Lit Fest - Lighthouse Writers Workshop 2026: Full Schedule

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1:30pm MDT

Thursday June 18, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Characters are the most basic part of writing fiction, but just how do you create fictional people that will win readers over with their authenticity and verve? We'll study how masters such as Kent Haruf, Lucia Berlin, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and Ann Patchett introduce major and minor characters, talk about "spark plug characters" and how to create them, learn how to collect character details in a writer's notebook, and discuss the importance of giving your characters skills.

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 →

Thursday June 18, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Fantastic Thresholds: Short Fiction Techniques of Kelly Link and Susanna Clarke (V)

Thursday June 18, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Virtual

Kelly Link and Susanna Clarke write stories in which the extraordinary emerges from the ordinary in an elegant, intimate, and unsettling manner. We’ll explore key techniques that shape their short fiction, such as finely calibrated voice, well-placed rupture, and invitation into mystery. Discussion of excerpts will lead into generative exercises, encouraging writers to experiment with modulating voice and narrative distance, layering the uncanny into the everyday, and crafting tension through implication. Participants will have opportunities to share their inspired yet distinct approaches to estrangement and enchantment.

Speakers

Kanika Agrawal

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

Thursday June 18, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Virtual

Fiction

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Make a Scene!: How to Bring Your Memoir to Life (V)

Thursday June 18, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Virtual

If your memoir is reading like the hair in the "Before" photo in a shampoo commercial — flat, lifeless and dull — adding a scene might be what's missing! In this seminar we'll chat about what it looks like to "show not tell" by bringing your reader into the real-time of your narrative. The writing prompts for this seminar can be applied to your work-in-progress or generate writing for a new piece.

Speakers

Minda Honey

Faculty

Minda Honey’s (she/her) essays on politics and relationships have appeared in Harper’s Baazar, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Oxford American, Teen Vogue, and Longreads.

Her work is featured in “Burn It Down: Women Writing About Ang... Read More →

Thursday June 18, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Virtual

Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Making the Personal Matter

Thursday June 18, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

In this seminar, we’ll explore strategies for integrating research into our own first-person writing with the goal of answering some burning questions about creative nonfiction: How do essayists use “real” experiences to make stories that move? How do they create context that matters, turn personal anecdotes into universally applicable meanings, and write fresh perspectives into experiences and topics that are age-old: culture, travel, death, or love? What is the best way to build context and to shape essays so that they have momentum and meaning? In other words, how do we make meaning?

This is the livestream version of this event.

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 →

Thursday June 18, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Making the Personal Matter (Livestream)

Thursday June 18, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Virtual

Speakers

Emily Rapp Black

Visiting Author

Thursday June 18, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Virtual

Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

From Idea to Outline

Thursday June 18, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Often we have a nugget that we want to play with, but can't find the larger story. This generative workshop walks writers through a toolbox to go from idea to outline. This will work for people who are pantsers as well as plotters, because they can apply the tools at any point in the process. The takeaway from this class isn't "this is how it's done" but rather "here are tools for when you are struggling."

Speakers

Mary Robinette Kowal

Faculty

Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award winning alternate history novel The Calculating Stars, the first book in the Lady Astronaut series which continues in 2025 with The Martian Contingency. She is also the author of The Glamourist Histories series... Read More →

Thursday June 18, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Writing Process, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Seance of the Bees: Writing and Ritual Practices

Thursday June 18, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

What parts of your body do you write with? Your brain, your heart, your lungs, your womb? This interactive, movement-based seminar will guide participants through a series of somatic and ritual practices, stemming from the wisdom of bees and the artist/writers Ana Mendieta, Cecilia Vicuña, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa, among others.

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 →

Thursday June 18, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Writing Process, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Secrets: Strategies for Story

Thursday June 18, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

In this workshop, we’ll explore secrets as a major component for all storytelling. Secrets both separate us from one another and bind us together. Writers will learn how to make powerful allusions in their writing to build plot and develop character. In addition to learning the art of confession, we’ll also explore subtext as strategy and when and how to prioritize the reader’s experience.

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 →

Thursday June 18, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Writing Process, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

The Picture Within: Art as Inspiration and Critique

Thursday June 18, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Throughout literary history, writers and poets have often turned to artists for inspiration and contemplation. Visual art can be a powerful catalyst for both sensory and formal exploration, deepening our awareness of color, composition, tension, and scale. It can also elicit words within us, to paraphrase Virginia Woolf on Cézanne, from places we had not known language to exist. Through close-looking exercises, short ekphrastic readings (contemporary and classic), and writing prompts drawn from our own encounters with art, we’ll hone our skills as noticers and interpreters of life.

Speakers

Megan O'Grady

Faculty

Megan O’Grady is a critic and an essayist. She was a writer at large for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, where she created the Culture Therapist column. Her reviews and essays about art and life also appear in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York... Read More →

Thursday June 18, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Writing Process, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

The Rich Layers of Personal Style

Thursday June 18, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

“Good artists copy; great artists steal.” This quote is famously attributed to the artist Pablo Picasso, but it applies equally to writers. We all bring to the page our influences over the years—the books we’ve admired (or even hated), the imagery and music and themes we’ve been drawn to again and again, and the styles we’ve envied. In this class, we’ll look at your influences, how they’ve helped shape your style and ideas, and work to consciously incorporate your influences in your writing. No one will accuse you of stealing—we’ll just admire the rich layers of your style.

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 →

Thursday June 18, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Writing Process, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Satisfy Me!

Thursday June 18, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Even when you think you know where the draft of your story or poem is headed, its "real" ending is often lurking somewhere beneath the surface. In this discussion class, we will close-read the endings of two works of fiction and poetry on the spot (no advance reading required). The goal is to figure out not only how/if these endings "satisfy" but what "satisfaction" actually means for them and for our own projects.

Speakers

Christopher Castellani

Thursday June 18, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Suffering Builds Character

Thursday June 18, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

A story in which characters don’t suffer (or don’t suffer enough) is a story that’s easy to put down. In the most compelling stories, characters struggle mightily. They grapple with impossible dilemmas. They face their greatest fears. And just when you imagine they can take no more, things get undeniably worse. We’ll look at examples from literary fiction and commercial fiction. We’ll discuss ways to put characters in peril and keep them there for the sake of crafting a compelling story.

Speakers

Tiffany Quay Tyson

Faculty

Tiffany Quay Tyson is the author of two novels, The Past is Never and Three Rivers. The Past is Never is the recipient of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the 2019 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, and the 2019... Read More →

Thursday June 18, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Writing the Best American Essay: Contemporary Techniques and Ideas

Thursday June 18, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

In this class, we’ll read excerpts from essays that appeared in the Best American Essays 2025 with an eye to their technique, structure, story, voice, and emotion. We’ll study recent trends in essays as well as classic templates, glean everything we can learn from some of the best essayists working today, and leave with some fresh starts and ideas for our own writing.

Speakers

Jenny Shank

Faculty

Thursday June 18, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Exploring Prose Poetry: The Art of Condensed Writing (V)

Thursday June 18, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Virtual

In this course, we’ll explore the definition and intentions of prose poetry. We’ll have close readings and discussion of contemporary masters like James Tate, Harryette Mullen, Victoria Chang, Shivani Mehta and others. There will also be time for generative prompts and prose poetry.

Speakers

Jose Hernandez Diaz

Faculty

Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020) and Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024). His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Georgia Review, Huizache, Iowa Review... Read More →

Thursday June 18, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Virtual

Poetry, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Just Keep Going: Being a Writer for Life

Thursday June 18, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

What sets "real writers" apart from dilettantes? The practice of writing. As creative people, too often we blame ourselves for a lack of motivation and consistent creative work, when the truth is that we live in a society designed to distract us from original creation, encouraging us to put off creative work in favor of something more "productive" (e.g., money-making). This seminar proposes the radical idea that part of your job as an artist is self-motivation: you need to keep yourself inspired and creating, despite everything. Together we'll explore ideas, strategies, and daily practices to ensure you Just Keep Going.

Speakers

Buzzy Jackson

Faculty

Buzzy Jackson is an award-winning author who lives in Boulder, Colorado. She has a Ph.D. in History from UC Berkeley and is a voting member of the National Book Critics Circle. Her books include To Die Beautiful: A Novel (Dutton) which won the Colorado Book Award, as well as A Bad... Read More →

Thursday June 18, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Writing Process, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Undoing Poetry and Prose

Thursday June 18, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

This practice-oriented talk will take a close look at three poems and three short pieces of prose. I’ll explain why I think they are great and how they operate as memory machines and embodied practice. We’ll then pause and write a poem using some of what we’ve learned. We’ll look at a James Schuyler poem* , N. Nourbese Philip’s Zong!, and something by Fanny Howe. For prose, we’ll read Kafka, Sergio Chejfec, and Elena Garro**. After we look at these guys, we will do the same as we did with the poets: we’ll use their meanings to write something of our own.

This is not a workshop—it’s very much a playful lit crit group experience, and anything you write will be an opening of some sort, which I hope will continue to roll after this session. Plus, I really think reading is more important than writing—for writers and for everyone. So there’s only gain here for the species.

*Go buy his collected poems! Or check out the new bio of him by Nathan Kernan.
**I’d recommend reading Chejfec’s The Planets and Garro’s Week of Colors before the seminar. For additional reading, you might read Jazmina Barrera’s Queen of Swords, which is kind of a neo-bio of Elena Garro.

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 →

Thursday June 18, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Writing Process

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Writing in an AI Powered World

Thursday June 18, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

For many writers, artificial intelligence is changing not only the creative landscape, but also how we talk about our writing, connect with readers and other writers, and build community. One of the biggest challenges brought on by AI is anxiety. Writers worry about being falsely accused of using AI to produce work, their published works being used to train AI tools, and ensuring their words remain relevant in a world that’s rapidly become accustomed to AI-generated content. In this seminar, we’ll talk about these challenges and discuss approaches for building (or rebuilding) our creative confidence in the AI age.

Speakers

Cynthia Swanson

Faculty

Cynthia Swanson writes psychological thrillers, often using historical settings. Cynthia’s debut novel, The Bookseller, was a New York Times bestseller, an Indie Next selection, the winner of the 2016 WILLA Literary Award for Historical Fiction, translated into 18 languages, and... Read More →

Thursday June 18, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Writing Process, Multi-Genre