Lit Fest - Lighthouse Writers Workshop 2026: Full Schedule

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9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Fiction Workshop: Finding the Subterranean Story with Danielle Evans

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT

Often, the process of drafting fiction is one of uncovering: What is it we actually mean to be writing about, and how can we bring that thread to the surface in revision? At the same time, one of the great pleasures of reading is the consideration of suggestions or questions that remain just beneath the surface of the text.

In this workshop, we'll consider the “layers” of a story, and we’ll explore how some of those subterranean layers can guide us toward structures and narrative arcs that serve the project. We'll negotiate the balance between what works best when said directly and what works best when it’s left to be discovered by the reader. Each workshop will open with discussion of a published short story and a brief responsive writing exercise; then we’ll move to an in-depth discussion of work submitted by participants.

Speakers

Danielle Evans

Visiting Author

Danielle Evans is the author of the story collections The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. Her first collection won the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright award for fiction, and the Paterson Prize for fiction; her... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Fiction

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Fiction Workshop: Intimate Distance with Mat Johnson

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT

TBA

Novels are long, often unruly, and inherently ambitious projects that require the writer to be both intimate with and distant from the text. It's easy to type a bunch of pages, but it’s hard to make them captivate the reader and ensure that the journey adds up to more than the sum of its parts. This course will explore the tools needed to bring your novel-length manuscript to life in its strongest form. Your novel has strengths: we'll explore how you can build on them. Your novel has weaknesses: we'll identify them and create strategies for you to overcome them. Together, we'll reveal what your novel is actually about, as opposed to what you planned for it to be. We’ll examine its hidden structures, and we’ll enable your characters and their struggles to come alive on the page.

Speakers

Mat Johnson

Visiting Author

Mat Johnson is a Philip H Knight Chair of Humanities at the University of Oregon. His publications included the novels Invisible Things and Pym, the nonfiction novella The Great Negro Plot, and the graphic novel Incognegro. Johnson is the recipient of the American Book Award, the... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Fiction

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Fiction Workshop: Situation and Event with Brandon Taylor

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT

TBA

In this weeklong workshop, we’ll explore the intimate relationship between situation and event in narrative using work submitted by participants. The goal is to gain a stronger understanding of and appreciation for the underlying or pre-existing dramatic context that gives meaning to plot, character actions, and even the structure of a piece. We’ll use this stronger understanding to develop a more thorough conceptualization of our work so that we can make exciting, unexpected, and more meaningful choices in our stories.

We’ll be working with the below definitions:

Situation: All of the facts that comprise the starting condition of a character’s life at the beginning of a given story, novel, scene, or act. We may understand situation as another word for circumstance raised to the level of dramatic action and intent.

Event: The event is the happening or the trigger shot of a given scene, story, or novel. There are capital E Events and little e events. But regardless, both kinds of events should be drawn out of the very bedrock of your narrative and dramatic situation.

Speakers

Brandon Taylor

Visiting Author

Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels Minor Black Figures, The Late Americans, and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Fiction

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Fiction Workshop: The BS Detector with Steve Almond

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT

TBA

Writing is decision making, nothing more and nothing less. What word? Where to place the comma? How to shape the paragraph? Join Steve Almond for a workshop focused on improving the decisions you make in your writing. By looking critically and carefully at other people’s work, you’ll walk away with a better sense of how to improve your own. The idea is not to slow your rate of composition via compulsive revision, but to instead make better decisions in the first place and to recognize quickly when you haven’t.

Speakers

Steve Almond

Visiting Author

Steve Almond [www.stevealmondjoy.org] is the author of a dozen books, including the New York Times bestsellers “Candyfreak” and “Against Football.” His first novel, “Which Brings Me to You” (co-written with Julianna Baggott) was made into a major motion picture starring... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Fiction

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Fiction Workshop: Who's Telling Your Story? with Christopher Castellani

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT

TBA

The most important decision a writer makes is who tells their story. In this workshop, we will examine each other's manuscripts primarily through the lens of point of view and by using the concept of narrative strategy, but we will also take each manuscript as a whole and discuss how all the craft elements are working together. The primary question we will ask is, "How can the manuscript be a stronger, deeper version of itself?" This workshop is open to short story writers and novelists with stand-alone excerpts.

Speakers

Chris Castellani

Visiting Author

Christopher Castellani's fifth novel, Last Seen, will be published by Viking in February 2026. He is also the author of Leading Men (Viking, 2019) for which he received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, among others. Searchlight... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Fiction

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Generative Fiction Workshop: Starting, or Starting Over with Rebecca Makkai

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT

TBA

In this generative workshop, we’ll either begin brand new pieces, or begin a brand new version of an old piece. In either case, we’ll use our clean slates to find startling originality, optimal angles of approach, and the energies that will carry a story or novel through to the end. We’ll write both in class and outside of class and (voluntarily) share what we’ve written. In the last two days of class, we’ll squeeze in mini-workshops on everyone’s opening page. Accepted participants do not need to come in with an idea of what to write, although they may.

Speakers

Rebecca Makkai

Visiting Author

Rebecca Makkai is the author of the New York Times bestselling I Have Some Questions For You as well as four other works of fiction. Her last novel, The Great Believers, one of the New York Times’ Best Books of the 21st Century, was a finalist for both the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Fiction

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Nonfiction Workshop: Excavation with Andre Dubus III

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT

TBA

We’ll begin with a difficult task: do not outline your novel or novella or short story or essay or memoir. Do not think out the plot, the narrative arc, the protagonist’s journey, whatever you want to call it. Instead, try to find the story through an honest excavation of the characters’ total experience of the situation in which they find themselves. Do that, and the story will begin to write itself.

But how, precisely, does one go about this “excavation”? And how, technically speaking, can we ignite a story into “writing itself”? Come to this workshop, and we’ll demystify those writerly tools and skills that, time and time again, if they are sharp enough, and if the writer can summon enough daily faith and nerve, can penetrate the mystery of story itself.

Fiction, as well as creative nonfiction is welcome. We will be doing in-class writing exercises and workshopping each participant’s submission.

Speakers

Andre Dubus III

Visiting Author

Andre Dubus III’s nine books include the New York Times’ bestsellers House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and his memoir, Townie. His most recent novel, Such Kindness, was published in June 2023, and a collection of personal essays, Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin, was... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Nonfiction Workshop: Find Your Focus with Beth Nguyen

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT

TBA

Maybe you’ve been wanting to try writing creative nonfiction. Maybe you have been writing it but are feeling a little bit stuck. Maybe you’re restless, curious. Maybe you’re wondering how to create a cohesive work out of a lifetime of material. Where to start? How to shape it? This generative workshop is geared toward inspiration, starts and restarts, and rethinking nonfiction, at any level. Whether you’re interested in memoir, essays, memoir-in-essays, or anything in between, you’ll find guidance, support, writing prompts, and discussion aimed at helping you figure out your writing process. We’ll talk about ideas, structure, perspective, ethical concerns (how do we know what we should write? how do we write about other people?), and more. This workshop is all about gaining greater focus and understanding as we generate work and ideas in a fun and supportive environment.

Speakers

Beth Nguyen

Visiting Author

Beth Nguyen is the author of the memoirs Owner of a Lonely Heart and Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, as well as two novels. She has received a Guggenheim award and an American Book Award, and her work has appeared in publications including The New Yorker, Paris Review, Time Magazine... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Nonfiction Workshop: Mapping the Memoir with Emily Rapp Black

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT

TBA

Art is architecture; art is artificial; art is...? The biggest challenge for any writer of narrative is finding the map from beginning to end. This workshop is designed for writers working on book-length memoirs who wish to delve more deeply into the issues of structure, style, and voice: these three craft points will be our focus, as they make up the net that holds a narrative together in a propulsive, engaging, immersive, and beautiful way. The goal of this workshop is to take your completed manuscript to the next level. We'll also discuss different avenues of publication.

Speakers

Emily Rapp Black

Visiting Author

Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir (BloomsburyUSA); The Still Point of the Turning World (Penguin Press), which was a New York Times bestseller, Editor’s Pick, and a finalist for the PEN-USA Award; Sanctuary (Random House), a New York Times Editor’s Pick... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Nonfiction Workshop: Shadow Narratives with Rachel Louise Snyder

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT

TBA

Behind every piece of narrative nonfiction there exists a dual narrative. This partnership of story with meaning is often the blend that provides memoir, personal essay, and narrative nonfiction pieces with both tension and emotional consequence. There is the story as it exists on the page, and then there is the shadow narrative, whispering behind that story, trying to make sense of it. In this weeklong workshop, students will be asked to explore these dual narratives in their own work and in published works from contemporary practitioners such as Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Eula Biss, Richard McCann, and others. Particular attention will be paid to voice and point of view.

Speakers

Rachel Louise Snyder

Visiting Author

Rachel Louise Snyder is the author of Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade; the novel What We’ve Lost is Nothing; No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us; and the memoir Women We Buried, Women... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Poetry Workshop: Draft Exclusion with Paul Muldoon

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT

TBA

The popular image of the poet is as a dasher off of poem drafts. So manic and mercurial are poets’ imaginations that not even champion typists can keep abreast of them. If there’s a problem, it’s something to which they can return in a quiet moment way down the road. The focus of this week will be to set ourselves against this popular image, to make every moment a quiet moment, to fix problems as they arise, to revise even as the poem’s vision for itself is slowly coming into being and, in the end, to cut down on a lot of unnecessary work. The key to this approach is to write the poem one line at a time, to allow one idea to lead to another, and to avoid getting ahead of ourselves. When we implement this approach, the poem is now, paradoxically, more likely to bring us to a place of genuine immediacy and vitality which had hitherto been illusory.

Speakers

Paul Muldoon

Visiting Author

Paul Muldoon is the author of a number of poetry collections, including New Weather (1973), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting the British (1987), New Selected Poems: 1968-1994 (1996), Hay (1998), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002)—which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Poetry

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

No Genre/All Genre Generative Lab with Eileen Myles

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT

TBA

In this weeklong seminar, poets, fiction writers, and memoirists (and even non-writers) will re-consider and even de-rail their works in progress (or write new ones) informed by some new approaches, formal constraints, good talk, and engagement with other art forms. We’ll write at least four pieces this week, taking cues from the history of poetry and prose, music, photos, and film, and we will effectively banish the lines that separate these forms of expression in order to instill our own work with the real breadth of this postmodern world. Bring a song, a problem (aesthetic or personal), or at least one significant photo, stuffed animal, flyer, something—a piece of real or artificial fruit. The goal is to create a live working environment, a studio effect, in order to generate more work and to get reinstalled or re-awakened in our writing process.

*Since this is a generative class and can accommodate a few more people, Eileen cannot meet one-on-one with each participant, but they tend to be around Lit Fest and there are ample opportunities for additional talks.

Speakers

Eileen Myles

Visiting Author

Eileen Myles the author of more than twenty books, including a “Working Life,” For Now, Evolution, Afterglow (a dog memoir), Chelsea Girls, and I Must Be Living Twice: New & Selected Poems 1974-2014. Myles’s many honors include four Lambda Literary Awards, the Clark Prize for... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Poetry, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

9:00am MDT

Writing for Young Adults

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT

Virtual

Description forthcoming

Speakers

Kelsey Day

Faculty

Kelsey Day is a young adult author and queer Appalachian poet. Their writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Orion Magazine, Freeman’s and more. THE SPIRAL KEY is their first novel for young readers. You can find them online at KelseyDays.com or on Instagram @KelseyDays.

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT
Virtual

YA/Children's

Audience Craft Seminar

12:00pm MDT

Lunchtime Business Panel: Through the Fire—Debut Writers on Their First Books

Monday June 15, 2026 12:00pm - 1:00pm MDT

TBA

Panelists include: Lior Torenberg, Katie Boland, Amanda McCracken, Susan Golomb (Writers House).

Debut year has a shape everyone recognizes—the thrill, the terror, the mystifying silence that follows. But what happens after? Four writers with books out in the last year talk honestly about what the debut actually taught them, how they're thinking about the next book, and what building a sustainable literary life really looks like once the confetti settles. Less "how to launch" and more "how to last"—useful for writers at every stage. This crew will also be joined by one of our visiting agents, who will give their take.

Speakers

Susan Golomb

Agent, Writers House

Susan Golomb has been an agent of literary fiction and non-fiction for over 30 years. She founded the Susan Golomb Literary Agency in 1988 with Jonathan Franzen as her first client and joined Writers House in 2015. Her other authors include award winners and bestsellers such as William... Read More →

Lior Torenberg

Faculty

Lior Torenberg’s work has been published by One Story, MAYDAY, the Poetry Society of New York, and others. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from New York University and graduated from the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project. Just Watch Me is her first novel.

Kathleen Boland

Faculty

Kathleen Boland is the author of the novel Scavengers. Her fiction has appeared in Tin House, Conjunctions, and Gulf Coast, among other places, and she has received support from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Vermont Studio Center. She... Read More →

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.

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 →

Monday June 15, 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: Through the Fire—Debut Writers on Their First Books (Livestream)

Monday June 15, 2026 12:00pm - 1:00pm MDT

Virtual

Speakers

Susan Golomb

Agent, Writers House

Lior Torenberg

Faculty

Kathleen Boland

Faculty

Pardeep Toor

Faculty

Amanda McCracken

Faculty

Monday June 15, 2026 12:00pm - 1:00pm MDT
Virtual

All Genres

Audience Lunchtime Business Panels

1:00pm MDT

Two-Day Intensive: Finish the Nonfiction Book—Everything but the Pages

Monday June 15, 2026 1:00pm - 4:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

This craft seminar is about everything except the pages. We'll talk through queries, proposals, research, drafting, editing, refinement, and, most importantly, designing a project plan so you can complete your book while staying sane. You'll leave with templates and examples of what different authors use to keep on track and a project plan specific to your book. Organization is an author's best friend, and this seminar will help you set yourself up for success.

Speakers

Simone Stolzoff

Faculty

Simone Stolzoff is an author and journalist who explores big questions about work, meaning, and identity. A former design lead at the global innovation firm IDEO, he is the author of two books: The Good Enough Job and How To Not Know. His work has been featured in The New York Times... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 1:00pm - 4:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Publishing/Career

Audience Two-Day Intensive

1:30pm MDT

Advanced Structure Lab: Break the Story Free with Dean Bakopoulos

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

In this seminar designed for screenwriters and prose writers of all levels, we’ll use dramatic structure to help us get unstuck. Bring along a draft that’s failing or an idea that’s not finding a form, and we’ll explore the intricacies and opportunities of narrative structure. Over the course of this week, we’ll utilize a four-part system Bakopoulos developed while writing television pilot scripts (but that YOU can apply to any form of narrative writing—short stories, memoirs, novels, screenplays, TV scripts, plays etc.) to move past any literary obstructions you’re battling.

While no system is a magic potion that can take away the agonies of creation, this character-based approach to structure allows you to rethink the possibilities of your project. We'll discuss characters and their journeys towards liberation, as well as the notion of dramatic escalation, the tension between exposition and plot, the construction of compelling scenes, and the importance of unexpected dialogue and minor characters. We’ll watch scenes from great television pilot episodes and feature films as examples to illustrate these principles;we’ll also read a few passages of prose.

We’ll take part in at least one generative exercise per session; by the fifth day of the course, you will have a shiny new four-part outline that will help you successfully revise, or finally draft, a stuck project.

*Dean's weeklong seminar is two hours each day and does not include one-on-one meetings. The tuition is also adjusted (down) from the typical weeklong workshop.

Speakers

Dean Bakopoulos

Visiting Author

Dean Bakopoulos is the author of the novels Please Don't Come Back from the Moon (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), My American Unhappiness (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Summerlong (Ecco/HarperCollins) and the forthcoming I Get Lonely in a Hurry. The winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Dramatic Writing

Audience Advanced Workshop

1:30pm MDT

Bait the Hook: Your First Few Pages

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

The first few pages of a story are the tryout; after that, the reader makes a decision to keep reading or move on. How can you “hook” your readers and immerse them in your narrative world? What techniques do you need to create a firm writer-reader contract? In this content-heavy class, we’ll explore hooks and expositions (a.k.a. beginnings): how to introduce your characters, ground your readers in your novel/memoir/short story/essay, and begin the art of narrative intrigue. Bring your ideas to class, and leave with new beginnings you can use immediately. Open to all prose writers.

This is the in-person version of this event.

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 →

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Bait the Hook: Your First Few Pages (Livestream)

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Virtual

Speakers

Erika Krouse

Faculty

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Virtual

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Type advanced, intermediate, intro
Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Every Sentence an Ocean: Concision and Compression in Flash-Fiction

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

As anyone who’s ever sat down to write a flash story or essay knows, it can be incredibly difficult to fit an entire narrative into 1,000 words or less. Even more difficult: lacing that narrative with enough tension and emotional complexity to make your readers feel like they’ve devoured a much longer work. In this two-hour craft seminar, we’ll break down George Saunders’ 1995 flash fiction masterpiece “Sticks” on a sentence-by-sentence level to examine and emulate how he packs an entire ocean of complexity—and decades of narrative time—into just 392 words.

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 →

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

From Morally Gray to Black: Creating Flawed and Unscrupulous Protagonists

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho, claims: “The best way to create a memorable character is to make them both repellent and fascinating at the same time.” Indeed, more crucial than the likability of a protagonist is his/her charisma—even if that charisma only serves to hide complicated or even depraved psyches. In this class, we’ll explore some morally questionable protagonists from authors such as Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, and Flannery O’Connor. We’ll then try our hand at creating some of these fascinating, and sometimes terrifying, characters in our own work. The class will combine readings, writings, and discussions, and when we're finished you should be comfortable writing from the POV of not-so-sympathetic characters.

Speakers

Jon Bassoff

Faculty

Jon Bassoff is the author of ten novels, including his latest, The Memory Ward (Blackstone Publishing). His mountain gothic novel, Corrosion, has been translated in French and German and was nominated for the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere, France’s biggest crime fiction award... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Novel Whispering

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Have a novel that you just can’t finish, or finish well? Considering writing a novel and want an insight into how to actually complete one? In this seminar, we'll identify hurdles in completing the process of novel creation, and we’ll learn how to get over them. The seminar will provide participants with practical techniques to kickstart their manuscripts, such as applied story structuring, thematic tuning, character mirroring, and more.
This is the in-person version on this event.

Speakers

Mat Johnson

Visiting Author

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Novel Whispering (Livestream)

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Virtual

Speakers

Mat Johnson

Visiting Author

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Virtual

Fiction

Type advanced, intro, intermediate
Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

From Patient to Protagonist: Claiming Agency in Your Own Story

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Illness can make us feel passive, but memoir requires an active center. In this session, we’ll practice techniques for crafting a narrator who drives the story—even when circumstances are beyond their control. In this class, we’ll read brief examples and then draft scenes that externalize symptoms through action, imagery, and interaction. We’ll practice crafting vivid, fresh metaphors and sensory details that convey what it feels like to inhabit a changed or challenged body.

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 →

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Squash For Golfers: Line Movement in Prose and Poetry

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

The defining characteristic of verse, formal or free, is the fact that the line makes a turn (versus) at some point before it reaches the right hand margin. There are any number of reasons why and places where that turn might be made. This seminar will focus on developing strategies for improving our sense of the line ending through readings of poems by Erika Jong, Joyce Carol Oates, W.G. Sebald, Colm Toibin, and John Updike.

Speakers

Paul Muldoon

Visiting Author

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Poetry

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Author Branding for Introverts and Impostors (V)

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Virtual

Authors in traditional publishing, indie publishing, and self-publishing are all expected to do a tremendous amount of the lifting in their own promotion. This part of the job of being an author stirs lots of emotional issues for many authors. This session will explore how to identify your own brand as an author and harness the power of enthusiasm to bypass imposter syndrome and prioritize self-care while finding your audience. This course is taught by a painful introvert who manages to read as a gregarious extrovert.

Speakers

Henry Lien

Faculty

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 →

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Virtual

Publishing/Career

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Creatures of Impulse: What Fictions Writers Can Learn From TV

Monday June 15, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

This session will focus on the way popular TV series hook viewers, construct scenes, build characters, and structure episodes. We’ll examine how this can easily be adapted to add energy to short stories, memoirs, novels, and maybe even poems! We will likely use the pilot (first) episodes of Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Atlanta, and Insecure as examples, so you may want to watch those in advance. I'll show a few clips in class as time and technology allows.

Register using this link:
https://lighthousewriters.org/workshop/creatures-impulse-what-fictions-writers-can-learn-tv?session=8993

Speakers

Dean Bakopoulos

Visiting Author

Monday June 15, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Dramatic Writing

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

How to Stop Worldbuilding and Start Worldconjuring

Monday June 15, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Writers wanting to build worlds are met with difficult questions: Should I describe the city’s sewer system for ten or twenty pages? How much to explain Frontier Utah’s rural bartering system of spiderwebs? These are also the wrong questions. As writer Lincoln Michel says, “Worldbuilding imposes. Worldconjuring collaborates.” In this seminar, we’ll challenge current paradigms for worldbuilding; instead, we’ll craft settings and circumstances through the power of detail selections, rule systems, and essential mysteries. Together, we’ll ask much better questions: in your new world, what do readers need to know and what do readers want to know?

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 →

Monday June 15, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

To Flash Back or Not to Flash Back

Monday June 15, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Good characters come with a past, but is a flashback the only way to let readers know about essential details from before the story’s start? Not necessarily. We’ll look at examples from writers who eschew flashbacks but still give readers a rich sense of a character’s past life, including excerpts from Kent Haruf, Jane Austen, and more. If you choose to use flashbacks, how do you do it well? We’ll look at the way experts including Willy Vlautin, Susan Straight, and Percival Everett slide gracefully in and out of flashback.

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 →

Monday June 15, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Collage as Poetic Practice

Monday June 15, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

What can poets learn from the techniques of collage? In this image & text based seminar, we will discuss and practice collage in both written and visual mediums. Come ready to experiment and to play with textual fragments, images, scissors, paper, and glue. Participants, please bring collage materials (things to cut up).

Speakers

Andrea Rexilius

Faculty

Andrea Rexilius is the author of: Sister Urn (Sidebrow, 2019), New Organism: Essais (Letter Machine, 2014), Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine, 2012), and To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011), as well as the chapbooks Séance (Coconut Books, 2014... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Poetry, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Letting the I Ching Help You Write Your Story (V)

Monday June 15, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Virtual

Philip K. Dick claimed that he did not write one of his greatest novels, The Man in the High Castle, by himself. Dick discovered the I Ching when he began the novel and he claimed the I Ching co-wrote the novel with him. The I Ching is a 3,000 year-old collection of 64 poems. It can be read as philosophy but is most famous as an oracle, using a method of casting coins or yarrow stalks. This workshop guides students through the process of consulting the I Ching to guide the course of their story.

Speakers

Henry Lien

Faculty

Monday June 15, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Virtual

Poetry, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Two-Day Intensive: Emotional Truth—Using Fiction to Tell the Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth

Monday June 15, 2026 4:00pm - 7:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

This workshop will focus on how to write what you know, taking both small and large elements of your particular human experience to create fiction. We will study other fiction writers and their techniques and do exercises based on them. This class will focus on generating new text but should be inspiring for those writers deep into a work-in-progress too. Ideally, writers will experience a catharsis as they alchemize their hard times into art.

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 →

Monday June 15, 2026 4:00pm - 7:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, YA/Children's

Audience Two-Day Intensive

4:30pm MDT

Book Project Showcase: Stolzoff, Torenberg, Yun, Lennon, and Leotaud

Monday June 15, 2026 4:30pm - 6:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Come meet our very successful Book Project authors Simone Stolzoff (How to Not Know), Lior Torenberg (Just Watch Me), Marissa Leotaud (Family Affair), John J. Lennon (The Tragedy of True Crime), and Jihyun Yun (And the River Drags Her Down) read from their work and talk about writing their books. Stick around for book signings and Q&A from director William Haywood Henderson and others from the Book Project!

We will have a Sober 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

Speakers

Simone Stolzoff

Faculty

Lior Torenberg

Faculty

Jihyun Yun

John J. Lennon

and Marissa Leotaud

Monday June 15, 2026 4:30pm - 6:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

All Genres

Audience Event

4:30pm MDT

Book Project Showcase: Stolzoff, Torenberg, Yun, Lennon, and Leotaud (Livestream)

Monday June 15, 2026 4:30pm - 6:30pm MDT

Virtual

Speakers

Simone Stolzoff

Faculty

Lior Torenberg

Faculty

Jihyun Yun

John J. Lennon

and Marissa Leotaud

Monday June 15, 2026 4:30pm - 6:30pm MDT
Virtual

All Genres

Audience Event

7:00pm MDT

Visiting Authors Reading: Steve Almond, Danielle Evans, Eileen Myles, and Brandon Taylor

Monday June 15, 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 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

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

All Genres

Audience Event

7:00pm MDT

Visiting Authors Reading: Steve Almond, Danielle Evans, Eileen Myles, and Brandon Taylor (Livestream)

Monday June 15, 2026 7:00pm - 8:15pm MDT

Virtual

Monday June 15, 2026 7:00pm - 8:15pm MDT
Virtual

All Genres

Audience Event

8:30pm MDT

Lit Fest Faculty Reading at Fort Greene Bar: Boland, Hodges, Jia, Morales, and Stolzoff

Monday June 15, 2026 8:30pm - 9:30pm MDT

Fort Greene Bar

Hear readings from members of Lighthouse’s faculty at the storied Fort Greene bar. Grab a drink, enjoy the ambiance, and saddle up for some great readings!
Our roster:

Kathleen Boland
Natalie Hodges
Claire Jia
Juan Morales
Simone Stolzoff

Monday June 15, 2026 8:30pm - 9:30pm MDT
Fort Greene Bar 321 E 45th Ave, Denver, CO 80216

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