Socially Distant Mother Denver

During this stressful and surreal time, we are committed to finding ways to connect through the power of our personal stories and shared experiences. Although LTYM Denver has been rescheduled for July 30th, we were thrilled to bring you a livestream of Socially Distant Mother Denver on Saturday, April 11th! Stay tuned for details about Socially Distant Mother Boulder on May 2nd– ticket sales coming soon! 

You can purchase a discounted $10 ticket to view a recording of this virtual celebration of storytelling and motherhood here.

It is our great pleasure to introduce you to the talented cast of
Socially Distant Mother Denver!

Amanda Cherry

Amanda Cherry is so grateful to return to Listen to Your Mother for a third season. She lives in Boulder with her partner, Matt, and her five-year-old, Gavin. She teaches language arts at Southern Hills Middle School. Given that she spends most of her time around her 11-year-old students and her five-year-old child, her main hobbies include being ignored and repeating herself. Her best days include coffee, connection, sunshine, and wine.

Danae Davison

Danae is mother to three. Her middle child experiences multiple disabilities and is the heart of all her family’s most difficult and magical adventures together. Danae found writing as a way to re-think the tragic predictions of the doctors and find a different kind of hope. When her daughter was two, she wrote a play with five other moms about raising kids with disabilities called “Fierce Love.” Every show was sold out and she has been writing with other moms ever since. Today she is proud to write with a mom’s group in Boulder whose children have a range of neuro-diversities. Lastly, Danae’s daughter has outlived the doctor’s predictions and just celebrated her seventh birthday.

Carrie Esposito

Carrie Esposito moved to Denver eight years ago from New York City where she was an English teacher, Literacy Coach, and finally Assistant Principal of an all-girls school. Now, she’s writing fiction and has three daughters, aged 11, 8 and 4, so in one day she hears about the latest on Tik-Tok, boys who eat boogers, and an imaginary skunk. She hopes her novel, No Way to Fall Off This Earth, set in India, will be on the stands one day. For now, you can read her short stories which have been published in The Georgia Review, Mused, and Little Rose Magazine. She’s also received an honorable mention from Glimmer Train for one of her stories. You can read more about Carrie’s writing at www.carrieesposito.com and can follow her on Twitter @carriebesposito where she posts about books, stories, and essays she loves.

Lisa Lane Filholm

Lisa Lane Filholm is a former high school English teacher, mother of two almost-fully-grown sons, and the author of Beyond Mama Bear: How to Survive the Balancing Act of Parenting Teenagers and Teenagers Suck: A Memory Book for Parents During the Awkward and Awful Years. She brings both titles to life on stage for parents and educators, at venues ranging from school auditoriums to local bars. She also freelances as a voiceover artist, announcer and emcee. She does stand-up comedy, loves her stand-up paddle board, and works at a stand-up desk. Websites: beyondmamabear.com lisalanefilholm.com

Jane K. Glenn

Jane K. Glenn is a Denver-based writer and editor. A professional learner by trade, she studied comparative literature at Hamilton College and documentary filmmaking at the Maine Media Workshops. Her career has followed a passion for education and the arts through roles in filmmaking, educational media, academic publishing, and her current role designing online graduate programs for renowned universities. Jane also loves writing and performing comedy, music (cello), and volunteering with organizations that specialize in therapeutic services for foster children, birds of prey, and equine therapy. As a mother of two young children, Milo and Lucia, Jane struggles to fill her copious amounts of free time. She manages to do so by tromping around in nature with her husband Tom, snuggling her kids and dog, and writing her first manuscript: a nonfiction work that explores food’s role in American post-war pop culture, The Joy of Eating (ABC-CLIO, January 2021).

Stacey Hutson

Long long ago, back in 2016, Stacey was an ad copywriter, a published magazine author, a food blogger at healthystacey.com, an aspiring health coach, and a karaoke superstar. She had work published in New You magazine, Paleo Magazine, TheList.com, and Hubspot.com. She wrote witty and inspirational ad copy for clients like Blue Bunny ice cream, Mara Natha nut butter, Green Toys, Enjoy Life, Fisher nuts, and Revlon. Then, she had kids. And now, she’s “mom” 24/7, by far the toughest job she’s ever had. Born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, she and her family moved to Colorado a year and a half ago — a life-long dream to move west, realized. Today she lives in Golden with her husband, toddler and (fairly) newborn baby. They spend most of their time reading piles of library books on the couch, mitigating tantrums, and taking breaks for dance parties.

Sally Kurtzman

Sally Kurtzman, originally from Hawaii, came to Colorado to attend Loretto Heights College. She then attended John Carroll University in Cleveland for her MA. Kurtzman aught at Arapahoe Community College for 30 years with a few years at DU in the Women’s College. Named one of Denver’s 150 “movers and shakers” when the Rocky Mountain News folded, she has worked in recycling helping to get Denver curbside service. She now does a monthly collection at the Montclair Rec Center of various items for area shelters. She’s an avid reader traveler, and writer for the local Lowry Magazine, The Aviator. She and her husband Jim live in Lowry with two dogs and a cat,
Lulu.

Drew Sorrells

Drew is a Colorado native who never complains when it snows and plays a sport for every season. She has an artisan spirit and is a pro at multi-tasking. Drew decided to leave her career in elementary school and is now an award winning commercial and residential interior designer. Her amazingly talented son Coury lives locally, and her two step kids live in New York and Scotland. She can never outsmart her Director of Research, English major husband who cooks for her every night. They live in old town Longmont, and currently are training their 2 cats for Westfalia road trips. Her website is: Adue Interiors.

Sunna von Christierson

Sunna (“Sun”-“uh”) grew up in Santa Barbara, CA and moved to Denver 10 years ago. She met her pilot husband 9 years ago when he hit on her in the lotion aisle of a Whole Foods. Yes, you guys, that stuff really happens. Sunna has a 2-year-old girl and a 4-year-old boy who think that when Mama goes pee, it’s ideal family hang-out time, yay! After long detours through a 10-year career as a wind energy developer and a never-ending career as a stay-at-home mom, Sunna couldn’t ignore her writing hobby any longer. She is a freelance copywriter, maintains a blog called Things They Forgot to Mention and a cobwebbed photo project called The Pecking Orders involving a tiny toy chicken she took photos of around the world. She is currently shopping around a children’s book series she wrote with her son and working on a memoir about her experience with motherhood, mental health, and self-care.

Your LTYM/Socially Distant Mother Denver Production Team: 

Stephanie Sprenger

Stephanie Sprenger is a writer, producer, music therapist, and mother of two daughters. Her work has been published in O Magazine, The Washington Post’s On Parenting, Brain, Child Magazine, Cosmopolitan.com, Redbook.com, the Huffington Post, and Scary Mommy, among other places, and she (infrequently) blogs about the imperfect reality of motherhood at Mommy, for Real. She is also co-editor of The HerStories Project, a writing and publishing community for women at midlife. Stephanie lives for sunny weekends and Disney vacations, and in between those moments, she fuels herself with coffee, yoga, kickboxing, hot toddys, and snuggles from her eight- and thirteen-year-old daughters.

Megan Vos

Megan Vos was a 2018 LTYM Boulder cast member, and joined the production team in 2019. A New Hampshire native, Megan has lived in Boulder for fifteen years. She taught in Denver Public Schools before leaving the classroom to stay home with her first daughter nine years ago. When she’s not writing during the pre-dawn hours, you can find Megan skiing with her family, listening to Harry Potter audio books with her eight-year-old, and justifying yet another trip to Starbucks with her five-year-old. Megan shares her writing at familygrowsup.com, and her work has been published in Motherscope magazine.

Jessey Smithwick

Jessey Smithwick started her Listen To Your Mother love affair as an awestruck audience member and is thrilled to be a part of the 2020 production team.  She is originally from Nebraska but is happy to call Colorado her home and has recently embraced the idea of attaching “I Love CO” bumper stickers to her car.  After 20 years in the nonprofit sector, Jessey realized her dream of starting her own business as a Wellness Coach and Holistic Health Practitioner.  You can find her at The Wellbeing Path where she works passionately with her clients but only sporadically on things like marketing, social media, and budget-balancing.  Jessey is the proud mom of an amazing son, Ryan, as well as the bonus mom to a few other wonderful souls.  She has been a professional bellydancer for the past umpteen years, teaching in the Denver metro area, traveling to various parts of the country to perform, and co-producing shows wherever she can.  Though fueled with great love, Jessey’s attempts at regular self-care, downtime, and being a wife are humorous and mediocre at best.

And a huge thanks to our incredible LTYM Denver local sponsors: Surge Kickboxing, Ladder Creative Graphic Design for Print and Web, Shredder Urban Ski and Snowboard School, Hops and Pie Pizzeria & Craft Brew Taproom, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, Lutheran Medical Center, the mama’hood, Parisi Pizzeria, Trattoria e Vino, and Raven Inspections.

In the coming weeks, we will share information on the services our local sponsors are currently providing during quarantine, and how you can continue to support them during this unprecedented and disruptive time for business owners.

Are you a local business owner interested in becoming a Socially Distant Mother/LTYM Denver Sponsor? Contact us at ltymboulder @ gmail.com.

We can’t wait to virtually connect with you on April 11th for Socially Distant Mother!

Best,

Stephanie, Megan, & Jessey

**LTYM Denver has been rescheduled for Thursday, July 30th at the Oriental Theater, and tickets are currently on sale here. 

Interested in the show? Don’t miss an announcement and subscribe to our newsletter here.