Visiting Author - Colleen Morton Busch in conversation with Judy Lorenzen - Smolder
Date and Time
- Friday, Aug 7, 2026 4:30pm - 6pm
Location
Francie & Finch Bookshop
130 S. 13th St.
Category
Details
Join us as we welcome Ex Ophidia's 2025 winner for the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Prize, Colleen Morton Busch, as she presents her book of poetry Smolder. Colleen will be joined in conversation by writer Judy Lorenzen. We will see you there!
About the Book:
Smolder takes its title from a diagnosis my husband received 20 years ago, of smoldering multiple myeloma—a treatable but incurable blood cancer we’d never heard of before. At that time, the prescribed treatment was: Don’t do anything. Just watch and wait for myeloma to cause problems. Sometimes the title comes before the work. This lush word—smolder—plucked from the natural world and set down amid arid clinical terms and bewildering medical advice captivated me. I immediately wanted to write a collection of poems entitled Smolder. I did write some of the poems. But then I spent the next two decades working in prose. Eventually, I found my way back to poetry and its ability to relate a story and accrue meaning the way only a poem can. I had my title, Smolder, but now I had the embodied experience of twenty years to spark and sustain the poems. Smolder explores the many kinds of fire blazing inside a life. Fires of rage, grief, lust, loss, uncertainty and acceptance. They’re love poems, elegies, prayers, howls, meditations. Together, the poems reveal what it’s like to live with the open flame of a tender heart
About the Author:
Colleen Morton Busch is the 2025 winner of the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Prize, an annual poetry book contest by Ex Ophidia Press. Busch’s winning collection Smolder is a collection of poems about that many kinds of fire blazing inside life. Busch is the author of “Fire Monks: Zen Minds Meets Wildfire” (Penguin Press, 2011) that was named best book of the year by Publisher’s Weekly. Her prose and poems have been published widely, from Willow Springs, Poet Lore, and Belleview Literary Review, to Orion, The Washington Post, Tricycle, and the Ekphrastic Review. Smolder is her first poetry collection
For more about her work, visit www.colleenmortonbusch.com
About Guest:
Judy Lorenzen, a former children's librarian and English teacher, is a poet, writer and teaching artist, who lives on a farm in Central City, where she enjoys the vast beauty of the Great Plains every day of her life. Her works appear in journals, anthologies, newspapers, magazines, and on calendars and websites. Her first book, Turning Back to Her Love Pages, was published in May 2025, Kelsay Books. Her second book, Seasons of Reverence, a poetic memoir of her life on the Great Plains, released June 2026.
