Brook Bhagat

Nearby Universe Poets to Read at the Historic Satellite Hotel

November 9, 2026November 9, 2026 Brook Bhagat

I’m thrilled to share that the first event for my new book will be with three poets from my writers’ group, The Nearby Universe, on Friday, December 4. We’ll be reading in the VIP room at the historic Satellite Hotel, alongside longtime member M.R. Hyde‘s art show opening at the Satellite Gallery. Poets will read from 5- 6 p.m., with book signing to follow; the gallery opening will run until 8. Refreshments will be served.

I’ll read from my brand-new collection of poetry and short stories, Exodus with Red Delicious, to be released just three days before from Unsolicited Press. M.R. Hyde‘s new books are The Reluctant Poet and A Prayer From the Driven: Poems by a Christian.

Amie Sharp will read from her latest collection, Formations of the West, from Main Street Rag Press, and Amber Ridenour Walker will read from her new chapbook, Suburban Gothic, from Bottlecap Press.

Located at 411 Lakewood Circle near South Academy Boulevard and Airport Road in Colorado Springs, the Satellite Hotel has been a mid-century modern landmark since 1969. I’m a Colorado Springs native, and I’ve seen this groovy building since I was a kid. Come to find out it’s even cooler on the inside, with thriving businesses and funky Jetsons-style vibes everywhere. And we’re going to be in the VIP room!

The Nearby Universe is the creative writers’ group for Pikes Peak State College faculty and staff, founded nine years ago by yours truly. We hold monthly workshops and at least one write-in annually. I am forever grateful to them for their support, honest feedback, and friendship, and I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the release of Exodus with Red Delicious. Hope to see you there!

Exodus with Red Delicious

November 4, 2026November 11, 2026 Brook Bhagat

My new book, Exodus with Red Delicious, explores the relative nature of truth, death, and love in poems and stories about volcanoes and entangled particles. The muses on Titan who swim during the day, drinking white Russians in their drippy gauze dresses. A kid selling Guitar Hero on Craigslist. A ghost mouse, a fortune teller, a time-traveling train in Delhi. What it’s like trying to write about a time-traveling train in Delhi when your dad is on hospice. How if you risk everything because nothing means anything, sometimes you get love in the end.

Exodus is an unflinching journey through grief, love, anger, beauty, rebellion, and transformation. It is fiercely feminist and brutally honest, whimsical and heartbreaking, personal and universal.

Unsolicited Press will release Exodus with Red Delicious on December 1, 2026, but you can preorder it now. It is my most personal, most powerful work, and I look forward to sharing it with you!

Preorder Exodus with Red Delicious

“Ghazal for End Times” Featured in South Broadway Press: Autumn 2026 Edition

October 14, 2026 Brook Bhagat

I’m proud to share that my poem, “Ghazal for End Times, or, How to Stay Cozy in the Apocalypse,” has been published in South Broadway Press’s Autumn 2026 issue!

I read this poem live at the Coyoetry series through Concrete Couch, at PPSC‘s Queer Lit Night, almost a year ago, and again at the Arapahoe Community College Literary Festival in February, and began sending it out for publication. South Broadway Press is an independent publisher based in Denver that is known for publishing “weird, gorgeous, and revolutionary poetry,” and I’m thrilled to see my work finally find such a fierce and beautiful home.

South Broadway Press informed contributors that the press received over 800 submissions to the four online editions this year. Only 45 poems were accepted, placing “Ghazal for End Times” in the top 2% of submissions. The poem took over a year to write, and I am grateful to the members of my writers’ group, The Nearby Universe, whose feedback was invaluable in revising it. Read it here: “Ghazal for End Times, or, How to Stay Cozy in the Apocalypse”

A Born-Again Darling: “Fingertips to Her Shoulders Like Wings in Her Sleep”

October 12, 2026October 14, 2026 Brook Bhagat

You can’t get far on the path to becoming a writer without being told to “kill your darlings.” There is value in the well-worn advice. It points to an author’s attachment to a character, sentence, or image, making it difficult to cut, even if it doesn’t serve the poem or story. Stephen King popularized the adage in his book On Writing: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

I don’t exactly disagree with this advice, but “kill” is the wrong word. The delete button is too blunt an instrument for something we wrote that we love for a reason: it’s catching, beautiful, ironic, or powerful. Something tells us we created something valuable, and that something is usually right. Then, we waste valuable time himming and hawing and glancing sideways at the delete button, because writers aren’t killers by nature, even when Stephen King tells them they are.

The right word is “relocate.” I tell my writing students to gently move their darlings to a comfortable, well-lit folder on their desks or computers. The benefit of this distinction is twofold: first, it becomes easier to remove the darling from the poem it doesn’t belong in, knowing we’re not losing it forever. Second, when the day comes that finds the writer at the table with nothing, as it always does sooner or later, we can suddenly remember our ace in the hole: the darlings folder. In there, the discarded gems shine even brighter, without context or competition. The image that didn’t fit in the story or poem it first appeared in could be the seed of a new thing all its own.

This is the origin story of my prose poem, “Fingertips to Her Shoulders Like Wings in Her Sleep,” which was recently published in A Story in 100 Words. The beauty of this darling haunted me, but there was nothing else I liked in the poem it was living in. Eventually, I gave up and relocated the image to the Darlings folder.

No less than two years later, when inspiration was thin one day, I pasted it into its own document. I looked deeply into it. Perhaps the woman is dreaming of what she might become, I thought. What might be holding her back? The image of wings stretched naturally into metaphors involving birds and flight, and I had a prose poem I was proud of in front of me in twenty minutes. Well, two years and twenty minutes, to be exact, but who’s counting?

Read my darling poem in A Story in 100 Words: “Fingertips to Her Shoulders Like Wings in Her Sleep”

Field Notes from the Sabbatical: September 2026

September 22, 2026September 29, 2026 Brook Bhagat

I’m proud to share that Pikes Peak State College has awarded me a faculty sabbatical for fall 2026. Right now, and for a few more precious months, I am a full-time author working on two new books from Unsolicited Press: Exodus with Red Delicious, a collection of poetry and short fiction to be released in December 2026, and I Drink from an Ear: Real Ghazals, a collection forthcoming in December 2027.

Brook Bhagat stands in a lake with her arms open wide — Brook Bhagat, Assistant Professor of English at PPSC and author at Unsolicited Press

Exodus with Red Delicious explores death, grief, loss, and transformation from multiple angles, fictional, personal, and lyrical. While its creation was difficult emotionally, the work of writing it was an animal I was familiar with. The ghazal, however, is an entirely different beast.

The ghazal is an Eastern poetic form with roots in 7th-century Arabia. Its unusual formal constraints have made it notoriously difficult to write in English: my collection will join less than five verified single-author collections in existence.

There is an element to writing anything that is absolutely mysterious. The route to the most powerful poems is not recorded on any map. As poet-songwriter Leonard Cohen put it, “If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often.” Sometimes the lightning of inspiration strikes in a minute, or an hour; every writer knows it can also take much longer.

With ghazals, it has been a different journey than writing fiction or even other poetry. Ghazals need more time, more silence: they can circle for weeks in the sky before uttering a word. Having the luxury of emptiness has helped me make a space for them to land. Not emptiness exactly–there are still bills to pay and weeds to pull and children to pick up from play rehearsal. But not having essays to grade and textbooks to wrangle for a few months has created a small emptiness, a clear space where I am able to stand with my eyes closed for a while, waiting for ghazals.

Before the sabbatical began, I believed deeply in both of these books, in the transformative power of writing creatively, in the heart magic of teaching, and in the significance of the tradition of sabbatical leave in academia. Sabbatical leave provides teaching writers the most valuable gift in the world: time to write, which can mean time to wait for the mystery. A month in, I don’t know how I would have done it without it. Thank you, PPSC!

Unsolicited Press

My gratitude also goes out to Unsolicited Press, especially my editor, Summer Stewart, who’s investing in me, too: believing in me so much she thinks even my future books are going to be good. Trusting me to catch falling ghazals. Reading my drafts carefully enough to know when I should have said John Lennon instead of the Beatles, and when I’m playing fast and loose with em-dashes–which is more often than I’d like to admit.

Finally, it’s worth noting that, on my sabbatical application, I requested to not be relieved of one special duty: facilitating the Nearby Universe, the PPSC employee creative writers’ group I founded almost nine years ago. This group continues to be an integral part of my writing community, and their feedback and support have undoubtedly made both my forthcoming books better. Thank you, Nearby Universe!