in-performance group Vortex Drive.

Our Featured Reader for Thursday, May 1st is Cameron Scott.

Cameron Scott was born in Denver, CO in 1977 and graduated from Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA having received the first annual English Department Award for Excellence in Creative Writing. He received a Master of Fine Arts, Poetry, from the University of Arizona in 2004, where he received an honorable mention in the 2002-2003 Poetry Center/Academy of American Poets student poetry contest. In 2004 he was selected as one of two alternates for the 2004 Artist in Residence program at the Grand Canyon National Park. He taught a creative writing workshop at Voices 110 Degrees, a writing program for at risk youth in Tucson, AZ for two years before taking a road trip in search of his roots and trout. He currently lives and works in Crested Butte, CO as a fly fishing guide at Dragonfly Anglers, for poet David Rothman and Conundrum Press, and participates in local performance poetry readings as part of a group called Wild Word.