This fall, I had the opportunity to participate in two Boise-based readings. This post covers information and photos from both readings.

MashUp | Boise State University College of Innovation and Design

This September, I participated in the College of Innovation and Design’s MashUp: Little Lectures in an Odd World event series. The series pairs experts in different fields who each present a talk about their research. Afterwards, audience members have to combine the two talks into questions to ask the presenters.

For the September event, the presenters were Shawn Simonson, a Kinesiology professor who discussed spiritual scuba, and Kasey Kennington, a linguist who discussed large language models like ChatGPT.

I was tasked with writing a poem that mashed up both scuba diving and AI to read at the event (sort of an IRL Easter egg). I wrote a poem using ChatGPT where I wrote a line and then it wrote a line; I heavily edited the results. I tasked the audience with identifying which lines where written by a human and which were written by a computer program. It was pretty interesting (and surprising) to hear the results.

Below are a few photos from the event.

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Reading | Ardilla Fusion Art Day at the Erma Hayman House

In October, I participated in a reading and art fair at the Erma Hayman House, a community art center managed by the Boise City Department of Arts & History. 

The art fair was organized by Ardilla Fusion, the brainchild of husband-and-wife-artist-team Susan Lasater and Veiko Valencia. It featured artwork by local artists and readings by local writers, including Christian Winn, Rebecca Evans, Tomas Baiza, Susan Lasater, and myself. A few event photos are below.

Susan Lasater drew portraits of the readers and presented them to each reader at the end of the event. My portrait is below. I love it so much!