The Reader in Residence
The Reader in Residence serves a three-month tenure in which they simply read—not aloud, but to themself—at the bookshop. In this setting, the reader hones their attention while making literary engagement visible and relevant. They receive a stipend for both sustenance and books. Learn more about the residents and philosophy below.
“Perelandra’s reader-in-residence combines the solitude of the original residency tradition with the community engagement of contemporary ones, into a position that’s physically out in public, but mentally tucked away in a good book.”
— The Colorado Sun
“We kind of just need understanding. We don’t always need proof of it.”
2025
Mary Thomas
Jeff Icenhower
Shawn Bowman - "A smorgasbord of curiosities"
2024
Steve Shafer - "Mouth shut, mind open"
Ricki Ginsberg - "Drop everything and read"
Sam Cranshaw
Matthew Schlief - "Where I get to escape"
2023
Kristy Beachy-Quick - "On learning to read: Proust"
Kristy Leushen
Danielle Parker
Matt Wood
Frankie Rollins
Callahan Woodbery - "Re-reading as re-membering"
2022
Brandi Thomas - "Reading like an animal"
Jeff Chelf - "The pricelessness of personhood"
Elaine Wall
Seth Braverman - "The seed that falls"
Kayla Redd
John Newman
Tobias Bank - "This changes everything"
Kathleen Willard
Lucia Hall
Erica Reid
2021
Rico Lighthouse - "Meaning is what surrounds"
Julia Goolsby - "The diversity of change"
John Flynn - "Time does the deepening"
Robin Walter - "Calling out to ourselves"
Jason Hardung - "The burden of honest work"
Reading is art.
Readers play an integral role in the creative process by which literature makes meaning. The practicing reader, no less than the writer, models an imaginative power that connects human beings across time and space. But twenty-first century readers face both new and familiar challenges to their practice, from access to literary materials to the more recent hegemony of distracting digital infrastructures. For many people, the idea of regular reading is unattainable.
Enter the Reader in Residence. Like other artist residencies, it affords individuals the resources to practice their craft; unlike other artists-in-residence, the Reader is not expected to produce anything but their own attentive presence. By foregrounding the simple act of reading rather than what a given individual “gets out of it,” the Reader in Residence manifests literary engagement instead of value judgment. This is a revolutionary democratic posture in increasingly undemocratic times.
REQUIRED READING
In Defense of Literacy
Wendell Berry, A Continuous Harmony
The Death of the Author
Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text
Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World
Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey
Notes for Young Writers
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
The Experiment
C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism
MISSION
To empower undistracted engagement with diverse literatures.
To nourish literary imagination, empathy and reflexivity.
To keep literary practice visible & viable in the digital age.
VISION
Communities bonded by individuality, openness, and imagination.