Joe Deany-Braun is the curator of Perelandra Bookshop and author of Young Santa. A “quietly astonishing” debut (Los Angeles Review of Books), Young Santa sketches the life of a would-be saint "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 has garnered national attention for its unique approach to space-making and communion. In 2021, Joe 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 founding Perelandra, Joe specialized in public programming as a bookseller at Boulder’s Innisfree Poetry Bookstore and Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstores. He has been a featured speaker at The Denver Post, Poets & Writers, and the Biennial of the Americas. 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 seasonal 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 the themes above. Hand-picked and shipped with love, these books cast the algorithm back to the void from whence it came.
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. Now more than ever, literary spaces are critical for conceiving systems of equity, sustainability, and compassion.
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, more Jain than djinn, closer to a stoic philosopher than to the stuff of our childhood dreams." - Dan Beachy-Quick, Los Angeles Review of Books