Lit Fest 2025

Lit Fest 2025

5:00pm MDT

Writing in Color/Queer Creatives Welcome Hour

Friday June 6, 2025 5:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Calling all Queer Creatives and Writers of Color! Come share a drink and build connections with fellow writers, artists, and Lit Fest attendees during our writing communities happy hour. This happy hour is open to all who identify as queer and/or BIPOC+*—we welcome you to join us in celebration and community. Copies of the Writing in Color and Queer Creatives guides to Lit Fest will be available, spotlighting Lit Fest workshops and events led by faculty that identify as BIPOC+ and/or part of LGBTQIA+** communities.
*BIPOC+ includes but is not limited to African, Indigenous, Native, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, Arab, and Multiracial heritage.
**LGBTQIA+ is an abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, asexual, and more.

Speakers

Multiple Instructors

Friday June 6, 2025 5:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Audience Event

6:15pm MDT

Advanced Weekend Workshop Orientation

Friday June 6, 2025 6:15pm - 6:45pm MDT

Writers taking workshops with Nicole Chung, Claire Dederer, Katie Kitamura, and Solmaz Sharif, join us on Friday evening for quick introductions to your instructor and fellow classmates and a tour of the Lit Fest campus. Stay for a visit to the food trucks, happy hour, and the Turn the Page with Colorado Matters and Kristin Koval, at 7:00 PM.

Speakers

Multiple Instructors

Friday June 6, 2025 6:15pm - 6:45pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Audience Event

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

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

9:00am MDT

Art Writing, Writing Art (Livestream)

Sunday June 8, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT

Zoom

What does it mean to write critically about art in fiction or creative nonfiction? How can writing about art allow us to write more deeply about character and world? How can it allow us to explore ideas in ways we might not otherwise have access to? We'll look at a number of examples in both fiction and nonfiction, from authors including John Berger and Sheena Patel. Please bring something to write with, as this talk will be centered on generative exercises.
This is the livestream version of this class, if you would like to attend in person, click here.

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 →

Sunday June 8, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Zoom

All Genres

6:00pm MDT

Lit Fest Kickoff Party

Sunday June 8, 2025 6:00pm - 8:30pm MDT

The kickoff party brings together participants and instructors for a night of celebration. Enjoy musical performances from Youth On Record musicians, catered dinner, drinks, and more!

Speakers

Multiple Instructors

Sunday June 8, 2025 6:00pm - 8:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Audience Event

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Workshop

Monday June 9, 2025 9:00am - 11:30am MDT

Advanced weeklong workshops include those with Steve Almond, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Eduardo Corral, Paul Harding, Mat Johnson, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Elizabeth McCracken, Eileen Myles, Helen Phillips, Tony Tulathimutte, and Matthew Zapruder.

Monday June 9, 2025 9:00am - 11:30am MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Audience Advanced Workshop

4:00pm MDT

Writing in Color Presents: Finding the Ghost

Monday June 9, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

This all-genre craft seminar will include a literature survey, highlighting moments when strangeness enters the room, and what it can offer a narrative, as well as in-class generative prompts based on readings. We'll take a look at nonfiction from Daisy Lafarge and Anna Lindsey, the poetry of Anna Swir, the prose-meets-poetry of Anne Carson, and the fiction of Victor Heringer. One of the most valuable modes a writer can be in is a blissful state of porosity. No matter our genre, we’ll open ourselves to the possibilities and tools of other genres to see what we can take away and bring back to our own. This seminar will encourage you toward strangeness, to investigate and play with structure and form.

Speakers

Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Visiting Author

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It tells the story of the author's lineage of curanderos, or shamans, and her mother, who was the first woman in her family to become... Read More →

Monday June 9, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Audience Craft Seminar

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Workshop

Tuesday June 10, 2025 9:00am - 11:30am MDT

Advanced weeklong workshops include those with Steve Almond, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Eduardo Corral, Paul Harding, Mat Johnson, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Elizabeth McCracken, Eileen Myles, Helen Phillips, Tony Tulathimutte, and Matthew Zapruder.

Tuesday June 10, 2025 9:00am - 11:30am MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Audience Advanced Workshop

8:30pm MDT

Reading Den at Lit Fest

Tuesday June 10, 2025 8:30pm - 9:30pm MDT

Stick around after the Visiting Authors Reading for a lively edition of Denver's latest reading series, Reading Den, featuring Lit Fest authors from Colorado and beyond.

Tuesday June 10, 2025 8:30pm - 9:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

All Genres

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Workshop

Wednesday June 11, 2025 9:00am - 11:30am MDT

Advanced weeklong workshops include those with Steve Almond, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Eduardo Corral, Paul Harding, Mat Johnson, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Elizabeth McCracken, Eileen Myles, Helen Phillips, Tony Tulathimutte, and Matthew Zapruder.

Wednesday June 11, 2025 9:00am - 11:30am MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Audience Advanced Workshop

7:00pm MDT

Writing in Color Trivia Night with Black People Know Things

Wednesday June 11, 2025 7:00pm - 9:00pm MDT

Love trivia? Looking for new writer friends? Join us for a night of BIPOC-centered trivia hosted by Black People Know Things! This event is open to all with the aim of highlighting BIPOC+* culture and providing writers of color an opportunity to connect.
*BIPOC+ includes but is not limited to African, Indigenous, Native, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, Arab, and Multiracial heritage.

Speakers

Multiple Instructors

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

Audience Event

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Workshop

Thursday June 12, 2025 9:00am - 11:30am MDT

Advanced weeklong workshops include those with Steve Almond, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Eduardo Corral, Paul Harding, Mat Johnson, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Elizabeth McCracken, Eileen Myles, Helen Phillips, Tony Tulathimutte, and Matthew Zapruder.

Thursday June 12, 2025 9:00am - 11:30am MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Audience Advanced Workshop

1:30pm MDT

Writing into the Time-Space Expanse: A Psychedelic Lit Seminar

Thursday June 12, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Psychedelic writing plays with time and space and perspective, blurs waking and dreaming life, multiplies and distorts the possibilities of narrative. It’s lush and daring and monumental; it finds sublimity and absurdity in the ordinary; it cannot be contained by genre labels. Through hybrid readings that conjure the language and ethos of the psychedelic experience, we’ll consider strange and mysterious routes to the center of states that can be impossible to write straightforwardly or linearly: the infinitude of grief, the obliteration of the self through sex and childbirth, the weirdness of aging, cycles of trauma and desire, chronic pain, transition, spiritual transcendence. We’ll take inspiration from authors like Venita Blackburn, Anne de Marcken, and Helen Phillips, who explore themes of loss and transcendence by folding the world and their work into exquisite and inexplicable shapes on the page. This seminar will urge you to break form and turn words inside out as a means of describing self-shattering conditions and the realities of our twisted present—which, it often feels, can only be contemplated clearly through a warped lens.

Speakers

Hillary Brenhouse

Instructor/Editor

Hillary Brenhouse is a Montreal-based writer and the editor and publisher of Elastic, the print magazine of psychedelic art and literature, which debuted in March 2025 with support from Harvard and UC Berkeley. She was previously the editor-in-chief of Guernica magazine and the editorial director of Bold Type Books. Much of her career in books and magazines has... Read More →

Thursday June 12, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

All Genres

8:30pm MDT

Reading Den at Lit Fest

Thursday June 12, 2025 8:30pm - 9:30pm MDT

Stick around after the Visiting Authors Reading for a lively edition of Denver's latest reading series, Reading Den, featuring Lit Fest authors from Colorado and beyond.

Thursday June 12, 2025 8:30pm - 9:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

All Genres

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Workshop

Friday June 13, 2025 9:00am - 11:30am MDT

Advanced weeklong workshops include those with Steve Almond, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Eduardo Corral, Paul Harding, Mat Johnson, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Elizabeth McCracken, Eileen Myles, Helen Phillips, Tony Tulathimutte, and Matthew Zapruder.

Friday June 13, 2025 9:00am - 11:30am MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Audience Advanced Workshop

4:30pm MDT

Community Book Fair and Reading

Friday June 13, 2025 4:30pm - 5:30pm MDT

Speakers

Multiple Instructors

Friday June 13, 2025 4:30pm - 5:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Audience Event

5:30pm MDT

Closing Party

Friday June 13, 2025 5:30pm - 7:30pm MDT

Speakers

Multiple Instructors

Friday June 13, 2025 5:30pm - 7:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Audience Event

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