Visiting Author – Colleen Morton Busch in conversation with Judy Lorenzen – Smolder
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 author of the nonfiction book Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire, selected as a best book of the year by Publisher’s Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Barnes and Noble. In Smolder, winner of the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds prize in poetry, forthcoming from Ex Ophidia Press, she returned to her first writing language to explore the many kinds of fire blazing inside a life. Her poems and prose have been published widely, from Willow Springs, New Orleans Review, and Poet Lore to Orion, The Washington Post, and Yoga Journal, where she was a senior editor. She’s an alumna of Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Community of Writers, and Tin House Writers Workshop. She grew up in the heartland and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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. She is working with a publisher presently on her second book, Seasons of Reverence, a poetic memoir of her life on the Great Plains, which should be out later in 2026.