Lit Fest 2025: Full Schedule

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8:30am MDT

Advanced Weekend Nonfiction Intensive: In Pursuit of the Story with Nicole Chung

Saturday June 7, 2025 8:30am - Sunday June 8, 2025 12:00pm MDT

In this weekend memoir intensive, you’ll be invited to pursue your story with new curiosity: What about it feels most urgent or exciting to you? What idea, question, obsession, or truth are you inviting readers to explore along with you? This workshop is designed to help you identify the most promising threads of your story and consider several possible approaches to revision. Together, we’ll dive into your work and engage in lively, affirming craft conversations about voice, characterization, setting, chronology, structure, and more. We’ll discuss the complications of rendering the truth on the page, how to do so when memory is imperfect, and the role of imagination in memoir. And we’ll talk about how you can nourish the writing practice you want, so that you can continue developing and pursuing the stories that matter most to you. Accepted participants will submit essays or excerpts from longer works of 1,500 to 3,500 words by May 9.

Speakers

Nicole Chung

Visiting Author

Nicole Chung is the author of the award-winning memoir A Living Remedy, which was named a Notable Book by The New York Times and a Best Book of the Year by over a dozen other outlets. Her 2018 debut All You Can Ever Know was a national bestseller and a finalist for the National Book... Read More →

Saturday June 7, 2025 8:30am - Sunday June 8, 2025 12:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

Art of Creative Research (V)

Saturday June 7, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT

Zoom

Research is a fundamental part of long-form writing projects. Knowing where to find the information and how to access it is a key skill for writers across genres. Background information, facts, and anecdotes all make a story richer and more authoritative. Drawing from journalism and the oral history tradition, this class provides tools for writers working on essays, profiles, memoirs, or novels. We'll create a roadmap for our research and discuss how to prepare and conduct interviews to collect information professionally, responsibly, and ethically.

Speakers

Ladane Nasseri

Instructor

Ladane Nasseri is a journalist and writer. A former Middle East correspondent for Bloomberg News where she led Iran’s news coverage, Ladane has reported for a decade and a half from Tehran, Dubai, and Beirut. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, Businessweek... Read More →

Saturday June 7, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Zoom

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

9:00am MDT

Managing the Middle: How to Not Lose Readers Along the Way

Saturday June 7, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT

Lighthouse

You’ve nailed your opening and you have a killer ending, but what about the middle? If you can’t hold your reader’s attention in the middle, they might not make it to that killer ending. In this class, we’ll examine how to maintain literary tensions to ensure your reader keeps turning the pages, focusing specifically on the concepts of conflicts, curiosities, and clocks. Please have in mind a novel or story you're working on or that you've read and admire for its ability to keep you reading. This class will be a mixture of lecture, discussion, and generative exercises.

Speakers

Kristin Koval

Instructor

Kristin Koval is a former lawyer who always wanted to be a writer but initially wandered down other paths. Her debut novel, Penitence, was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick for February 2025, a People Magazine Best Book of the Week, a Book of the Month Pick, an Indie Next, an Apple... Read More →

Saturday June 7, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Dramatic Writing

Audience Craft Seminar

9:00am MDT

Two-Day Intensive: Breaking the Surface—Revision

Saturday June 7, 2025 9:00am - Sunday June 8, 2025 12:00pm MDT

Lighthouse

You finish a draft—then what? The text can seem impenetrable, but you know you need to open it to new possibilities. You can change a word, add a comma, reorder the clauses, but you know (deep down) that you’re not yet getting at what you know needs to occur in order to dramatize your idea. Noodling around on the surface won’t suffice. In this intensive, we’ll break the surface of our drafts and discover the potential for meaningful change. Writers will come away with an expanded understanding of their texts.

Speakers

William Haywood Henderson

Instructor

William Haywood Henderson earned a BA in English from the University of California at Berkeley, an MA in creative writing from Brown University, and attended Stanford University as a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing. He is the author of three novels: Native, The Rest of... Read More →

Saturday June 7, 2025 9:00am - Sunday June 8, 2025 12:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Hybrid Dramatic Writing YA/Children's

Audience Two-Day Intensive

9:00am MDT

Two-Day Intensive: Strange Story Structures

Saturday June 7, 2025 9:00am - Sunday June 8, 2025 12:00pm MDT

Lighthouse

Freytag, get lost! In this weekend workshop, we’ll read, explore, and try a variety of short story structures that range from the alternative to the bizarre: the montage, the list, the instructional, the backward story, metafiction, the “Rashomon,” the floater, and much more! Emphasis will be on mass generation, rather than perfected and read-aloud-able work. Prose writers of any genre can expect example readings, brief discussions, and lots of exercises focusing on techniques you’ve never tried before. Come to class with one idea or fifteen; leave with exciting new writing and your mind on fire.

Speakers

Erika Krouse

Instructor

Erika Krouse has taught at Lighthouse since 2008; she is a Book Project mentor and a winner of the Lighthouse Beacon Award. Erika's most recent collection of short stories, Save Me, Stranger, is out with Flatiron Books in January 2025. It has garnered starred reviews from Kirkus and... Read More →

Saturday June 7, 2025 9:00am - Sunday June 8, 2025 12:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Hybrid YA/Children's

Audience Two-Day Intensive

9:00am MDT

Two-Day Intensive: Finish It! Perspective and Persistence (V)

Saturday June 7, 2025 9:00am - Sunday June 8, 2025 12:00pm MDT

Zoom

Working on a long poem, story, essay, play, or book? What will it take to finish? Can we do it—or at least create an actionable plan to finish—in a weekend? This intensive will provide solutions and strategies in the form of planning sessions, readings, discussions, writing exercises, charts, and other resources. We’ll cover the role of editors and feedback; myths and benefits of breaks; how to bypass blocks, fears and resistances; and where planning meets plain old knuckling down. Any genre welcome. This may be most useful for work between midway and “almost there.” Let’s find our way to the finish line together.

Speakers

Khadijah Queen

Instructor

Khadijah Queen is the author of five books and four chapbooks of innovative poetry. Her full length collections are Conduit (Black Goat/Akashic Books 2008), featured in Poets & Writers magazine's Debut Poets issue; Black Peculiar, winner of the 2010 Noemi Press book award and published... Read More →

Saturday June 7, 2025 9:00am - Sunday June 8, 2025 12:00pm MDT
Zoom

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Poetry Hybrid Dramatic Writing Publishing/Career YA/Children's

Audience Two-Day Intensive

1:00pm MDT

Two-Day Intensive: Defining the Indefinable—Learning Description from Samantha Harvey's Orbital

Saturday June 7, 2025 1:00pm - 4:00pm MDT

Lighthouse

Samantha Harvey was awarded the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel Orbital, which follows six astronauts aboard a space station circling our planet for twenty-four hours. Orbital is an eloquent meditation about the complex relationships between humanity, Earth, and their joined legacy. It’s Harvey’s richly layered and undeniably sublime prose that rockets her novel into the stratosphere of masterful description writing. In this intensive, we’ll read, discuss, and model various strategies Harvey employs to great reward. Together, we’ll elevate our own prose stylings and learn how to depict the most ineffable parts of the world around us.

Speakers

Alexander Lumans

Instructor

Alexander Lumans was awarded a 2018 NEA Creative Writing Grant in Fiction. He received fellowships in 2015 and 2024 for expeditions with The Arctic Circle Residency and he was the Spring 2014 Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in... Read More →

Saturday June 7, 2025 1:00pm - 4:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction

Audience Two-Day Intensive

1:00pm MDT

Two-Day Intensive: Asking The Oracle | Divination As Discipline

Saturday June 7, 2025 1:00pm - 4:00pm MDT

Lighthouse

In this Two-Day Intensive, we'll experiment with the stations of "The Midwife" and "The Medium" to catch/channel the writing and reVISION to come. Through hermeneutic listening and asking the Oracle for guidance, we'll traverse the looping spectrum of creativity and craft by employing divination techniques to practice accessing the Muse; we'll use tried and true divinatory methods like communion with Ancestor; the Tarot; bibliomancy; dream-work; automatic writing; and more, to then develop our own entry points and intersections with Inspiration and Idea based on our individual needs as writers and the unique requirements each particular project demands.

Speakers

Sarah Elizabeth Schantz

Instructor

Sarah Elizabeth Schantz is primarily a fiction writer living on the outskirts of Boulder, Colorado in a Victorian-era farmhouse where her family is surrounded by open sky and century-old cottonwoods. She literally grew up in a bookstore with parents who worshipped all things literature... Read More →

Saturday June 7, 2025 1:00pm - 4:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Poetry Hybrid

Audience Two-Day Intensive

1:30pm MDT

ChatGPT Is My Secretary (V)

Saturday June 7, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Zoom

ChatGPT is awful. It’s a plagiarist, it lies and fabricates, it will run us out of our jobs… but it’s also free, exploitable, non-human labor! AI can be the answer to our harried dreams: a sometimes-reliable entity to perform research, consolidation, organization, and administrative tasks that would otherwise take us hours or months to do. What are the many ways a writer can use recent technologies to save ourselves valuable time and labor? How much can we trust it, and what are the ways we really shouldn’t? No technical knowledge needed; your instructor doesn’t have any, either.

Speakers

Erika Krouse

Instructor

Saturday June 7, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Zoom

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Poetry Hybrid YA/Children's

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Advanced Weekend Fiction Intensive: Writers and Readers with Katie Kitamura

Saturday June 7, 2025 1:30pm - 5:00pm MDT

Lighthouse

Good writers are good readers. In this workshop, we’ll focus on learning how to read each other’s work, and how to give critique that both helps and challenges each writer. Focusing on craft fundamentals including characterization, plot and voice, we’ll learn to ask the questions that can help locate and in some cases reimagine the parameters of a story. Each participant will workshop either a full story or an excerpt from a longer piece. Participation is at the heart of a good workshop, so please come to each session on time and having prepared thoughtful, detailed feedback. Accepted participants will submit up to 15 pages by May 9.

Speakers

Katie Kitamura

Visiting Author

Katie Kitamura’s most recent novel is Intimacies. One of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021 and one of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2021, it was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize... Read More →

Saturday June 7, 2025 1:30pm - 5:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction

Audience Advanced Workshop

4:00pm MDT

Everyday Objects, Luminous Things

Saturday June 7, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse

In this workshop, we’ll consider several short works of fiction, specifically “Pet Milk” by Stuart Dybek and the lesser-known “I Have a Stapler” by Dom Leone, to see how a story can be built around and rise up from a common object or two—the staple that a can of baking cream might seem to be as well as the tabletop stapler which writers like us use every day to “staple things.” We’ll look for our own everyday objects that might be made to be luminous or charged with a sense of meaning and matter, heft and story.

Speakers

Peter Markus

Instructor

Peter Markus is the author of the novel Bob, or Man on Boat, as well as the books of stories, We Make Mud and The Fish and the Not Fish, all three published by Dzanc Books. A recent book of poems, When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds, was published in September of 2021 from Wayne... Read More →

Saturday June 7, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Cultivate Your Metaphors

Saturday June 7, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse

Metaphor is the art of drawing connections between things to create new meanings. In this workshop, we'll learn to identify the metaphors in our writing, explore ways to cultivate new associations, and generate new possibilities. Bring a draft of your writing—it will be your starting point for our journeys into the latent imagination.

Speakers

Teow Lim Goh

Instructor

Teow Lim Goh is the author of two poetry collections, Islanders (2016) and Faraway Places (2021), and an essay collection Western Journeys (2022). Her essays, poetry, and criticism have been featured in The Georgia Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, PBS NewsHour... Read More →

Saturday June 7, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Poetry Hybrid

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Learning Craft Techniques from Literature in Translation

Saturday June 7, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse

Different languages and literary traditions invite and make possible the use of different craft techniques. Fortunately, the US literary landscape is gradually holding more space for works in translation, though they still comprise a small percentage of the market. In this course, we'll study craft techniques used in some very recent publications in translation and discuss what we can learn from both the authors and the translators to adopt into our own writing practices.

Speakers

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 →

Saturday June 7, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Poetry Hybrid

Audience Craft Seminar

5:30pm MDT

Faculty Showcase

Saturday June 7, 2025 5:30pm - 6:30pm MDT

Lighthouse

Grab a refreshment and hear readings from recently published works by Lighthouse faculty members.

Speakers

Multiple Instructors

Saturday June 7, 2025 5:30pm - 6:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Poetry Hybrid

Audience Event

7:00pm MDT

Visiting Authors Reading: Nicole Chung, Claire Dederer, Katie Kitamura, and Solmaz Sharif

Saturday June 7, 2025 7:00pm - 8:15pm MDT

Lighthouse

Hear your favorite visiting author perform their recent works. Shop at the Lit Fest pop-up bookstore operated by The Bookies and get your book signed afterward.

Speakers

Multiple Instructors

Saturday June 7, 2025 7:00pm - 8:15pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Hybrid Poetry

Audience Event

7:00pm MDT

Visiting Authors Reading: Nicole Chung, Claire Dederer, Katie Kitamura, and Solmaz Sharif (Livestream)

Saturday June 7, 2025 7:00pm - 8:15pm MDT

Zoom

Hear your favorite visiting author perform their recent works. Shop at the Lit Fest pop-up bookstore operated by The Bookies and get your book signed afterward.

Speakers

Multiple Instructors

Saturday June 7, 2025 7:00pm - 8:15pm MDT
Zoom

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Hybrid Poetry

Audience Event

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