Cycles of Words and Music: An Evening with Heidi Kraay and Nick Jaina

Name: Cycles of Words and Music: An Evening with Heidi Kraay and Nick Jaina
Start: 2025-11-07T19:30:00-07:00
Location: Hemingway Western Studies Center

Schedule

Fri, 07 Nov, 2025 at 07:30 pm

UTC-07:00

Location

Hemingway Western Studies Center | Boise, ID

Come celebrate the release of the second edition of "12 Lifetimes: A Century Cycle" by Boise State professor and writer, Heidi Kraay. The evening will include musical performances and readings by Nick Jaina and readings by Heidi Kraay.
This event is free and open to the public.
Priase for "12 Lifetimes"

"The form is fascinating, spacious, and inciting. The form (and Table of Contents, which feels a poem in itself) reflects the wisdom learned from a life (or 12!). Reflected too is the ancient philosophy that we learn compassion/wisdom only through loss and suffering. There is really no other way through the human condition."
– Elisabeth Sharp McKetta, author of "Edit Your Life"
About Heidi Kraay
Playwright and writer-across-disciplines Heidi Kraay examines the link between brain and body on personal, global and mythic scales. Plays include three exploring the hidden monsters inside us: Take Me Away, see in the dark, How to Hide Your Monster, additional full-lengths, co-devised projects, plays for young audiences and shorts. Dramatic work has been presented in Boise, regionally, in NYC and internationally, recently through the Valdez Theatre Conference, Boise Contemporary Theater and The Liberty Theatre Company. Projects in other disciplines include 12 Lifetimes: A Century Cycle, a memoir-adjacent book in the ancient century form, and Drown to Resurface, an album of poem-songs. In 2024, Heidi served as one of two inaugural Boise City Writers-in-Residence and this spring traversed inner/outer wildernesses at Ketchum’s Hemingway House. Heidi holds an MFA from California Institute of Integral Studies and is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America. www.heidikraay.com
About Nick Jaina

Nick Jaina is an author and musician currently living nomadically.
His 2015 memoir Get It While You Can was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. His work has appeared in McSweeney's, Atlantic Monthly, Wilderness House Review, Somnambulist, Oregon Journal of the Humanities, and many other places. He has composed music scores for feature films, such as the indie comedy All Sorts and the forest fire documentary Elemental. He also co-founded a ballet collective in New York City, in which he was the musical composer and worked with dancers from Juilliard and New York City Ballet and performed works at the Baryshnikov Center and BAM Center for the Arts.
His recent book, SPEKTRUM, is a literary re-creation of an immersive light and sound exhibit of the same name that he co-created in the Santa Cruz Mountains in 2018.