Lit Fest 2025: Full Schedule

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9:00am MDT

Art of Creative Research (V)

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

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

When Everything Changed: Writing Your Marker Story (V)

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

Zoom

An accident. A cancer diagnosis. A bold decision. A life saved. A loved one lost. That moment when you saw yourself clearly. These are defining moments—marker moments because they make a mark in which nothing is the same afterward. Marker stories can be written in a variety of nonfiction formats: personal essay, memoir-in-essays, letter, speech, a story for stage or a recording. In this two-hour craft workshop, we’ll read and listen to excerpts from marker stories in each a variety of genres, unpack what makes them poignant and talk about how to get started on our own.

Speakers

Ellen Blum Barish

Instructor

Ellen Blum Barish is the author of the spiritual memoir Seven Springs: A Memoir and the essay collection Views from the Home Office Window: On Motherhood, Family and Life. Her work explores themes of identity, family, and spirituality. You can find her essays and prose poems in Brevity... Read More →

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

Nonfiction/Memoir

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

9:00am MDT

Two-Day Intensive: Experiments in Form—Audre Lorde

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

Lighthouse

Participants in this two-day intensive will enjoy close reading and discussion of excerpts from Audre Lorde's poems and essays, accompanied by generative exercises designed for writers to begin drafting poems and lyric essays.

Speakers

Suzi Q. Smith

Instructor

Suzi Q. Smith is an award-winning artist, organizer, and educator who lives in Denver, Colorado. She has created, curated, coached, and taught in Denver for over 20 years, managing the largest poetry festivals that Denver has seen to date. A TEDx speaker multiple times, Suzi has performed... Read More →

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

Poetry Nonfiction/Memoir Hybrid

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

1:00pm MDT

Two-Day Intensive: "I Read it in One Sitting"—On Pacing

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

Lighthouse

Neither readers nor writers want a story whose pacing is off: a story that stalls, sputters, or sprints ahead at breakneck speed. Every part of a story must have an intended and balanced pace—but how do we find that pace? The art of pacing is about the decisions we're making as writers, from sentence structure to showing and telling. This generative craft lesson will look at concrete examples and writing prompts. Intermediate and advance writers thinking about the pacing in their nonfiction work are welcome.

Speakers

Anna Qu

Instructor

Anna Qu is a Chinese American writer. Her critically acclaimed debut memoir, Made In China: A Memoir of Love and Labor, was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick. Her work has appeared in Threepenny Review, Lumina, Kartika, Kweli, and Vol.1 Brooklyn, among others. She was... Read More →

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

Nonfiction/Memoir

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

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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