2/8/17: Local Writers Night: Katy Grabel, Rick Haltermann and Brinn Colenda - FREE Katy Grabel is a former newspaper reporter and freelance journalist whose award winning short story “Woman by Chemistry,” won first place for fiction from New Millennium writings. Her short prose “Tips for Magician Assistants” was published in ZYZZYVA. Her creative writing has been greatly influenced by her parent’s career in professional magic – her father, Lee Grabel, manned the last big traveling magic show in the country. Her memoir Girl in a Top Hat is about traveling in their magic show when she was fourteen. She is the Daughter of the Human Cannon Ball and loves Taos because she fits right in! “Girl in a Top Hat” is a literary coming-of-age memoir about traveling in her father’s magic show when he launched his last bid to be a Vegas headliner. She was a shy, awkward fourteen-year-old with a craving for grandeur who believed her father’s return to show biz would bring her stardom as his assistant. Hitting the road with a floating piano and disappearing horse, her enthusiasm started to wane when she realized the quest for fame was full of costs and the road full of trouble: wayward roadies, crashed show truck, and the increasing unhappiness of her mother – the human cannon ball – who missed their old life in the suburbs. As tension mounted between cast members, she saw her father in a new light and her loyalty was tested. Rick Haltermann is a photographer musician, jazz DJ at KTAOS, African dance teacher and Director of the Association of Noetic Practitioners (www.noeticbalancing.com). Through the combination of original writing, poetry, quotations, art images and photography, the “Curriculum of the Soul” is a guide that discusses the tools we are given, how to apply them to suffering, to being in the world, to spirituality and living a balanced life culminating in a soul-centered view of death. He currently lives in northern New Mexico where he spends as much time outdoors as possible. Brinn Colenda is a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and a retired Lieutenant Colonel. He served in a variety of flying and staff assignments around the world from Southeast Asia to Bolivia. He was an instructor pilot with the U.S. Air Force, the German Air Force, the Dutch Air Force, Great Britain’s Royal Air Force and was awarded command pilot wings by the Bolivian Air Force. He has advanced degrees in economics and business, and had a post graduate fellowship at the Hoover Institution for War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. He has published articles in professional journals and his local newspaper. His first political-military thriller novel, “The Cochabamba Conspiracy,” won awards from the Military Writers Society of America and the Southwest Writers Association. His second thriller, “Chita Quest,” explores MIA/POW issues as well as military families under stress. It won awards from the Florida Authors and Publishers Association and first-place from the New Mexico-Arizona Book Cooperative. He is currently working on his third in the series, planned for release in Spring, 2017.