About Us

FolkVoice uplifts individuals and communities by offering opportunities to showcase how marginalized people in Colorado express themselves through their traditions, informal behavior, and creative artifacts. We offer programs, workshops, and educational materials that celebrate the infinite variety of creativity past and present in the region.

FolkVoice began in the fall of 2023 with the Comics For A Better World initiative, a student-led research project illustrating the lives and experiences of student parents. Inspired by Vermont Folklife’s award-winning series on migrant farmworkers, folklorist Dr. Sandra Mizumoto Posey created  Applied Feminist Folkloristics: Comics for a Better World as an independent study course in which students could learn interviewing and collaborative methods that resulted in short comic zines representing the stories of actual student parents on campus. While a formal class did not result from this independent study, the project’s significance was recognized by grants from the Provost’s Office and Dreamer U.S./Immigrant Services to continue the creation of zines. Neither of the students who led each series had formal art training but by implementing Macarthur Fellow, Cartoonist, and Professor Lynda Barrie’s approach in which everyone can discover their inner visual artist to represent meaningful stories in comic form, both student fellows progressed quickly and created multiple zines telling student stories in their own words.

FolkVoice seeks to elevate marginalized voices and creativity in Colorado by empowering a wide range of genres that fall under the folklore umbrella, from personal experience narrative, zines, yarnbombing, yard and car art, dance, to occupational lore and more. To complement and encourage the flourishing of people and their creativity, FolkVoice offers public programs in the form of events, gallery showings, and workshops. Volunteer and internship opportunities abound to take part in or initiate projects through FolkVoice, enabling students in non traditionally vocational majors to gain hands-on work experience in their areas of passion that align with FolkVoice’s primary mission.

Our Team

Cricket Malament – Co-Founder, Project Director and Board President

Cricket considers themself a folklorist in training, and they hope to begin pursuing a master’s degree in the fall of 2025 (location TBD). In addition to their work with FolkVoice, Cricket is an illustrator and fiber artist who perpetually seeks to celebrate traditional expressive crafts with expansive evolutionary possibility. 

Sandra Mizumoto Posey, Ph,D. – Co-Founder, Board Member

All-around volunteer- in-the-trenches who tends to ramble a bit much. Folklorist, illustrator, stamp carver, writer, Profesor in the Gender Institute of Teaching and Advocacy at MSU Denver. More at SandraPosey.net. Suggested epitaph: “She said YES too often. Now would be the time to stop asking for more, but who knows, she may answer affirmatively from beyond.”