Lit Fest 2025: Full Schedule

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

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: 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

1:00pm 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

4:00pm MDT

Two-Day Intensive: Word, Sound, and Power (V)

Tuesday June 10, 2025 4:00pm - Wednesday June 11, 2025 7:00pm MDT

Zoom

In this generative hybrid intensive we'll examine the power held by both written poetics/prose and the spoken word. Rather than interpreting these two viewpoints as adversarial, we'll examine them as extensions of each other. How do sound poets and storytellers strengthen their writing? Writers, what can you learn about your work through the performance of sound poets and storytellers? We'll look at ways others have successfully brought sound to writing.

Speakers

André O. Hoilette

Instructor

André O. Hoilette is a Jamaican-born poet living in Denver, Colorado. He’s a Cave Canem alumnus and the former editor of ambulant: A Journal of Poetry & Art and former assistant editor of Nexus Magazine. He earned an MFA in Fiction and Poetry from Regis University’s Mile-High... Read More →

Tuesday June 10, 2025 4:00pm - Wednesday June 11, 2025 7:00pm MDT
Zoom

Poetry

Audience Two-Day Intensive

4:00pm MDT

Two-Day Intensive: Comedic Memoir

Wednesday June 11, 2025 4:00pm - Thursday June 12, 2025 7:00pm MDT

Lighthouse

You don’t have to be a celebrity comedian to write a funny memoir. You don’t have to be born with a sense of humor or have had anything funny happen to you. A memoirist must make a meal out of their experience, however minor, however unfunny–that’s the job we’ll learn to do. There are many types of comedy and many comedic tools, and we’ll talk about how to use them all to write 200+ pages. We’ll refer to a few perfect comedic memoirs as examples. In this lecture-style class, students will brainstorm and receive informative handouts and inspirational assignments.

Speakers

Elissa Bassist

Instructor

Elissa Bassist is the editor of the “Funny Women” column on The Rumpus and author of the tragicomic memoir Hysterical, a semifinalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor. As a founding contributor to The Rumpus, she’s written cultural and personal criticism since the website... Read More →

Wednesday June 11, 2025 4:00pm - Thursday June 12, 2025 7:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Two-Day Intensive

4:00pm MDT

Two-Day Intensive: The Problem with Evil (V)

Thursday June 12, 2025 4:00pm - Friday June 13, 2025 7:00pm MDT

Zoom

The art of making satisfying villains, and the art of saying something new about bad, banal acts—all this can be tricker than it appears. How do we capture the reality of sinister characters without caricature? How do we dramatize bad behavior without glamorizing it or sermonizing, charting a course between theology and pathology? When is it worth separating bad people from bad acts? How do we steer clear of stereotypes? With so much real-life villainy afoot, with readers turning to books both for solace and for answers, these questions feel urgent as ever. Let's have a look at what successful stories have done, and how they've done it, and let's try a bunch of exercises together to make an old problem new.

Speakers

John Cotter

Instructor

John Cotter is the author of a memoir, Losing Music, winner of the Colorado Book Award for creative nonfiction, and of Under the Small Lights, winner of the Miami University Press novella competition. His essays and stories have appeared in Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Raritan... Read More →

Thursday June 12, 2025 4:00pm - Friday June 13, 2025 7:00pm MDT
Zoom

Fiction Hybrid

Audience Two-Day Intensive

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