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Lit Fest 2025
Type: Poetry clear filter
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Friday, June 6
 

9:00am MDT

Writing Beyond Walls: Resilience and Difficult Subject Matter
Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse
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Writing can feel overwhelming, especially with challenging themes. When daunting themes leave us frozen, that's when it's time to get your game plan on. In this workshop, we'll practice exercises to help navigate obstacles in our writing, whether mountains or molehills. We'll learn techniques to tackle both big and small challenges, making difficult subjects work for us, regardless of genre or skill level. All skill levels are welcome.
Speakers
avatar for Hillary Leftwich

Hillary Leftwich

Instructor
Hillary Leftwich is a neurodivergent, multimedia writer and the author of Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock (CCM Press, 2019 and Agape Editions, 2023 new edition), Aura (Future Tense Books and Blackstone Audio Publishing, 2022), and Saint Dymphna’s Playbook (forthcoming... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205
  Fiction   Nonfiction/Memoir   Poetry   Hybrid

9:00am MDT

Tuning In: Using Music and Playlists to Develop Character in Prose
Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse
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In this seminar, we'll explore how writers use music to convey their characters' desires, contradictions, fears, aspirations, and aesthetic sensibilities. We’ll discuss practical tips on using music in written narratives to serve a similar function as soundtracks in film and help view and develop our characters through another medium. We’ll even touch on copyright issues and how to artfully avoid infringing on another artist’s material without compromising your own creative intentions. Please bring a list of songs that relate to your current project. All genres welcome!
Speakers
AD

Anthony D'Aries

Instructor
Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205
  Fiction   Nonfiction/Memoir   Poetry   Hybrid   Dramatic Writing

9:00am MDT

Three Paths to Publishing Your Poetry Book
Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse
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This seminar explores the three primary paths to publishing a book of poems: traditional (including independent and university presses), self publishing, and emerging opportunities in hybrid publishing. Each path has pros and cons, not only in terms of perceived prestige, but also in terms of cost, timeframe, and design and marketing support provided (or not provided) to the publishing poet. This class demystifies the options and provides clear next steps for poets seeking to publish a body of work.
Speakers
avatar for Radha Marcum

Radha Marcum

Instructor
Radha Marcum, MFA, won the 2023 Washington Prize for her forthcoming collection, Pine Soot Tendon Bone (2024). She was also awarded the New Mexico Book Award in 2018 for her first collection of poems, Bloodline (3: A Taos Press), about her grandfather's work building the first atomic... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205
  Poetry

9:00am MDT

In Retrospect
Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse
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In this class, we're going to explore how we frame the past in our poems. We’ll look at ways to leverage our present selves and perspectives in taking our readers back in time. We are adults, after all, and bring to the page the authority and irony of our distance and difference from the past. But there are also advantages to laying the past bare. We’ll also look at ways to strip away the biases and assumptions of the present and make a good faith effort to inhabit the past through the poem. This can lead to surprising emotional access and recovery.
Speakers
AS

Austin Segrest

Instructor
Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205
  Poetry   Hybrid

1:30pm MDT

Queer(ing) Images for Our Futures
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse
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Samuel R. Delany has emphasized that science fiction gives us images not OF but FOR our futures; its power lies not in prediction but in manifestation. Extending this idea to speculative literature more broadly—and rejecting the notion that spec-lit is merely formulaic or escapist—what can we learn from its radical visions and thought experiments to help us contend with bigotry and existential threats? In this generative seminar, we'll discuss the pleasures and challenges of queer(ing) speculative writing; explore how to center historically marginalized images and imaginations; and dare to write toward a multiplicity of inclusive futures.
Speakers
avatar for Kanika Agrawal

Kanika Agrawal

Instructor
Kanika Agrawal is a queer Indian writer, editor, and educator. As a mad diasporic hybrid who developed over six countries on four continents, she works between and across languages, geographies, and disciplines. She received a BS in Biology and a BS in Writing from MIT. She then earned... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205
  Fiction   Nonfiction/Memoir   Poetry   Hybrid

1:30pm MDT

Erasures, Lacunae, and Voids: Writing What's Not There
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse
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Sometimes what's not in a piece of writing is just as crucial to making it tick as what's explicitly spelled out. The holes in our work can serve as invitations for readers to fall more deeply into the text and start creatively connecting the dots on their own. By breathing deliberate space into the page, we can write more engagingly—and in deeper, more active collaboration with our readers. This craft seminar will offer generative opportunities to play with withdrawal, opacity, and negative space as valuable creative techniques.
Speakers
avatar for Sasha Geffen

Sasha Geffen

Instructor
Sasha Geffen is the author of Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary, an analysis of queerness and gender nonconformity in the past century of popular music. Their writing attends to the intersections of gender, pop culture, the body, and technology, and has been published... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205
  Fiction   Nonfiction/Memoir   Poetry   Hybrid   Dramatic Writing

1:30pm MDT

Creating Our Personal Language (V)
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Zoom
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In this class, we’ll explore the unique power of personal language and its impact on creative writing. Writers will reflect on their relationship with language, incorporating words and phrases invented or uniquely used in their homes. We’ll analyze how these personal elements, alongside experiences of bilingualism or multilingualism, shape prosody, voice, and plot development. Emphasizing authenticity, writers will craft stories and poems that are distinctively theirs—pieces only they could write. This course deepens our connection to language and empowers us to create original work with personal and cultural depth.
Speakers
avatar for Oso Guardiola

Oso Guardiola

Instructor
Oso Guardiola received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing - Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was the recipient of the Maytag Scholarship and the Arthur James Pflughaupt Prize in Fiction. His short stories have been awarded the 2023 Gulf Coast Prize for Fiction, the... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Zoom
  Fiction   Poetry

1:30pm MDT

The Art of Condensary
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse
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In this session, writers of all levels and all genres will unlock the art of writing with precision, eliminating unnecessary words to make every sentence pop. Through hands-on exercises and lively discussions, you'll discover how to tighten your work without losing your unique voice. Get ready to supercharge your writing skills and leave with the tools to craft compact, captivating pieces that leave a lasting impression.
Speakers
avatar for Alyse Knorr

Alyse Knorr

Instructor
Alyse Knorr is an assistant professor of English at Regis University and, since 2017, co-editor of Switchback Books. Her most recent book of poems, Mega-City Redux, won the 2016 Green Mountains Review Poetry Prize, selected by Olena Kalytiak Davis. She is also the author of the poetry... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205
  Poetry

1:30pm MDT

Site/Visit: Writing with the Land
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse
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What does it mean to be in conversation with our local landscapes in our writing? Part experiential learning, part creative practice, SITE//VISIT provides a space to learn about native plants and local ecology and translate embodied experience onto the page through play and improvisation. We’ll draw from the practices and work of artists and writers such as Cecilia Vicuna, CA Conrad, Jake Skeets, and others.
Speakers
avatar for Cass Eddington

Cass Eddington

Instructor
Cass Eddington is a poet, teacher, and editor originally from Utah. They are the author of the chapbooks Vernal Hurt (Magnificent Field) and TRANSIT (Spiral Editions, forthcoming January 2023) with recent work in Annulet, Deluge, DREGINALD, La Vague. They are a PhD candidate in the... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205
  Poetry   Hybrid   Publishing/Career

4:00pm MDT

Developing Writing Habits
Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse
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With jobs and family/personal responsibilities, sustaining a writing practice seems harder these days than ever before. We struggle to find the time and energy to find our way into our creative space. This course will offer prompts and habit-building techniques to help us sustain our writing practices, whether to exercise our muscles or to make it through long-term projects.
Speakers
avatar for Poupeh Missaghi

Poupeh Missaghi

Instructor
Poupeh Missaghi is a writer, translator, and editor. Her debut book trans(re)lating house one was published in 2020 and her second book Sound Museum was published in 2024 (Coffee House Press). Her most recent translation In the Streets of Tehran, a book of witness narratives, was... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205
  Fiction   Nonfiction/Memoir   Poetry   Hybrid   Dramatic Writing   Publishing/Career   YA/Children's

4:00pm MDT

Vocational Poetics: Working, Writing, Calling Out
Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse
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Most of us aren't able to support ourselves materially through what we would consider our “calling” (an idea that doesn’t recognize the inequities and issues of access shaped by capitalism, racism, and ableism). Lacking a single “vocation,” we may cobble together our livelihood through many sources. Beyond the fantasy of a consistent work/life balance, this lecture considers the root of vocation: both the labor of writing and the “calling out.” Through what forms and technologies are we able to be heard?
Speakers
avatar for Cass Eddington

Cass Eddington

Instructor
Cass Eddington is a poet, teacher, and editor originally from Utah. They are the author of the chapbooks Vernal Hurt (Magnificent Field) and TRANSIT (Spiral Editions, forthcoming January 2023) with recent work in Annulet, Deluge, DREGINALD, La Vague. They are a PhD candidate in the... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205
  Fiction   Nonfiction/Memoir   Poetry   Hybrid   Dramatic Writing   Publishing/Career   YA/Children's

4:00pm MDT

Asking Questions (V)
Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Zoom
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This workshop is based on the idea that creative writing is about inquiring. Is a poem a question? What can a poem ask that can't be asked in everyday life? How might we shape a poem's rhythms to open to inquiry? What images open the poem to curiosity and even uncertainty? Would you like to join us in shaping an interrogatory poetry?
Speakers
avatar for Elizabeth Robinson

Elizabeth Robinson

Instructor
Elizabeth Robinson is the author of over a dozen volumes of poetry. Her most recent books are Three Novels (Omnidawn), Counterpart (Ahsahta), and Blue Heron (Center for Literary Publishing). Robinson’s mixed genre meditation, On Ghosts (Solid Objects), was a finalist for the Los... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Zoom
  Poetry

4:00pm MDT

A Talk Against Goodness
Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse
Register
This is a talk about craft, its embedded politics, and the production of a poet in the US.
Speakers
avatar for Solmaz Sharif

Solmaz Sharif

Visiting Author
Solmaz Sharif is the author of two books of poetry, most recently Customs (Graywolf Press, 2022) which Publisher’s Weekly praised as “complex and confident” in a starred review. Her first book, Look (Graywolf Press, 2016), was a finalist for the National Book Award and a New... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205
  Poetry   Publishing/Career
 
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