Lit Fest 2025: Full Schedule

9:00am MDT

Writing Beyond Walls: Resilience and Difficult Subject Matter

Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT

Writing can feel overwhelming, especially with challenging themes. When daunting themes leave us frozen, that's when it's time to get your game plan on. In this workshop, we'll practice exercises to help navigate obstacles in our writing, whether mountains or molehills. We'll learn techniques to tackle both big and small challenges, making difficult subjects work for us, regardless of genre or skill level. All skill levels are welcome.

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 →

Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Poetry Hybrid

Audience Craft Seminar

9:00am MDT

Tuning In: Using Music and Playlists to Develop Character in Prose

Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT

Lighthouse

In this seminar, we'll explore how writers use music to convey their characters' desires, contradictions, fears, aspirations, and aesthetic sensibilities. We’ll discuss practical tips on using music in written narratives to serve a similar function as soundtracks in film and help view and develop our characters through another medium. We’ll even touch on copyright issues and how to artfully avoid infringing on another artist’s material without compromising your own creative intentions. Please bring a list of songs that relate to your current project. All genres welcome!

Speakers

Anthony D'Aries

Instructor

Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Poetry Hybrid Dramatic Writing

Audience Craft Seminar

9:00am MDT

Three Paths to Publishing Your Poetry Book

Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT

Lighthouse

This seminar explores the three primary paths to publishing a book of poems: traditional (including independent and university presses), self publishing, and emerging opportunities in hybrid publishing. Each path has pros and cons, not only in terms of perceived prestige, but also in terms of cost, timeframe, and design and marketing support provided (or not provided) to the publishing poet. This class demystifies the options and provides clear next steps for poets seeking to publish a body of work.

Speakers

Radha Marcum

Instructor

Radha Marcum, MFA, won the 2023 Washington Prize for her forthcoming collection, Pine Soot Tendon Bone (2024). She was also awarded the New Mexico Book Award in 2018 for her first collection of poems, Bloodline (3: A Taos Press), about her grandfather's work building the first atomic... Read More →

Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Poetry

Audience Craft Seminar

9:00am MDT

In Retrospect

Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT

Lighthouse

In this class, we're going to explore how we frame the past in our poems. We’ll look at ways to leverage our present selves and perspectives in taking our readers back in time. We are adults, after all, and bring to the page the authority and irony of our distance and difference from the past. But there are also advantages to laying the past bare. We’ll also look at ways to strip away the biases and assumptions of the present and make a good faith effort to inhabit the past through the poem. This can lead to surprising emotional access and recovery.

Speakers

Austin Segrest

Instructor

Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Poetry Hybrid

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Queer(ing) Images for Our Futures

Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse

Samuel R. Delany has emphasized that science fiction gives us images not OF but FOR our futures; its power lies not in prediction but in manifestation. Extending this idea to speculative literature more broadly—and rejecting the notion that spec-lit is merely formulaic or escapist—what can we learn from its radical visions and thought experiments to help us contend with bigotry and existential threats? In this generative seminar, we'll discuss the pleasures and challenges of queer(ing) speculative writing; explore how to center historically marginalized images and imaginations; and dare to write toward a multiplicity of inclusive futures.

Speakers

Kanika Agrawal

Instructor

Kanika Agrawal is a queer Indian writer, editor, and educator. As a mad diasporic hybrid who developed over six countries on four continents, she works between and across languages, geographies, and disciplines. She received a BS in Biology and a BS in Writing from MIT. She then earned... Read More →

Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Poetry Hybrid

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Erasures, Lacunae, and Voids: Writing What's Not There

Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse

Sometimes what's not in a piece of writing is just as crucial to making it tick as what's explicitly spelled out. The holes in our work can serve as invitations for readers to fall more deeply into the text and start creatively connecting the dots on their own. By breathing deliberate space into the page, we can write more engagingly—and in deeper, more active collaboration with our readers. This craft seminar will offer generative opportunities to play with withdrawal, opacity, and negative space as valuable creative techniques.

Speakers

Sasha Geffen

Instructor

Sasha Geffen is the author of Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary, an analysis of queerness and gender nonconformity in the past century of popular music. Their writing attends to the intersections of gender, pop culture, the body, and technology, and has been published... Read More →

Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Poetry Hybrid Dramatic Writing

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Creating Our Personal Language (V)

Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Zoom

In this class, we’ll explore the unique power of personal language and its impact on creative writing. Writers will reflect on their relationship with language, incorporating words and phrases invented or uniquely used in their homes. We’ll analyze how these personal elements, alongside experiences of bilingualism or multilingualism, shape prosody, voice, and plot development. Emphasizing authenticity, writers will craft stories and poems that are distinctively theirs—pieces only they could write. This course deepens our connection to language and empowers us to create original work with personal and cultural depth.

Speakers

Oso Guardiola

Instructor

Oso Guardiola received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing - Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was the recipient of the Maytag Scholarship and the Arthur James Pflughaupt Prize in Fiction. His short stories have been awarded the 2023 Gulf Coast Prize for Fiction, the... Read More →

Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Zoom

Fiction Poetry

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

The Art of Condensary

Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse

In this session, writers of all levels and all genres will unlock the art of writing with precision, eliminating unnecessary words to make every sentence pop. Through hands-on exercises and lively discussions, you'll discover how to tighten your work without losing your unique voice. Get ready to supercharge your writing skills and leave with the tools to craft compact, captivating pieces that leave a lasting impression.

Speakers

Alyse Knorr

Instructor

Alyse Knorr is an assistant professor of English at Regis University and, since 2017, co-editor of Switchback Books. Her most recent book of poems, Mega-City Redux, won the 2016 Green Mountains Review Poetry Prize, selected by Olena Kalytiak Davis. She is also the author of the poetry... Read More →

Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Poetry

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Site/Visit: Writing with the Land

Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse

What does it mean to be in conversation with our local landscapes in our writing? Part experiential learning, part creative practice, SITE//VISIT provides a space to learn about native plants and local ecology and translate embodied experience onto the page through play and improvisation. We’ll draw from the practices and work of artists and writers such as Cecilia Vicuna, CA Conrad, Jake Skeets, and others.

Speakers

Cass Eddington

Instructor

Cass Eddington is a poet, teacher, and editor originally from Utah. They are the author of the chapbooks Vernal Hurt (Magnificent Field) and TRANSIT (Spiral Editions, forthcoming January 2023) with recent work in Annulet, Deluge, DREGINALD, La Vague. They are a PhD candidate in the... Read More →

Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Poetry Hybrid Publishing/Career

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Developing Writing Habits

Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse

With jobs and family/personal responsibilities, sustaining a writing practice seems harder these days than ever before. We struggle to find the time and energy to find our way into our creative space. This course will offer prompts and habit-building techniques to help us sustain our writing practices, whether to exercise our muscles or to make it through long-term projects.

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 →

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

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

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Vocational Poetics: Working, Writing, Calling Out

Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse

Most of us aren't able to support ourselves materially through what we would consider our “calling” (an idea that doesn’t recognize the inequities and issues of access shaped by capitalism, racism, and ableism). Lacking a single “vocation,” we may cobble together our livelihood through many sources. Beyond the fantasy of a consistent work/life balance, this lecture considers the root of vocation: both the labor of writing and the “calling out.” Through what forms and technologies are we able to be heard?

Speakers

Cass Eddington

Instructor

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

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

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Asking Questions (V)

Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Zoom

This workshop is based on the idea that creative writing is about inquiring. Is a poem a question? What can a poem ask that can't be asked in everyday life? How might we shape a poem's rhythms to open to inquiry? What images open the poem to curiosity and even uncertainty? Would you like to join us in shaping an interrogatory poetry?

Speakers

Elizabeth Robinson

Instructor

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of over a dozen volumes of poetry. Her most recent books are Three Novels (Omnidawn), Counterpart (Ahsahta), and Blue Heron (Center for Literary Publishing). Robinson’s mixed genre meditation, On Ghosts (Solid Objects), was a finalist for the Los... Read More →

Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Zoom

Poetry

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

A Talk Against Goodness

Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse

This is a talk about craft, its embedded politics, and the production of a poet in the US.

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 →

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

Poetry Publishing/Career

Audience Craft Seminar

8:30am MDT

Advanced Weekend Poetry Intensive with Solmaz Sharif

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

Lighthouse

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

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

Poetry

Audience Advanced Workshop

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

Lighthouse

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

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

Poetry Hybrid

Audience Craft Seminar

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

1:30pm 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

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 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Zoom

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Poetry Hybrid YA/Children's

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Scansion Blast

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

Lighthouse

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

Poetry

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

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

Lighthouse

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

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

Poetry

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

How to Build Your Niche as a Poet (V)

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

Zoom

Discussing his background as a traveling Himalayan poet, our instructor shall share his efforts to build bridges across continents despite being from a small nation. The lecture will explore the unique Himalayan tradition of traveling saints and bards, who played a vital role in shaping the instructor’s world and helping him develop the resilience and inner spirituality needed to establish his niche as a poet. The lecture will turn to the universal, covering how to develop a unique voice, cultivate a clear identity, and position oneself within the literary world.

Speakers

Yuyutsu Sharma

Instructor

Yuyutsu Sharma is one of the few poets in the world who make their living with poetry. Named as “The world-renowned Himalayan poet,” (The Guardian) “One-Man Academy” (The Kathmandu Post) and “Himalayan Neruda” (Mike Graves), Yuyutsu is a vibrant force on the world poetry... Read More →

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

Poetry Hybrid Publishing/Career

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

9:00am MDT

Writing Food

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

Lighthouse

Food connects us to our origins as well as to people beyond our immediate families. It has a language of its own, telling many stories with many ingredients—not all jolly and nostalgic but also complex and multilayered, sometimes hard and heavy. In this course, we'll gather around a table to nourish ourselves with many food stories and learn from a wide range of dishes and their narratives.

Speakers

Poupeh Missaghi

Instructor

Sunday June 8, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Poetry Hybrid

Audience Craft Seminar

9:00am MDT

Equanimity and the Long-Lined Poem (V)

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

Zoom

In these days of environmental, military, social, and—for some—personal upheaval, the feeling of equanimity can be illusive. The Buddha said that if we want to be happy, we need to be able to stand like a great tree amid praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and sorrow. We’ll look at a forest of such trees comprised of ancient and contemporary poems that manage to convey equanimity—not by looking away, but by seeing clearly and articulating that seeing onto the page. We’ll consider various approaches and begin the creative process of writing our own equanimous poems.

Speakers

Sawnie Morris

Instructor

Sawnie Morris is author of Her, Infinite, winner of the 2015 New Issues Poetry Award. Recent honors include the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, inclusion in BAX: 2016, Best American Experimental Writing, and a feature in Poets & Writers. She's the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Taos (2018-2... Read More →

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

Poetry Hybrid

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Perchance to Dream: Crafting Our Dreams Into Poems (V)

Sunday June 8, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Zoom

Poetry, from its earliest known incarnation, has been shaped of dreams. The very architecture of what we call a poem may originate in our innate capacity for dreaming. We’ll read and discuss the work of a range of contemporary poets who write successfully and movingly from their dreams, looking with a keen eye at the craft moves that have made the private experience of a dream into a shared and inspiring experience for a reader. Then we’ll experiment with shaping our own dream(s) into poems. Bring a dream (or two or three), written or held in memory.

Speakers

Sawnie Morris

Instructor

Sunday June 8, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Zoom

Poetry Hybrid

Audience Craft Seminar

5:00pm MDT

Advanced Weeklong Workshop Orientation

Sunday June 8, 2025 5:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse

Writers taking workshops with Steve Almond, Emily Rapp Black, Mark Doty, Danielle Evans, Amitava Kumar, T Kira Māhealani Madden, Claire Messud, Beth Nguyen, Jenny Offill, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Maurice Carlos Ruffin, join us on Sunday afternoon for quick introductions to your instructor and fellow classmates and a tour of the Lit Fest campus. Stay for the Lit Fest Kickoff Party!

Speakers

Multiple Instructors

Sunday June 8, 2025 5:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Poetry Hybrid

Audience Event

1:30pm MDT

Borderless: Writing Against Containment

Monday June 9, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse

The border is highly permeable for some and completely rigid for others, as the pandemic, various humanitarian crises, and recent elections in the West have underscored. The terror of the border remains relentless. In this generative seminar, we'll discuss and write in response to the work of (im)migrant writers who question the border and contend with its shifting, dislocating provocations. We’ll consider how and why certain bodies and literatures are (b)ordered through denial, displacement, dispossession, and detainment. And we’ll explore how we can write to confound the ideologies, policies, and practices that seek to contain us.

Speakers

Kanika Agrawal

Instructor

Monday June 9, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Poetry Hybrid

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

So You Want to Go Indie

Monday June 9, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse

As the quality and readership of indie/self-published books increases, indie publishing—once considered a “less than” alternative to traditional publishing—is becoming a progressively popular choice for authors at all stages of their careers. What does it take to independently publish your book? In this seminar, we’ll explore what goes into the indie decision, the pros and cons of this publishing method, and the must-have attributes of a successful independently published book.

Speakers

Cynthia Swanson

Monday June 9, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

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

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Just Two Poems

Monday June 9, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse

In this class, we’ll experience the power of deep reading. Before class, you’ll be given two poems that serve as jumping-off points to explore and be inspired by master poets of exceptional craft. We’ll explore both the measured unfolding of a longer poem and the lyric compression of another. Exercises, experiments, and your own poems will follow.

Speakers

Lynn Wagner

Instructor

Lynn Wagner is the author of No Blues This Raucous Song, which won the Slapering Hol Chapbook competition. She received an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, where she won the Academy of American Poets prize. She has earned fellowships to the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts... Read More →

Monday June 9, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Poetry

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Channeling Palimpsest in Your Writing

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

Lighthouse

Drawing inspiration from the idea of a palimpsest—medieval manuscripts on papyrus or parchment whose text was scraped or washed off, and then written over—the workshop will consider what is erased from the past versus what remains and how that shows up in our lives and our writing. We’ll try techniques that sample the writing of others, such as erasure or the cento, and also write from prompts that consider what parts of ourselves have been erased and written over, or how scraps of the past are embedded in the places and objects that surround us.

Speakers

Malinda Miller

Instructor

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

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Poetry Hybrid

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

The Art of Iteration: How to Revise Your Poetry Manuscript

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

Lighthouse

When is a poetry manuscript truly “done”? This seminar explores the balance between productive revision and perfectionism, drawing insights from poets like Ocean Vuong and Victoria Chang. Learn to approach your manuscript as a cohesive body of work, clarifying its themes, voice, and style. We’ll challenge the myth of linear progression, embrace curiosity, and help you recognize when your work feels whole enough to share with the world—so that you can seek publication with confidence.

Speakers

Radha Marcum

Instructor

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

Poetry

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Lament (V)

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

Zoom

Lament can be elegy or protest, memoir or lyric outpouring. This craft workshop will explore this fertile and necessary genre, offering examples and prompts to encourage writers to articulate their own lament whether it be personal, political, environmental, or spiritual.

Speakers

Elizabeth Robinson

Instructor

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

Poetry Hybrid

Audience Craft Seminar

7:00pm MDT

Visiting Authors Reading: Mat Johnson, Alex Marzano-Lesnevitch, and Elizabeth McCracken

Monday June 9, 2025 7:00pm - 8:00pm 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

Monday June 9, 2025 7:00pm - 8:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Hybrid Poetry

Audience Event

7:00pm MDT

Visiting Authors Reading: Visiting Authors Reading: Mat Johnson, Alex Marzano-Lesnevitch, and Elizabeth McCracken (Livestream)

Monday June 9, 2025 7:00pm - 8:00pm 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

Monday June 9, 2025 7:00pm - 8:00pm MDT
Zoom

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Hybrid Poetry

Audience Event

9:00am MDT

The Radical Four-Act Eastern Storytelling Structure (V)

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

Zoom

Discussions in the West around diversity in the arts often focus on the identities of characters and creators. However, true diversity is about more than just plopping different faces into stories that are 100 percent Western in spirit; it can―and should―encompass diverse structures, themes, and values. The program explores how storytelling staples in the West, such as the three-act structure and themes of empowerment and change, are far from universal. It introduces viewers to the East Asian four-act story structure and explains how Eastern value systems such as collectivism can dictate form.

Speakers

Henry Lien

Instructor

Henry Lien is a 2012 graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop, Seattle. He is the author of the critically-acclaimed and award-winning Peasprout Chen middle grade fantasy series, which he began writing under the guidance of George R.R. Martin, Kelly Link, and Chuck Palahniuk at Clarion... Read More →

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

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

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Diving Into the Wreck—Finding Your Obsessions

Tuesday June 10, 2025 1:30pm - 2:30pm MDT

Lighthouse

Denis Johnson said, “The stories of the fallen world lay inside us. That’s the interesting stuff.” At our best, we all write about that slice of experience and knowledge that haunts and obsesses us. Does it have to be dark or fallen? No. But it has to be true to the deepest corners of your consciousness. In this seminar, we’ll look at what you write about and why. We’ll find the richest avenues for you to pursue, to set you off from the pack.

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 →

Tuesday June 10, 2025 1:30pm - 2:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Poetry Hybrid Dramatic Writing

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

The Art of Literary Submission

Tuesday June 10, 2025 1:30pm - 2:30pm MDT

Lighthouse

You've been polishing your writing and you're ready to submit it to literary journals, but just how do you do that? In this seminar, we'll learn about many of the journals waiting for your work. We'll discuss cover letters, tracking your submissions, useful websites, how to gauge whether you received a "good" rejection, and how to know when to keep submitting a piece, pull it for revisions, or put it in the recycle pile. By the end of this seminar, you'll be armed with a thick-anti-rejection hide and a list of journals to submit your work to.

Speakers

Jenny Shank

Instructor

Jenny Shank's short story collection, Mixed Company, won the George Garrett Fiction Prize and is a finalist for the Colorado Book Award (General Fiction). Jenny Shank's novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award in fiction, was a finalist for the Mountains & Plains Independent... Read More →

Tuesday June 10, 2025 1:30pm - 2:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Poetry Hybrid Publishing/Career

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Say Less: Reading and Writing Minimal Poems

Tuesday June 10, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse

In After Lorca, Jack Spicer writes (in a “letter” to the dead Federico Garcia Lorca), “A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.” In “The Spiral Jetty,” Robert Smithson writes that “size determines an object, but scale determines art.” How do we create and experience the life and afterlife (and perhaps even the half-life) of the “infinitely small”? How does a minimal poem negotiate a relationship between size and scale? In this discussion-based seminar, we'll explore how attention and comprehension expand, contract, and contort as we read and write toward the limits of expression.

Speakers

Kanika Agrawal

Instructor

Tuesday June 10, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Poetry

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Find Your Unique Style

Tuesday June 10, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse

Your style is yours alone. Readers will return to your writing again and again because they like the way you shape consciousness on the page. In this seminar, we’ll dig into your style, decide on what sets you apart, then hone your unique voice. You’ll come away with a clear sense of your true self on the page.

Speakers

William Haywood Henderson

Instructor

Tuesday June 10, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

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

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

The Rhetorical Hallway

Tuesday June 10, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse

Writing a poem is not unlike walking down a hallway, passing many doors, almost always too quickly. Which ones might we stop and open? How exactly do we do open these doors? When we write, we are making constant choices, intuitive and conscious. In this seminar, we’ll talk about how to slow down and understand our choices in poems, and by extension any piece of writing. This way we can vastly expand our writing, and continually renew our sense of exploration and discovery. We can also become better readers. We’ll look at poems by others, and gather specific techniques of expansion and discovery. Bring a poem of yours that you know is not yet right, and if we have time, we’ll practice slowing down together.

Speakers

Matthew Zapruder

Visiting Author

Poet, translator, professor and editor Matthew Zapruder was born in Washington, DC. in 1967. He earned a BA in Russian literature at Amherst College, an MA in Slavic languages and literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in poetry at the University of Massachusetts... Read More →

Tuesday June 10, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Poetry Hybrid

Audience Craft Seminar

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

4:30pm MDT

Lit Fest Fellows Reading

Tuesday June 10, 2025 4:30pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse

Help us celebrate the exceptional talent among this year’s Lit Fest Fellowship finalists and winners. Happy hour beverages and snacks available.

Our lineup so far:

Fellowship for Emerging Writers
Poetry: Sydney Mayes (selected by Rowan Ricardo Phillips)
Fiction: Mika Taylor (selected by Megha Majumdar)
Nonfiction: T Abeyta (selected by Mark Sundeen)

Veteran Writing Awardees (selected by Benjamin Hertwig):
Enrique Gautier
Matt Gallagher

LARRK Fellowship Winners:
Shelby Pinkham
Iggy Shuler

Speakers

Multiple Instructors

Tuesday June 10, 2025 4:30pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Hybrid Poetry

Audience Event

7:00pm MDT

Visiting Authors Reading: Steve Almond, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Eduardo Corral, and Paul Harding

Tuesday June 10, 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

Tuesday June 10, 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: Steve Almond, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Eduardo Corral, and Paul Harding (Livestream)

Tuesday June 10, 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

Tuesday June 10, 2025 7:00pm - 8:15pm MDT
Zoom

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Hybrid Poetry

Audience Event

9:00am MDT

Non-Linear Structures from Non-Western Storytelling (V)

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

Zoom

Western storytelling traditions decree that a linear structure (along with the three act structure, the hero’s journey, and a rising self-esteem arc) are mandatory features of any satisfying story. This program challenges that assumption by exploring non-linear structures, specifically cyclic and nested structures, using examples from non-Western stories and films.
Writers will come to understand how these non-linear structures allow for thematic stacking, embracing of moral complexity, and a synthesis between form and content to explode the idea that a straight line is the best way to tell every story.

Speakers

Henry Lien

Instructor

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

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

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Write Livelihood: Making a Living as a Writer (V)

Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Zoom

How do we support our writing habit without wearing ourselves out in our day jobs so much that it’s hard to write? Let’s talk about off-the-beaten path possibilities for Right Livelihood (the Buddhist term for work that serves the world) for writers, including translating what we know as writers into helping others grow their creativity, day jobs that don’t have anything necessarily to do with writing, cobbling together freelance work with enough time to write, or rearranging our time in our current work-life balance. We’ll also do writing prompts together to conserve with our callings and brainstorm possibilities and next steps.

Speakers

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

Instructor

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Ph.D, the 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate is the author of 24 books, including How Time Moves: New & Selected Poems; Miriam's Well, a novel; Needle in the Bone, a nonfiction book on the Holocaust; The Sky Begins At Your Feet: A Memoir on Cancer, Community, and... Read More →

Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Zoom

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Poetry Hybrid Dramatic Writing

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Close, Close (Close) Third Person

Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse

In this class, we'll talk about "close third person" point of view, and how to really embody a character’s innermost psyche and motivations. How can you heighten emotion in your writing through the closest point of view possible? In this class, we'll discuss the particular demands of close third POV by exploring elements such as free indirect discourse, the perception layer, psychic distance, "head-hopping," interiority, and embodied physical action.

Speakers

Erika Krouse

Instructor

Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Poetry Hybrid YA/Children's

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Poems for Garden and Forest

Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse

Let’s write poems inspired by the world around us! Excerpting DH Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers! and poems in Camille Dungy’s anthology Black Nature, we’ll write poems of creatures, plants and places. As Dungy herself writes in “Language,” nature can be a key to the cipher: “The way the high hawk’s key unlocks the throat / Of the sky and the coyote’s yip knocks / it shut.” Bring your bats, ants, tomatoes and daffodils, and we'll go wild.

Speakers

Lynn Wagner

Instructor

Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Poetry

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Why Rhyme (V)

Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Zoom

Poets have long known that rhyme is an effective tool that can enhance the overall meaning and impact of a poem. When used well, rhyme not only brings together unexpected words, but can also make a poem more ear-pleasing and creates a kind of expectation and aural satisfaction. Is rhyme a thing of the past, is the pendulum due to swing in the other direction; or might there be room for a variety of types of rhyme applicable to contemporary poetry? In this course, we’ll consider these and other questions.

Speakers

Jodie Hollander

Instructor

Jodie Hollander was raised in a family of classical musicians. She studied poetry in England, and her work has been published in journals such as The Poetry Review, The Yale Review, PN Review, The Dark Horse, The Rialto, Verse Daily, The New Criterion, Australia’s Best Poems of... Read More →

Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Zoom

Poetry

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Up Front: Exploring and Making Poem Titles

Wednesday June 11, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse

Usually, the title is the first thing you read of the poem on the page. In this class we’ll explore at least five different ways to make a poem title and escape the uninspiring addition of an appendage or the mere label. Using models from Thomas Lux, Yusef Komanaaka, Wallace Stevens, Mary Ruefle and more we will play approaches to create context, clarify focus and subvert meaning.

Bring two poems you have written but may be unsure about as well as any stray titles you may have.

Speakers

Lynn Wagner

Instructor

Wednesday June 11, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Poetry

Audience Craft Seminar

9:00am MDT

Live in the Layers: Mindfulness and Writing (V)

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

Zoom

“Live in the layers, not on the litter,” Stanley Kunitz writes in his poem, “The Layers.” Through cultivating a practice of mindful writing, we can bring greater curiosity to the layers of our lives and more vivid, compelling, and powerful writing to the page. Writing itself can be its own path of mindfulness, training us to open our peripheral vision wider as we learn to listen to and glimpse what wants to be said. We’ll engage in some short writing and meditation exercises, and we’ll talk about writing to grow our freedom, gratitude, courage, and resilience.

Speakers

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

Instructor

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

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Poetry Hybrid

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Imagination Station

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

Lighthouse

Come with an open mind, leave with pages and pages (and pages) of fresh writing! In this generative class, our magical box of props, prompts, and writing activities will infuse your writing with new energy, sending you in exciting new directions. Exercises will be in 3-5 minute sprints, each inspired by a different source of inspiration to explore. Open to writers of all genres who are looking for inspiration and fun.

Speakers

Erika Krouse

Instructor

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

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

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Using the Epistolary to Jumpstart the Poem

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

Lighthouse

Many of us remember the pleasure of writing and receiving letters, the way an evolving correspondence could deepen our understanding of our correspondent and ourselves. In this generative poetry seminar, we'll activate our letter writing skills to create poems that tap into the dimensions of a letter. Using models by Victoria Chang, Eve Ewing, William Carlos Williams, Catherine Wing, and others, we'll explore the possibilities of the epistle—how it compresses exposition, makes room for complex relationships, allows for both distance and intimacy. Once we cross the threshold of speaker, audience, and premise, we’ll be on our way!

Speakers

Emily Pérez

Instructor

Emily Pérez is the author of What Flies Want, winner of the Iowa Prize; House of Sugar, House of Stone; and two chapbooks. She is co-editor of the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. A CantoMundo fellow and Ledbury Critic, she’s received support from Hedgebrook... Read More →

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

Poetry

Audience Craft Seminar

4:30pm MDT

Poetry Collective Celebration

Thursday June 12, 2025 4:30pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse

Come and celebrate the hard work of the Poetry Collective graduates, hear some of their final work, and learn more about the year-long program.

Speakers

Multiple Instructors

Thursday June 12, 2025 4:30pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Poetry

Audience Event

4:30pm MDT

Poetry Collective Celebration (Livestream)

Thursday June 12, 2025 4:30pm - 6:00pm MDT

Zoom

Come and celebrate the hard work of the Poetry Collective graduates, hear some of their final work, and learn more about the year-long program.

Speakers

Multiple Instructors

Thursday June 12, 2025 4:30pm - 6:00pm MDT
Zoom

Poetry

Audience Event

7:00pm MDT

Visiting Authors Reading: Helen Phillips, Eileen Myles, Tony Tulathimutte, and Matthew Zapruder

Thursday June 12, 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

Thursday June 12, 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: Helen Phillips, Eileen Myles, Tony Tulathimutte, and Matthew Zapruder (Livestream)

Thursday June 12, 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

Thursday June 12, 2025 7:00pm - 8:15pm MDT
Zoom

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Hybrid Poetry

Audience Event

1:30pm MDT

Details That Matter

Friday June 13, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse

Is the sofa in your story gold or green? Does it matter? Yes, it actually does. In this seminar, we’ll work on creating specific details that add meaning and depth to your story. Specificity leads to subtext. Subtext leads to richness. The sofa is gold for a reason. Everybody wins!

Speakers

William Haywood Henderson

Instructor

Friday June 13, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Fiction Nonfiction/Memoir Poetry Hybrid Dramatic Writing

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

A Circle Is God Saying Yes: Strategies for Rethinking Revision

Friday June 13, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse

In this craft seminar, we’ll enlarge and complicate what we mean when we say “revision”. Revision isn’t just reworking language, it’s part of the poet’s practice. One should never be satisfied with the first gift: the language that arrives first. Poets should aspire to more surprising imagery and phrasing. During our conversation, we’ll put pressure on notions of attentiveness, notebooking, reading, the poetic line, sentence patterns, imagery, and language itself. How do we notice and internalize the things of the world? How can we be more attentive to our attentiveness? We’ll practice a few revision strategies during our time together and discuss the importance of wonder and bewilderment in a poet’s life.

Speakers

Eduardo Corral

Visiting Author

Eduardo C. Corral is the son of Mexican immigrants. Graywolf Press published his second book, Guillotine, in 2020. His first book, Slow Lightning, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. His poems have appeared in Ambit, New England Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares... Read More →

Friday June 13, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

Poetry

Audience Craft Seminar

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