Lit Fest 2025

Lit Fest 2025

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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

Audience Advanced Workshop

8:30am MDT

Advanced Weekend Poetry Intensive with Solmaz Sharif

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

An acceleration of equitably distributed precarity—which is to say existential threat that cannot be avoided by money or nation, genetic lotto, or brute force—has made it so more of our sentences begin with, “As I write this, [insert disaster] is unfolding.” As I write this, it feels cruel to accept ‘givens’: that the room we will enter together on June 7, 2025 will still be standing, that all who can fly there now will join us then, that we will arrive with the same questions and hopes for our poems, the same sense of imagined and future reader. And yet, the life of the poem is long. What pressures does the immediate ‘now’ we find ourselves in place on the packets of poems we turned in earlier? How might we allow those questions, whatever they may be this summer, into the workshop? What might they tell us of the vocation of writing poems? We will look at our poems through their relationship to time, through syntax and rhythm, self and other, as well as through the material present of the poem and the material presents it is not yet including. Line edits and formal questions will be raised alongside ethical ones, leading to greater articulation of each poet’s perceived responsibility. Agreement on the roles of poetry is not required nor even desired, but willing and willful wrestling with such questions will be central to our time together. Accepted participants will submit up to two poems by May 9.

Speakers

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 →

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

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

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

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

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

Oracle Poetry: Pushing the Veil Between the Spirit Realm and Our Writing (V)

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

Using oracle cards as writing prompts, we’ll explore messages and clues from the universe through divinatory free writing, unlocking our truths with guided cards as our mentors. We’ll use various techniques to shape our raw writings into crafted poems until we find at least one fragment that resonates deeply. Through the power of words and the oracle's wisdom, we’ll push back the veil between this world and the realm of spirits, using our intuition and awareness as an alchemical process to embrace what arises from the unknown.

Various Oracle decks will be used during the workshop, so cards are not a requirement.

Speakers

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 →

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

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

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

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: Experiments in Form—Audre Lorde

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

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

10:00am MDT

Queer Creatives Brunch

Saturday June 7, 2025 10:00am - 11:30am MDT

It’s brunch! Come celebrate Lit Fest with a dazzling morning of Drag Brunch Bingo, featuring the fabulous Alice Glamoure, with your fellow LGBTQIA+ writers and creatives! We’ll be serving up delicious bites from Scratch Kitchen, along with a selection of cocktails and mocktails.

Speakers

Multiple Instructors

Saturday June 7, 2025 10:00am - 11:30am MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Audience Event

12:00pm MDT

Lunchtime Business Panel: Your Agent Itinerary—Tips for Representation

Saturday June 7, 2025 12:00pm - 1:00pm MDT

Are you feeling overwhelmed at how to narrow down which agents might be a good fit for you? Are you querying to no avail? Just wondering how it all works? Join four agents as they tell the candid story of what they do. They’ll share tips and strategies for successfully targeting and querying agents, and give you insights into turnoffs and what not to do. Each agent will share one thing you absolutely must know; you’ll leave with an understanding of the inner workings of publishing and how you can best begin your publishing journey.

Speakers

Nate Moscato

Agent

Nate Muscato (Agent, Aevitas Creative Management) represents academics, journalists, artists, and polymathic thinkers and storytellers. Authors he works with have written for national and international publications, hit The New York Times bestseller list, and received awards and fellowships... Read More →

Haley Casey

Agent

Haley Casey graduated from The University of Kansas in 2015 with a BA in creative writing, and that fall, she attended the Denver Publishing Institute for a deep dive into the industry. She began her full-time career at Ogden Publications, where she was an editor for four years. There... Read More →

Brenna English-Loeb

Agent

Brenna English-Loeb works with authors of adult genre fiction and adult nonfiction, with select YA and crossover clients. She joined the Transatlantic in 2019 after working for several years at Janklow & Nesbit Associates and Writers House, where I had the pleasure of working with... Read More →

Elizabeth Copps

Agent

Elizabeth Copps is a literary agent and founder of Copps Literary Services based in Denver, Colorado. With 15 years of industry experience, Elizabeth began her publishing career in 2010 when she moved from Florida to New York City and discovered her passion through an agency internship... Read More →

Saturday June 7, 2025 12:00pm - 1:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Publishing/Career

Audience Lunchtime Business Panel

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

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

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

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

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

Facing Fears: Flash Fiction, Prose Poetry, and Hybrid Forms

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

With one sentence, a story can be told and a world of possibilities can open up. Whether you're writing flash fiction, prose poetry, essayette, or another hybrid form, blending genres can be an inspiring way to explore horror, mystery, and suspense. In this multi-genre workshop, we'll look to Charles Simic, Amy Hempel, Ross Gay, Julio Cortázar, and others to better understand how short forms can capture the ways fear, desire, and daily life can intersect. We'll explore blockheads, stanzagraphs, units of time, and other craft aspects that help us delve into our use of the short form.

Speakers

Juan J. Morales

Instructor

Juan J. Morales is the son of an Ecuadorian mother and Puerto Rican father. He is the author of three poetry collections, including The Handyman’s Guide to End Times, winner of the 2019 International Latino Book Award. Recent poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, The Laurel Review... Read More →

Saturday June 7, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

All Genres

1:30pm MDT

Scansion Blast

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

William Carlos Williams said, "A poem is a machine made out of words," and this is a course in mechanics. We'll look at a few of the different machines that poets have developed over the millennia—and why they still purr and hum—then use the late, great Robert Fitzgerald’s method to mark them up. This course is for anyone who wants to have a better understanding of the nuts and bolts of how metrical poems (and free verse, which is also a set of forms) actually work at the syllabic level. Bring pencils... and pliers.

Speakers

David Rothman

Instructor

David J. Rothman has taught at Lighthouse since 1998, winning the Beacon Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2012. He has published six volumes of poetry, including My Brother’s Keeper (Lithic Press, 2019) and The Elephant’s Chiropractor (Conundrum Press, 1998), both of which... Read More →

Saturday June 7, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Advanced Weekend Nonfiction Intensive: Fighting Overwhelm with Claire Dederer

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

Attempting to write a memoir can bring up feelings of overwhelm. This feeling comes about because your life — everyone’s life — is an unending flow of events and memories and experiences. How do you select and cut your material from that vast bolt of fabric? Your life can simultaneously feel like too much and not enough, giving rise to all kinds of fears about whether or not your story is worth telling, and how to tell it. We’ll explore the ways that the building blocks of memoir — scene, character, dialogue, and structure — can help us move through the overwhelm and find the heart of the story. Accepted participants will submit up to 15 pages by May 9.

Speakers

Claire Dederer

Visiting Author

Claire Dederer is a memoirist, essayist, and critic. Her most recent book is the national bestseller Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma (Knopf, 2023), a New York Times Notable Book that was named a best book of 2023 by The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Elle, Esquire, Kirkus, Electric... Read More →

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

Audience Advanced Workshop

1:30pm MDT

Advanced Weekend Fiction Intensive: Writers and Readers with Katie Kitamura

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

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

Audience Advanced Workshop

4:00pm MDT

Everyday Objects, Luminous Things

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

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

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Cultivate Your Metaphors

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

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

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

4:00pm MDT

Rhyme: Crime or Sublime?

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

John Milton called rhyme "the invention of a barbarous age." But the closer we look, the more mysterious and fascinating it becomes. If we think of rhyme as the entire universe of similar sounds among words, we soon realize that rhyme includes not only "cat" and "bat," but also "cat" and "coat," along with "cat" and "hand"... and things just become more and more complex from there. Rhyme may be impossible to escape, and the real question is how to manage it. In this class, we'll explore the varieties of rhyme and how poets and even prose writers use it—or purposely avoid it—today. If you have the interest and the time / come learn about rhyme.

Speakers

David Rothman

Instructor

David J. Rothman has taught at Lighthouse since 1998, winning the Beacon Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2012. He has published six volumes of poetry, including My Brother’s Keeper (Lithic Press, 2019) and The Elephant’s Chiropractor (Conundrum Press, 1998), both of which... Read More →

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

Audience Craft Seminar

5:30pm MDT

Faculty Showcase

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

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

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

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