Lit Fest - Lighthouse Writers Workshop 2026: Full Schedule

arrow_back View All Dates

9:00am MDT

Literary Lightning: Finding the Poetry in Your Prose (V)

Tuesday June 16, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT

Are there lines in your stories or essays that, when you reread them, contain multitudes? Ideas in which your thinking has deepened or changed? How do you pull threads from previously written prose and turn it into prose poetry or hybrid prose? What was once an essay may carry the seeds of a flash essay, prose poem or song. We’ll explore work that began in one form and transformed into another and talk about how to do that for a piece of our own.

Speakers

Ellen Blum Barish

Faculty

Ellen Blum Barish is the author of the spiritual memoir Seven Springs: A Memoir and the essay collection Views from the Home Office Window: On Motherhood, Family and Life. Her work explores themes of identity, family, and spirituality. You can find her essays and prose poems in Brevity... Read More →

Tuesday June 16, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT
Virtual

Poetry, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Finding the Heart and Body of Your Memoir (V)

Tuesday June 16, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Virtual

One of the biggest challenges in writing memoir or essays is finding the focus and structure. So many directions tempt us before we find our best way forward. In this invigorating seminar, we’ll explore tools and approaches for sussing out the heart of the memoir, and from there, consider possibilities for organizing it (chronologically, thematically, as an essay collection, or even as a collage of vignettes). We’ll do some short exercises to clarify what our memoir or essay wants to be and how we can realize that potential. Ample handouts will be provided.

Speakers

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

Faculty

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 →

Tuesday June 16, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Virtual

Fiction, Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

I Hate You, Too: Writing Antagonistic Relationships

Tuesday June 16, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Our friends are close, but our enemies are uncomfortably closer, and the protagonist-antagonist relationship is often the most intimate one in any story. For this reason, it’s important to throw your protagonist and antagonist together in all sorts of interesting ways, so the torture can begin. In this hands-on, exercise-driven class, we’ll craft that antagonistic relationship to hit as many trigger points as possible, creating story-propelling conflict and change. Open to all prose writers.

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 →

Tuesday June 16, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Information Underload: What Each Precious Paragraph Communicates to a Reader

Tuesday June 16, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

We’re writers. We want to beguile our readers so we write and re-write, polish and agonize over every word and comma. But what information is the reader taking away? And does it match our intentions? In this two-hour session, we’ll examine paragraphs—published examples and our own—and identify what types of information readers glean, how it advances or deepens the plot, story, and characters. When it doesn’t achieve our designs, we’ll diagnose why, what we want to change, and most importantly, how to do so. This is an interactive session in which writers examine their own work, so please bring (or have available) some pages of manuscript.

Speakers

Bix Gabriel

Faculty

Bix Gabriel is a writer, teacher of creative writing, and seeker of the perfect jalebi. Her writing appears in the anthologies A Map is Only One Story, and Fusion: South Asian Flash Fiction, and in literary magazines such as Crab Creek Review, Longleaf Review, Guernica, and Electric... Read More →

Tuesday June 16, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Reader in the Room

Tuesday June 16, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Writers are often told to “write from the heart,” but if the goal is to move or connect with others, audience matters. This two-hour class explores how powerful nonfiction honors both the writer’s truth and the reader’s experience. We’ll look at what audiences really want—to be invited into another’s world, to feel tension and release, to understand what’s at stake. Through short readings, discussion, and exercises, you'll learn to balance authenticity with craft—using the tools that make nonfiction not just true, but felt.

Speakers

Angelique Stevens

Faculty

Angelique Stevens lives in Upstate New York where she teaches creative writing, literature of genocide, and race literatures. Her nonfiction has been published or is forthcoming in Granta, LitHub, The New England Review, and a number of anthologies. Her essay “Ghost Bread,” which... Read More →

Tuesday June 16, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Survey of Interiority

Tuesday June 16, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Using readings and examples from a variety of modes—short fiction, novels, cinema, and drama—this seminar provides a survey of interiority in narrative writing. We’ll examine and explore the technical challenges of writing interiority as well as the narrative and aesthetic motivations that accompany the concept. At the end of the seminar, we’ll engage in short writing exercises to synthesize and practice these techniques.
This is the in-person version of this event.

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 →

Tuesday June 16, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Survey of Interiority (Livestream)

Tuesday June 16, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Virtual

Speakers

Brandon Taylor

Visiting Author

Tuesday June 16, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Virtual

Fiction

Type advanced, intermediate, intro
Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

The Cutting Room Floor: Late-Stage Revision

Tuesday June 16, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

“I saw the angel in the marble, and I carved until I set him free,” Michelangelo said. What are both esoteric and practical techniques for cutting, in late-stage revision? We’ll dig into how different writers approach this question. Bring a draft or two to this revision-based class, in which we’ll practice techniques for excising, removing weight, and clarifying shapely prose.

Speakers

Evanthia Bromiley

Faculty

Evanthia Bromiley is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the recipient of scholarships from the Aspen Institute, a Lighthouse Fellowship, a Lisel Mueller scholarship, and Elizabeth George and Carol Houck-Smith awards. She is the 2025 Grace Paley Fellow for... Read More →

Tuesday June 16, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

They Can’t Be All Bad, Right?

Tuesday June 16, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Your antagonist is totally despicable. But despite horrible behavior, they must be interesting, fully capable of sustaining your reader, and a substantial foil to your protagonist. They must be more than a receptacle for revenge. Avoid the one-dimensional villain and make your antagonist develop beyond their worst act. This craft class will help fiction as well as nonfiction writers give depth to despots, frauds, and mean actors. Writers will use generative exercises, selected excerpts, and discussion to explore possible positive traits in even the most deplorable characters.

Speakers

Gloria J. Browne-Marshall

Faculty

Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is an Emmy Award-winning writer, a professor of Constitutional Law and Africa Studies at John Jay College (CUNY), civil rights attorney, and playwright. She is the author of She Took Justice: The Black Woman, Law, and Power; Race, Law, and American Society... Read More →

Tuesday June 16, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Where the Deer and the Antelope (and the Poets) Play: On the Page

Tuesday June 16, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

With our usual poetic practice, we might focus on clarity and meaning while letting our instincts determine the lines, stanzas, and punctuation. Some poems entice us to try something new. In this workshop, we’ll play on the page in hopes of discovering new layers and poetic intentions. We’ll talk punctuation and how it honors rhythm, including Dickinson’s emdash, when to “and” or “&,” and the mystery of / and // used by writers like Dana Levin. We will also consider methods of end stopping, enjambing, and even omitting punctuation altogether.

Speakers

Juan J. Morales

Faculty

Juan J. Morales is the son of an Ecuadorian mother and Puerto Rican father. He is the author of three poetry collections, including The Handyman’s Guide to End Times, winner of the 2019 International Latino Book Award. Recent poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, The Laurel Review... Read More →

Tuesday June 16, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Poetry, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Hook, Line, and Sinker: Exploring Form Via Ruben Ostlund’s Triangle of Sadness

Tuesday June 16, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

I recommend that every participant in this workshop watch Ruben Ostlund’s Triangle of Sadness (available on Hulu and elsewhere) before coming to class, and then we will discuss his unique triangular form. We’ll imitate the form in a writing exercise, coming up with a simple premise involving two characters, expanding the premise, and then flipping the premise entirely on its head. Come ready to write!

Speakers

Claire Jia

Faculty

Claire Jia's debut novel Wanting (Tin House) was an NPR, Elle, Public Books and Chicago Sun-Times Best Book of 2025. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column, The Rumpus, Reductress, and more. She writes for television and co-wrote the Peabody Award-winning video... Read More →

Tuesday June 16, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Dramatic Writing, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

A Wrinkle in Time: How to Manage Chronology and Structure

Tuesday June 16, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

One of the central struggles in storytelling is that human beings are, in essence, time travelers. We live in the past of our memories and the future of our hopes. Thus, when we tell stories, we often shuttle around in time. This can be exciting, but it more often winds up confusing the reader, and (in my case) the writer. In this fast-paced seminar, we’ll look at fiction and non-fiction examples of authors who manage chronology, and structure, masterfully. And we'll help writers learn how to do the same.

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 →

Tuesday June 16, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Write Stronger Scenes: A Checklist

Tuesday June 16, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Scene work is the backbone of any story. When your scene work is strong, your reader is pulled into the story and forget everything else. In this class, you’ll bring in one of your scenes and will reshape it according to a check list of what makes great scene work, including but not limited to controlling narrative distance, writing effective dialogue, capturing setting without being boring, maintaining tension, and integrating or eliminating backstory.

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 →

Tuesday June 16, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Black Doubt, Revision, and Faith

Tuesday June 16, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Albert Camus reminds us that we cannot be successful writers without “black doubt.” What do we do, then, when this doubt feels overwhelming? What do we do when we’ve lost faith, not only in what we’re working on, but in our ability to ever write anything worth reading ever again? Often, what is needed in these disheartening moments is deep revision, a stage of artistic effort and creation that is absolutely essential and which too many writers give short shrift.

This is the in-person version of this event.

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 →

Tuesday June 16, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Black Doubt, Revision, and Faith (Livestream)

Tuesday June 16, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Virtual

Speakers

Andre Dubus III

Visiting Author

Tuesday June 16, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Virtual

Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Symbolism and Metaphor: They Aren’t Just for Fiction

Tuesday June 16, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

So you think symbolism and metaphor are devices only fiction writers use? Everything humans do is symbolic. We create symbols, we use them, we misuse them. In this class, we’ll first take a deep dive into the symbolic and the metaphorical in our everyday lives. We’ll analyze several examples of literary nonfiction that use the same devices fiction writers employ. We’ll talk about ways nonfiction writers can both deepen and complicate their own narratives and, in the process, understand why and how they can be beneficial.

Speakers

Angelique Stevens

Faculty

Tuesday June 16, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Forms and Functions: Poetic and Otherwise

Tuesday June 16, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

In this generative workshop, we'll try our hand at writing poems using some newish, wild, and invented forms---like the burning haibun, the duplex, and more. Bring your rhymes and schemes and creative impulses, and be ready to write, sing, count, and laugh.

Speakers

Michael Henry

Faculty

Michael J. Henry, MFA currently serves as Executive Director of Lighthouse, where he also teaches poetry and memoir and essay workshops. A former recipient of a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship and a PlatteForum Fellowship, his work has appeared in such places as Copper Nickel... Read More →

Tuesday June 16, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Poetry, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

ChatGPT Is My Secretary (V)

Tuesday June 16, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Virtual

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