Mixed Taste: At Home is where even the most mismatched subjects find common ground in an interactive lecture series that can go pretty much anywhere. On Wednesday nights at 7PM, two speakers get twenty minutes each to enlighten participants on unrelated topics, without making any connections to the other. It is only as participants begin to ask questions that these talented, sometimes hilarious, speakers start to take our highly engaged audience on an adventure of words with twists and turns that eventually bring the two together in extraordinary ways. 

 Co-curated by MCA Denver and the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Mixed Taste: At Home will bring together favorite speakers from years past live from their living rooms to yours.

This week:

• 7/29: Napping & Slovenian Zombies  |  Featuring Maya Kroth & Nancy Wadsworth

Each evening will conclude with an original poem inspired by the topics performed by some of Denver’s best poets, including Suzi Q. Smith, Brenton Weyi, Mahogany, and James Brunt. 

This six-week series will be free with registration, and accessible via YouTube live on Wednesdays. Please join us for laughs, intellectual gymnastics, and community-building through a fun, fascinating cultural discourse.

Maya Kroth has spent nearly two decades in journalism, during which she has interviewed British neo-grunge bands, an eccentric Tijuana architect, the leader of the Honduran congress, an ultra-ultra-orthodox rabbi, Guatemalan weavers, an octogenarian madam, a Spanish sword-maker, Catalan puppeteers and more. She studied the siesta in Spain as a Fulbright fellow and reported from five countries on assignment for outlets including Foreign Policy, TheAtlantic.com, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor and PRI’s The World. Previous Mixed Taste lecture topic: Celery in 2019.

Professor Nancy Wadsworth specializes in the intersection of politics, identities, popular culture and political theory. She is the author of Ambivalent Miracles: Evangelicals and the Politics of Racial Healing, and numerous articles on race and religion in American politics. In recent years, her interest in zombies as a political metaphor led to research on the Trans-Universal Zombie Church of the Blissful Ringing in Slovenia, from which this talk is inspired. Previous Mixed Taste lecture topics: Machiavelli in 2009 and 2014, Carl Jung in 2010, Tammy Wynette in 2011, Thomas Jefferson in 2012, and Merle Haggard in 2016.

Brenton Weyi uses the power of word and performance to cultivate humanity. A son of Congolese immigrants, he is a first-generation essayist and award-winning creative polymath. Informed by travel to over 70 nations, Brenton’s work blends narrative, philosophy and history to examine how we build ethical societies. His professional journey began in Thailand and Central Africa, where he used writing as a healing modality for victims war. Brenton’s poetry and poetic essays have been read worldwide and he was a founder of the award-winning Almighty Ink poetry and Step One dance. He is an Inaugural Playwrights’ Group member at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, a Truth Be Told storytelling GrandSlam Champion, a proud member of Playback Theatre West & Storytellers Acapella, and a TEDx speaker and lead organizer. He has been featured in INC Magazine, LA Times, KGNU, and others.