Lit Fest - Lighthouse Writers Workshop 2026: Full Schedule

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8:30am MDT

Advanced Weekend Fiction Intensive: Narrative Movement with Megha Majumdar

Saturday June 13, 2026 8:30am - 12:00pm MDT

How does a story move? What constitutes successful movement, and what can we learn from moments where the story fails to achieve its own goals? With particular attention to plot, structure, character evolution, and logic, we’ll use this critique-based workshop to examine these questions as they pertain to participants' short stories or excerpts from longer work. We’ll begin workshop by having each participant read aloud one sentence from their work, to remind us of the spell of their fiction, and then we will discuss what we found to be persuasive, and what we found to be less so, with the aim of offering a path forward for revision.

Speakers

Megha Majumdar

Visiting Author

Megha Majumdar is the author of the National Book Award longlisted and Kirkus Prize finalist novel A Guardian and a Thief. Her first book, the New York Times bestselling novel A Burning, was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 8:30am - 12:00pm MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Fiction

Audience Advanced Workshop

8:30am MDT

Advanced Weekend Hybrid Workshop: Games Writers Play with Heather Christle

Saturday June 13, 2026 8:30am - 12:00pm MDT

TBA

Engaging in play strengthens our linguistic abilities and our capacity to imagine other ways to move through a day (or a life). This workshop will bring people together to play with language as a group and as individuals. We will work to lift ourselves and each other out of ruts worn into our minds. We will pick up strings of words and ask "What would happen if we took this in a different direction?" We will surprise and be surprised in turn.

Through games and other playful writing exercises, you will generate language that you can bring home with you to spark new work. In some cases you may create an entire poem during the workshop itself. The games and exercises are designed to delight and to be shared widely. You can play them later with friends when you (or they) need to connect with a wildness within.

It is probably going to be weird and it is almost certainly going to be fun.

Speakers

Heather Christle

Visiting Author

Heather Christle is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Paper Crown. She has also published two works of nonfiction: In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf and The Crying Book. Her work has appeared in London Review of Books, The Nation... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 8:30am - 12:00pm MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Poetry, Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

The Creative Act: Finding Flow in Flaw (V)

Saturday June 13, 2026 9:00am - 11:00am MDT

Virtual

Inspired by Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act, this generative workshop will loosen your sense of perfectionism and open the door to creative possibility. Through the practices of stillness, attention, and mindful observation, we’ll quiet the inner critic, welcome flaws on the page, and make them part of the creative process. Guided exercises will turn mistakes into unexpected openings and reveal new textures in your writing. Leave with pages that surprise you and a renewed sense of creative freedom.

Speakers

Ladane Nasseri

Faculty

Ladane Nasseri is a journalist and writer. A former Middle East correspondent for Bloomberg News where she led Iran’s news coverage, Ladane has reported for a decade and a half from Tehran, Dubai, and Beirut. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, Businessweek... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Virtual

All Genres

Audience Craft Seminar

9:00am MDT

Desire and Power

Saturday June 13, 2026 9:00am - 11:00am MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Desire is a fundamental element of character-building, yet in too many drafts, character desires lack urgency or are too easily thwarted or fulfilled. In this seminar, we’ll discuss different ways to pump up the stakes and, even better, consider the sparks that can fly when multiple characters have multiple, competing desires. How can tension be built through power dynamics? What are the ways in which power might manifest? How might it be applied? And how and when might it shift, so that your characters—and your reader—are kept on their toes?

Speakers

Dino Enrique Piacentini

Faculty

Dino Enrique Piacentini grew up in Los Angeles, lived in San Francisco for twenty years, and has also, at various times, set down stakes in Houston, Oaxaca, Champaign, and Prague. His debut novel, Invasion of the Daffodils, about a Mexican-American family living on an island off the... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

9:00am MDT

Haunted Landscapes: Writing Place as Presence

Saturday June 13, 2026 9:00am - 11:00am MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

In this generative workshop, we’ll go about the project of animating setting as character. Through prompts and discussion, we’ll explore how landscape can embody memory, loss, and the uncanny—whether rural, urban, or imagined. Come ready to write!

Speakers

Hillary Leftwich

Faculty

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 13, 2026 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

9:00am MDT

Say Less, Mean More: Writing with Subtext

Saturday June 13, 2026 9:00am - 11:00am MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Learn how to layer meaning beneath dialogue and description so your characters reveal as much in silence as they do in speech. We’ll analyze short examples, then practice writing scenes where the real tension simmers beneath the words.

Speakers

Rachel Weaver

Faculty

Rachel Weaver is the author of the novel Point of Direction, which Oprah Magazine named a Top Ten Book to Pick Up Now and which won the 2015 Willa Cather Award for Fiction. She is on the faculty at Wilkes University’s low-residency MFA program in addition to teaching Lighthouse... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

9:00am MDT

Revision is the Doorway to a Poem's (R)evolution

Saturday June 13, 2026 9:00am - 11:00am MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

This seminar will begin with an artist talk focused on revision. We’ll look at the (r)evolution of selected poems and lyrical essays from personal archives—from their raw and earnest first attempts into their final forms. We’ll explore the process of research and material collection; intellectual/emotional considerations; and the detachment from initial ideas and embrace of new directions and forms. We’ll also watch a few short videos of other poets discussing their revision processes. We’ll think about the ways that revision opens the doors for our poem’s liberation and freedom. Together, through group discussion and hands-on exercises, we’ll develop our own set of “best practices” for revision.

This is the in-person version of this event.

Speakers

Layli Long Soldier

Visiting Author

Layli Long Soldier is author of the collection Whereas (Graywolf Press, 2017), which won the National Books Critics Circle award, the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her poems and critical work have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The New... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Poetry

Audience Craft Seminar

9:00am MDT

Revision is the Doorway to a Poem's (R)evolution (Livestream)

Saturday June 13, 2026 9:00am - 11:00am MDT

Virtual

Speakers

Layli Long Soldier

Visiting Author

Saturday June 13, 2026 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Virtual

Poetry

Type advanced, intermediate, intro
Audience Craft Seminar

9:00am MDT

Two-Day Intensive: Plotting Your Course—The Major Turning Points Every Story Needs

Saturday June 13, 2026 9:00am - 12:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Plotting your novel doesn’t have to feel like pulling teeth. Writers will learn about the plot points roadmap—the five major plot points in every story that you need to know before starting your first draft. We'll talk about the three-act structure, theme as the touchpoint for every story, and how plot and character rely on each other and propel each other forward. We’ll identify the five major turning points in every plot that keep your story on track to the finish line (even if the story wanders a little in between).

Speakers

Jenny Elder Moke

Faculty

Jenny Elder Moke is the award-winning author of children’s and adult literature. She enjoys fast-paced adventures with plenty of mysteries, surprising turns, and laughs along the way. Her most recent release is A Spark in the Cinders. She is also the author of Hood and the Curse... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 9:00am - 12:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, YA/Children's

Audience Two-Day Intensive

9:00am MDT

Two-Day Intensive: The Visionary Movement

Saturday June 13, 2026 9:00am - 12:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Using fundamental techniques such as writing like a camera and tracking the sensory experience of a POV character, we'll learn how to write successful visionary movements such as hallucinations, delusions, distorted realities, daydreams, and interior fantasy lives. We'll study literary examples and film sequences as models for how to convince our reader they too are seeing and experiencing what the characters on the page think they are seeing and experiencing, when in fact it’s all in their head.

Speakers

Sarah Elizabeth Schantz

Sarah Elizabeth Schantz is a writer living on the East Side of Old Town Longmont in a Victorian bungalow one alley away from the train tracks. Her first novel Fig debuted from Simon & Schuster in 2015 and was selected by NPR as A Best Read of the Year before going on to win a 2016... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 9:00am - 12:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Audience Two-Day Intensive

9:00am MDT

Two-Day Intensive: The Personal. The Political. The Poetic.

Saturday June 13, 2026 9:00am - 12:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

To the tune of all things protest song and poetry: In this generative workshop, we'll read poems, speeches, essays, and lyrics that offer a lens on liberation and resistance, while highlighting the personal voice and experience. We'll consider the long-held traditions of poetry as a tool for social change and examine our own relationships to that history. Participants will write from prompts and then, depending on time, share some of their writing. Appropriate for all levels of experience.

Speakers

Suzi Q Smith

Faculty

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 13, 2026 9:00am - 12:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Poetry, Multi-Genre

Audience Two-Day Intensive

9:00am MDT

Two-Day Intensive: The Undeniable Voice—Craft Lessons from Vigil by George Saunders

Saturday June 13, 2026 9:00am - Sunday June 14, 2026 12:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

The latest novel from Booker Prize–winning George Saunders, Vigil, takes place in a single evening—the last one, in fact, for dying oil baron K.J. Boone. During his twilight hours, Boone finds himself transported to otherworldly realms populated by the living and the dead. And everyone he meets has an urgent story to tell. In this class, we’ll dissect Saunders’s meaningful storytelling choices. We’ll discuss his emotionally affecting style that takes bigger and bigger risks by the page. And we’ll experiment in our own writing with his craft techniques. Come ready to learn from one of our modern masters!

Speakers

Alexander Lumans

Editor

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 13, 2026 9:00am - Sunday June 14, 2026 12:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction

Audience Two-Day Intensive

10:00am MDT

Queer Creatives Drag Bingo Brunch

Saturday June 13, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

It’s brunch! And this year we're bringing back bingo with local drag queen Alice Glamoure! Come celebrate Lit Fest with delicious food from Scratch Catering Services, cocktails, mocktails, and some friendly bingo competition with your fellow LGBTQIA+ writers and creatives. The first three winners will receive prizes, including a choice of a book written by Lighthouse’s Queer Creatives faculty.

Queer Creatives focuses on queer writers and makers in Colorado. We aim to connect queer creatives with peers because we know that LGBTQIA+ lives are enriched and affirmed through collective storymaking and storysharing. No matter how your creativity manifests, no matter how your queerness manifests, this is a space for you!

If the ticket price will prevent you from attending this year’s brunch, please complete a writership application to register for a discounted or free spot.
We will have a Sober Safe Space available on the second floor during this event. This is a welcoming, inclusive gathering place for people in all forms of recovery or anyone who wants to have a space to connect without alcohol during Lit Fest 2026. There will be snacks. NA beverages, writing prompts, and conversation starters available during this time.

For more resources and recovery meetings close to Lighthouse, you can visit: https://www.yorkstreetclub.com/Schedule

Saturday June 13, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

All Genres

Audience Event

12:00pm MDT

Lunchtime Business Panel: Clips and Careers—Editors of Lit Mags, Newspapers, and Outlets Tell All

Saturday June 13, 2026 12:00pm - 1:00pm MDT

TBA

Panelists include: Camille Bromley (NYT Opinion Special Projects), Alexander Lumans (American Short Fiction), Holly Amos (Poetry), and J ane Huffman (Denver Quarterly)

Publishing a poem, essay, news piece, or short story can be a huge accomplishment on its own, but it can also be the first move in a much longer game. This panel brings together editors from literary magazines, newspapers, and major outlets (including an editor from American Short Fiction, a special projects editor from New York Times Opinion, an editor from Poetry, and an editor from Denver Quarterly) to talk about what they're looking for, how to get their attention, and what a single well-placed piece can set in motion. One Lighthouse writer published just such an essay in the Times, and watched it become the foundation of her book published in February. Come hear how that happens, and how to start building your own trail of clips, credits, and opportunities.

Speakers

Jane Huffman

Jane Huffman’s debut collection, PUBLIC ABSTRACT, won the 2023 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Dana Levin. Buy a copy of PUBLIC ABSTRACT here. Jane is a doctoral student in poetry at the University of Denver and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She found... Read More →

Holly Amos

Poetry magazine

As the Managing Editor at the Poetry Foundation, Holly has over a decade of experience curating print and digital content for the leading organization dedicated to poetry in the US and beyond. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago and a BFA in Creative Writing from... Read More →

Camille Bromley

Editor, Special Projects, New York Times

Camille Bromley is a special projects editor for The New York Times Opinion desk, specializing in features and longform. Before coming to the Times, she was a features editor at Wired, The Believer, Harper’s, and the Columbia Journalism Review. The stories she's edited have be... Read More →

Alexander Lumans

Editor

Saturday June 13, 2026 12:00pm - 1:00pm MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

All Genres

Audience Lunchtime Business Panels

12:00pm MDT

Lunchtime Business Panel: Clips and Careers—Editors of Lit Mags, Newspapers, and Outlets Tell All (Livestream)

Saturday June 13, 2026 12:00pm - 1:00pm MDT

Virtual

Panelists include: Camille Bromley (NYT Opinion Special Projects), Alexander Lumans (American Short Fiction), Holly Amos (Poetry), and J ane Huffman (Denver Quarterly)

Publishing a poem, essay, news piece, or short story can be a huge accomplishment on its own, but it can also be the first move in a much longer game. This panel brings together editors from literary magazines, newspapers, and major outlets (including an editor from American Short Fiction, a special projects editor from New York Times Opinion, and others TBA) to talk about what they're looking for, how to get their attention, and what a single well-placed piece can set in motion. One Lighthouse writer published just such an essay in the Times, and watched it become the foundation of her book published in February. Come hear how that happens, and how to start building your own trail of clips, credits, and opportunities.

Speakers

Jane Huffman

Holly Amos

Poetry magazine

Alexander Lumans

Editor

Camille Bromley

Editor, Special Projects, New York Times

Saturday June 13, 2026 12:00pm - 1:00pm MDT
Virtual

All Genres

Audience Lunchtime Business Panels

1:00pm MDT

Two-Day Intensive: Strange and Mundane—Pulling the Odd from the Everyday

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:00pm - 4:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

The minutia of our lives is a rich and wild and wonderful place. In this course, we'll look at a variety of writers—Joy Williams, Grace Paley, Lynne Tillman, Stephen Dixon, Donald Barthelme, George Saunders— to see how they mine the strangenesses of the everyday. In looking at these writers, we’ll identify places in our own work where the fascinating inner life of the work we do, the food we eat, the tasks we complete, the rules we have to follow, can become the thrilling, perplexing, nuanced, and propulsive heart that keeps us invested in a story.

Speakers

Nini Berndt

Faculty

Nini Berndt's debut novel, There Are Reasons for This, comes out from Tin House Press in spring 2025. She's a graduate of the MFA program in Fiction at the University of Florida, and her work has appeared in The Southampton Review, Subtropics, Adroit, Passages North, Blackbird, and... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:00pm - 4:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction

Audience Two-Day Intensive

1:00pm MDT

Two-Day Intensive: Your Voice on the Page

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:00pm - 4:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Your fully developed literary voice is as individual as your brain, your intelligence, your sight. It will set you apart from all other writers. Taking inspiration from Ben Yagoda’s The Sound on the Page and Jane Allison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode, we’ll examine your voice, discover its strengths and individuality, and ultimately help you break through to an even more distinct and complex voice on the page.

Speakers

William Haywood Henderson

Faculty

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 13, 2026 1:00pm - 4:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Audience Two-Day Intensive

1:00pm MDT

Two-Day Intensive: Borrowed Structures—Finding Poetic Form in Unexpected Places

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:00pm - 4:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

What happens when a poem takes its shape from an art installation, divination text, or folk calendar entry? In this class, we'll explore how poets borrow forms—structures adapted from non-poetic sources—to create surprising and generative constraints. Through a range of examples, we’ll explore how to identify promising forms in the world around you and adapt them for poem making.

Speakers

Radha Marcum

Faculty

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 →

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:00pm - 4:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Poetry

Audience Two-Day Intensive

1:30pm MDT

Is My Character An Asshole?

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

WWE Hall-of-Famer Scott Hall famously said, "Bad times don't last, but bad guys do." Is it true that bad characters last longer in our imaginations than the good ones? How does this compete with conventional wisdom that encourages likeable characters? We’ll examine common character tropes in fiction and nonfiction, as well as the mandate that characters can (or should?) change over the course of the story. Collectively, we’ll explore character arcs and how to create lasting relationships between readers and characters. Each writer will leave this seminar having developed an archetype for one of their characters.

Speakers

Pardeep Toor

Faculty

Pardeep Toor's writing has appeared in the Best Debut Short Stories 2021, The PEN America Dau Prize, Catapult, Electric Literature, Longreads, and Southern Humanities Review. His short story collection, Hands, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press.

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Literary Ephemera

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

In this generative, multi-genre course, we’ll explore alternative approaches to storytelling, such as erasure, literary collage, photo captions and image-text hybrids. We’ll create narratives relying less on plot and more on association, juxtaposition and negative space. This seminar will be run like an art studio – with live prompts and plenty of cutting, pasting, erasing and replacing. Through examples, discussion and exercises, we’ll learn how everyday ephemera can jumpstart your writing, help you approach a project from another angle, or simply see your world differently. Bring your inner child, an open mind, and be prepared to play.

Speakers

Harrison Candelaria Fletcher

Faculty

Harrison Candelaria Fletcher is the author of the essay collection, Descanso for My Father, the memoir, Presentimiento: A Life in Dreams, and his newest, Finding Querencia: Essays from In Between. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, Autumn House... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Sentence Surgery: Another Live Editing Seminar

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Sentences in fiction are subject to different demands than sentences in nonfiction, and thus (perhaps) must be constructed and revised differently. In this multi-hour live-edit session, we'll collectively play with various sentences and paragraphs as a means of exploring this idea, beginning with a sentence that every typist knows by heart, then mauling passages from some famous/infamous works, and concluding with examples submitted by participants (from their own work or from well-known writers, preferably dead). Where, exactly, we go will be driven by the examples selected and the questions that arise. Emphasis will be on exploring the phenomenal plasticity of language, design tradeoffs in sentence structure, and the cognitive processes involved in reading, rather than issues of correctness, style, or rhetorical strategy.

Speakers

David Wroblewski

Faculty

David Wroblewski is the author, most recently, of the novel Familiaris, his followup to the internationally bestselling The Story Of Edgar Sawtelle, an Oprah Book Club pick, Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, winner of the Colorado Book Award, Indie Choice Best... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Structure through Motif

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

A motif is a recurring element in a piece of art—an object, action, idea, sensation, or just a word or line. Saris. Doors opening and closing. Variations of the word “small.” And, like characters, motifs can develop over the course of a narrative, adding layers of suggestion and meaning. They can even serve as a narrative’s primary structural element. In this seminar, we’ll consider motifs that call to us; locate potential motifs in our own drafts; identify ways to tease out arcs for our motifs; and maybe even figure out how to use those motifs to build an entire story or essay around. Bring something short you’d like to play around with.

Speakers

Dino Enrique Piacentini

Faculty

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

The Laundry Line (V)

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Virtual

In his writing workshops, the journalist Michael Pollan says that every piece of writing, whether fiction or nonfiction, needs a "laundry line": a main conceptual through-line that is strong yet flexible enough to hold the various vignettes, reflections, and analyses that make up the piece. This craft seminar will provide an opportunity for writers to begin developing a sturdy laundry line for their current projects, focusing on the difference between narrative and chronology, how voice evolves across structure, how to braid personal reflection with reportage and analysis, and much more.

Speakers

Natalie Hodges

Faculty

Born and raised in Denver, Natalie Hodges has performed as a classical violinist throughout Colorado and in New York, Boston, Paris, and the Italian Piedmont, as well as at the Aspen Music Festival and the Stowe Tango Music Festival. Her first book, Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Virtual

Fiction, Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Sell Essays That Boost Your Book's Potential

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Trying to build your platform to sell your memoir book proposal? I was in that situation last year. This seminar will help writers brainstorm a variety of reported essay angles for their main personal story, and craft pitches for reported stories that include the right balance of research and connection to readers. We’ll talk about finding contacts for editors and then grabbing their attention. We'll examine sample pitches that helped me land research-backed essays in the New York Times, Guardian, Vogue and CNBC, all of which boosted my credibility as an expert, which in turn promoted my book.

Speakers

Amanda McCracken

Faculty

Amanda McCracken is a freelance journalist who is passionate about experiences that highlight the intersection of wellness and relationships. A few places her work has been published include the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, National Geographic, Elle, Outside, NPR, ESPN... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Advanced Weekend Fiction Workshop: Using Image with Melissa Broder

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:30pm - 5:00pm MDT

TBA

This immersive workshop invites writers of all levels to explore the vibrant intersection of visual art and the written word. Ekphrastic writing, poetry, or prose is directly inspired by works of art, and it offers a powerful way to deepen perception, escape the linear mind during drafting, and evolve originality and surprise in one’s artistic voice. Through guided in-class exercises and prompts, we’ll explore visual ekphrasis, as well as experimental forms of audio and somatic ekphrasis to generate new fiction. Participants will receive first-blush feedback on their work, and opportunities to share will be available to those who would like to do so.

Speakers

Melissa Broder

Visiting Author

Melissa Broder is the author of the novels DEATH VALLEY, MILK FED, and THE PISCES, the essay collection SO SAD TODAY, and five collections of poems, including SUPERDOOM: Selected Poems. Her books are translated in over twelve languages. Broder has written for The New York Times, Harper's... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:30pm - 5:00pm MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Fiction

Audience Advanced Workshop

1:30pm MDT

Advanced Weekend Nonfiction Workshop: Truth in Nonfiction with Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:30pm - 5:00pm MDT

TBA

This workshop is for all writers working in nonfiction, established or otherwise. The rigors of nonfiction lie in telling the truth, fact-checking the truth, and working with material evidence. The factually accurate in nonfiction is of utmost importance—but how do we write the factually accurate when facts can be slippery? How, and what, do we write when the history of a people hasn’t been kept, or has actively been erased? How can we acknowledge the murk and the inexact quality of memory on the page?

In this workshop, we’ll use Michael Taussig’s important summation of the work of anthropology—the “subject is not the truth of being but the social being of truth”— to help guide us through the lenses available in nonfiction. We’ll read some nonfiction that widens the scope of the genre, utilizes different lenses, and we’ll write in class using prompts inspired by our readings. Students will also workshop a piece. This class is for nonfiction work only.

Speakers

Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Visiting Author

Ingrid Rojas Contreras is the award winning author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree and The Man Who Could Move Clouds. She holds an MFA from Columbia College Chicago and currently teaches fiction at the University of San Francisco. Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, but... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:30pm - 5:00pm MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Advanced Workshop

1:30pm MDT

Advanced Weekend Poetry Workshop: Freedom Before the Revolt with Layli Long Soldier

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:30pm - 5:00pm MDT

TBA

Poems have their own lives and their own minds, it seems. At some point, even with our best intentions, we may encounter resistance from the poem. Or worse, the poem may revolt and fall apart. So perhaps, the poem is like a young adult: It wants to say something and needs the freedom to do so. For this to happen, we as poets must set aside our expectations and predeterminations of what a poem “should be.” Perhaps we need to get out of the way and let the young poem find itself, its shape, its own life. This is to say, we mustn’t be afraid to let the poem try things and fail. We must encourage its curiosity and courage.

In this workshop, we’ll see what happens when we get out of the way and follow the poem’s desires. We’ll set aside our ideas about right and wrong. Instead, we’ll ask, what happens when we completely alter the punctuation? What happens with short lines versus no line breaks at all? What happens when the text sprawls across the page freely or sings from a cozy corner? We will embrace missteps as part of the process, all in pursuit of the question, What does the poem want?

Participants will need a notebook dedicated as a “thinking journal” to write in and, outside of class, a computer and an open mind to listen sensitively and judgment-free to our young poems.

Speakers

Layli Long Soldier

Visiting Author

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:30pm - 5:00pm MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Poetry

Audience Advanced Workshop

4:00pm MDT

I Shot the Sheriff: Writing True/Untrue Confessions

Saturday June 13, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Literary confessions generate sympathy, create immediacy, and solidify the confessor’s relationship with an empathetic reader. But how do you navigate the trickier aspects of confession: drama vs. self-indulgence, getting the reader to care, and scariest of all, what your mother might think? In this class, we’ll examine how the experts navigate their real and imaginary confessions, and plunder their secrets for our personal use. And then confess to it. Privacy will be respected; open to all genres.

Speakers

Erika Krouse

Faculty

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 13, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Literary Swagger: Writing Prose that Makes Readers Take Notice

Saturday June 13, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Have you ever read a passage in a book that made you want to applaud, howl, laugh, and most of all, underline? Some writers have literary swagger, and don’t think that people don’t notice! Swagger can arrive through confidence, humor, decisiveness, or intensity of feeling. Swagger happens when the voice of the prose rises to meet the pitch of the story in an important moment. In this class we’ll read examples from writers including Miranda July, Deborah Jackson Taffa, Olga Tokarczuk, Damon Young, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Kevin Wilson, and Hanif Abdurraquib and try writing knockout prose of our own.

Speakers

Jenny Shank

Faculty

Jenny Shank's short story collection, Mixed Company, won the George Garrett Fiction Prize and the Colorado Book Award and her novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award in fiction.

Jenny's stories, essays, satire, and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, McSweeney's, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Poets & Writers, Bust Magazine, The Guardian, Santa Monica... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Out of Character

Saturday June 13, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

TBA

Contrary to everything writers are told about crafting credible characters, this workshop will explore when and why your characters should do something “out of character.” Practicing techniques we’ll discuss in class, we’ll further develop characters, build tension, create conflict, and/or work toward revelation and resolution. We will use low-stakes fiction-focused writing exercises to explore the idea but creative nonfiction writers and memoirists will learn how to use the same concept in their work. All participants will learn who the people populating their pages really are.

Speakers

Sarah Elizabeth Schantz

Saturday June 13, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Unspooling Local Lore: Bringing Your Setting to Life

Saturday June 13, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Even as many of us can quickly identify the eccentricities and mythology of places we’ve called home, it can be enormously challenging to fully capture a place on the page. In this two-hour, generative craft seminar, writers will have the opportunity to name, map, and explicate the urban legends, suburban gossip, and local lore that defines the towns and cities we call home, and, in doing so, bring the settings of our fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction to life in more vivid detail.

Speakers

Chris Vanjonack

Faculty

Chris Vanjonack is a writer and educator from Fort Collins, Colorado. A recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award, his fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in One Story, Barrelhouse, Electric Literature, Ninth Letter, DIAGRAM, Quarterly West, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. In... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Lyric Essay: Gathering Fragments

Saturday June 13, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

In this workshop, we will read examples and begin drafting our own lyric essays. The lyric essay is a form that brings together elements of poetry, memoir, and creative nonfiction to invite a reader to an experience. Sometimes fragmented, the lyric essay allows us to draw from our own memories, impressions, ideations, questions and research to weave a narrative about our individual and collective experiences. We will write fragments in response to prompts and find strategies to weave them together into lyric essays.

Speakers

Suzi Q Smith

Faculty

Saturday June 13, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Nonfiction/Memoir, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Rhapsody (V)

Saturday June 13, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Virtual

Rhapsody: an expression of ecstasy or uncontrolled emotion. This is not a genre we hear much about in poetry classes, but this workshop invites writers to play in language and sing out their most unbridled feelings. We will look at how sound and image—and even the use of punctuation and the page—can open the poem to articulate what we might otherwise hesitate to express.

Speakers

Elizabeth Robinson

Faculty

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 →

Saturday June 13, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Virtual

Poetry

Audience Craft Seminar

5:00pm MDT

Saturday Faculty Reading and Happy Hour: Rivera, Sawyer, O'Grady, Tucker, and Weaver

Saturday June 13, 2026 5:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Hear readings from members of Lighthouse’s faculty while enjoying some of our Happy Hour offerings.
Our Lineup
Christina Rivera
Joy Sawyer
Megan O'Grady
Seth Brady Tucker
Rachel Weaver

We will have a Sober Safe Space available on the second floor during this event. This is a welcoming, inclusive gathering place for people in all forms of recovery or anyone who wants to have a space to connect without alcohol during Lit Fest 2026. There will be snacks. NA beverages, writing prompts, and conversation starters available during this time.
For more resources and recovery meetings close to Lighthouse, you can visit: https://www.yorkstreetclub.com/Schedule

Saturday June 13, 2026 5:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

All Genres

Audience Event

5:00pm MDT

Saturday Faculty Reading and Happy Hour: Rivera, Sawyer, O'Grady, Tucker, and Weaver (Livestream)

Saturday June 13, 2026 5:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Virtual

Hear readings from members of Lighthouse’s faculty while enjoying some of our Happy Hour offerings. This is the Livestream version of this event, if you'd like to attend this in-person, click here.
Our Lineup
Christina Rivera
Joy Sawyer
Megan O'Grady
Seth Brady Tucker
Rachel Weaver

Speakers

Faculty TBA

Saturday June 13, 2026 5:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Virtual

All Genres

Audience Event

7:00pm MDT

Visiting Authors Reading: Melissa Broder, Heather Christle, Layli Long Soldier, Megha Majumdar, and Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Saturday June 13, 2026 7:00pm - 8:15pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Grab a drink or a bite from our food truck and buckle down in Beacon Hall to hear your favorite visiting author perform their recent works. Afterwards, you can shop at the Lit Fest pop-up bookstore operated by Spell Books and get your book signed. This is the in-person version of this event.

We will have a Sober Safe Space available on the second floor during this event. This is a welcoming, inclusive gathering place for people in all forms of recovery or anyone who wants to have a space to connect without alcohol during Lit Fest 2026. There will be snacks. NA beverages, writing prompts, and conversation starters available during this time.

For more resources and recovery meetings close to Lighthouse, you can visit: https://www.yorkstreetclub.com/Schedule

Saturday June 13, 2026 7:00pm - 8:15pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

All Genres