Joe Deany-Braun is a bookseller and poet living in northern Colorado. He is the author of Young Santa, a “quietly astonishing” debut (Los Angeles Review of Books) "with pagan traces of Frank L. Baum’s Claus and a spiritual afterlife akin to the mystics" (Chuck Stebelton, Woodland Pattern).Joe’s work at Perelandra Bookshop has garnered national attention for its unique approach to space-making and communion. In 2021, he established the Reader in Residence program, the first artist residency to treat reading itself as a creative act. In 2025, Perelandra was an Emerson Collective partner bookstore finalist.Before Perelandra, Joe specialized in public programming as a bookseller at Boulder’s Innisfree Poetry Bookstore and Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstores. He holds a BA in ecosystem science and an MFA in writing & poetics.
Photo by Olivia Sun / The Colorado Sun via Report for America
Curation
The Wild Carrot Society is a quarterly book subscription rooted in the collection at Perelandra Bookshop. Magic realism, renegade scholarship, pastoral enchantment, the sublime — every three months, subscribers receive three titles that chart a course through these themes.
Theory
When we make embodied contact with literature, we return to the roots of language as a medium: we turn towards each other in a vast field of sentience. This manner of recognizing personhood across generations has profound implications for the way we build communities today.
Poetry
"Young Santa brings together saint and Santa in a way I could never have guessed at before reading this thin, quietly astonishing book... Far from the red-nosed, portly elder tipsy on his own generosity, Young Santa cuts the lean figure of an ascetic mystic." - Dan Beachy-Quick, LARB