John Cotter

Artist-in-Resdience John Cotter presents an artist’s talk, short reading, and conversation about the wages of trauma and the role of art. Join us on Monday, December 11 at 6pm.

John Cotter, a deaf writer from Colorado, spent April of 2016 living and working at a homeless shelter in the great plains. In the grips of his own trauma — diagnosed in his 30s with a strange disease — Cotter found fellowship and new humility among the shelter’s residents, and learned both about what makes us who we are and how to bear better witness. An article he wrote for Guernica Magazine about his experience in the homeless shelter can be found here.

John Cotter is the author of the novel Under the Small Lights. A deaf writer, John’s current project concerns the dynamics of sound and what the world resembles when sound disappears (excerpts in Catapult, Electric Literature, and Open Letters Monthly). In 2016 John was an inaugural fellow at the Lighthouse Writers Fort Lyon residency where he spent a month living and working with recovering addicts at a homeless shelter on the high plains of Colorado. His short fiction has appeared in Puerto del Sol, his poetry in Volt, his comics in Westworld, his art writing in Sculpture, and his literary criticism in Bookforum. He lives in Denver.