The Adams State University Creative Writing Capstone Reading will feature seniors Melanie Bernstein and Cosmo Innarelli with special guest Colorado Poet Laureate Crisosto Apache. The reading begins at 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 22, in the Adams State Xperimental Theatre, located in the Theatre Building. The event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.
Apache will guide writers during a Community Writing Workshop at 2 p.m. Wednesday, April 22 in McDaniel Hall 204. All are welcome.
Crisosto Apache is the current 11th Poet Laureate for Colorado (26-27) and is from Mescalero, New Mexico, on the Mescalero Apache reservation. Crisosto is Mescalero Apache, Chiricahua Apache, and Diné (Navajo). Apache’s clanships are the Salt Clan, born for the Towering House Clan. Apache attended the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and earned an MFA and is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing. Crisosto is also an editor-at-large for The Offing Magazine. Apache’s books are GENESIS (Lost Alphabet), Out-of-Print & Ghostword (Gnashing Teeth Publishing), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s 2023 Betty Berzon Emerging Writers Award and a finalist for the 2023 Colorado Authors League Award in poetry, with a new poetry collection is(ness), from Gnashing Teeth Publishing. Apache is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Crisosto continues to advocate for the Two-spirit/Indigiqueer community for the past twenty years, working in grassroots non-profit organizations both locally and nationally.
Throughout his college career, senior Cosmo Innarelli came to realize the actual reason he writes stories. “Not just writing them for fun – even though that’s what I do every time – but also adding meaning and relatability to each story I write.” Commercial fiction is his first goal. However, he learned that the literary sense is most important when writing stories. “Not only that, but it fuels me to focus on my passion and understand why I keep writing.”
Innarelli genuinely enjoyed writing throughout his college career, but only a handful of his stories made it into his final capstone book. “Those stories and the characters spoke to me in a way that challenged me to take so much time and effort to make sure the story is good and says what I always intended for it to be.”
Melanie Bernstein experiences at Adams State have been wonderful and she is glad that she returned as a non-traditional student. “My professors have been wonderful to work with and they’re very supportive. My inspirations have been the authors that I’ve studied in English classes such as Joy Harjo, Edgar Allen Poe, and Anton Chekhov, to name a few.”
