2025 Authors + Presenters
Deborah Taffa
Whiskey Tender, by Harper Books
Deborah Taffa’s Whiskey Tender, a National Book Award Finalist 2024, as well as a longlisted title for the 2025 Carnegie Medal for Excellence, was named to the year’s best lists at Time Magazine, Esquire, Publisher’s Weekly, The Atlantic, Audible, Esquire, and other outlets. With awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, MacDowell, the Ellen Meloy Foundation, Tin House, and the NY Summer Writers Institute, Deborah received her MFA CW in Iowa City. Her work can be found at PBS, Salon, The LA Review of Books, and outlets. A citizen of the Kwatsaan Nation and Laguna Pueblo, she is the director of the MFA CW program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM.
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Coming soon!
Ben Goldfard
Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet and Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter
Ben Goldfarb is an environmental journalist whose work has appeared in National Geographic, the Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, High Country News, and many other publications. He is the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times and winner of the Sierra Club’s Rachel Carson Award and the Banff Book Competition's Grand Prize. His previous book, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, received the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. He lives in Colorado with his wife, Elise, and his dog, Kit — which is, of course, what you call a baby beaver.
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Coming soon!
Hillary Leftwich
Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock (Agape Editions, 2023)
Hillary Leftwich is a multi-media writer and the author of Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock (Agape Editions, 2023), Aura (Future Tense Books, 2022), and Saint Dymphna’s Playbook (forthcoming from Limit Zero, 2025). She teaches creative writing, business writing, and environmental writing and storytelling at several universities, writing organizations, and nonprofits for adults, previously incarcerated and hospitalized youth, and unhoused populations. She centers her writing around themes of class struggle, colonialism, the impact of disease, ritual, and the supernatural. On the outskirts of the writing world, she is a professional Tarot reader and death worker.
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Coming soon!
Doug Kurtz
Story Mistakes
For nearly three decades Doug Kurtz has taught writers in every context from universities and nonprofits to international retreats and his own coaching business. He is the co-creator of the Story Map, a holistic methodology that helps novelists of all stripes and skill levels write deeply impactful books. His clients have signed with literary agents, traditionally and self-published, won awards, topped the Amazon charts, received celebrity accolades, and, most importantly, finished novels they're proud to have written.
Author of the novel Mosquito, Doug has a graduate degree in creative writing from the University of Colorado and has served as core faculty at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. Beyond his professional endeavors, his passion for exploring the Rockies reflects his belief that, with the right map, even the highest peaks are within reach. Doug lives in Boulder with his wife and son and their Bearded Collie, Mudge
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Coming soon!
Ramona Ausubel
The Last Animal
Ramona Ausubel’s fifth book, The Last Animal was a national bestseller, a Barnes & Noble book of the month and named a best book of 2023 by NPR, Kirkus and the Oprah quarterly. Her previous books are Awayland: stories, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, A Guide to Being Born and No One is Here Except All of Us. She is the recipient of the PEN/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award and has been a finalist for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review daily, One Story, Tin House, The Oxford American, Ploughshares and elsewhere. She is a professor at Colorado State University and lives in Boulder with her family.
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Coming soon!
Kevin Grange
Wild Rescues: A Paramedic's Extreme Adventures in Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Grand Teton
Kevin Grange is a former National Park Ranger and the award-winning author of Wild Rescues: A Paramedic's Extreme Adventures in Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Grand Teton, along with Beneath Blossom Rain: Discovering Bhutan on the Toughest Trek in the World. His newest book, Grizzly Confidential: An Astounding Journey into the Secret Life of North America’s Most Fearsome Predator was published in September 2024 by Harper Horizon. Aside from writing, Kevin works as a firefighter paramedic with Jackson Hole Fire/EMS, lectures frequently at writing and wilderness medical conferences, and enjoys skiing, mountain biking, and trail running with his wife and golden retriever in the Tetons. Visit him at: www.kevingrange.com
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Coming soon!
Olivia Chadha
Rise of the Red Hand
Olivia Chadha writes science fiction, fantasy, comic books, and literary novels for MG, YA, and adult audiences. She has a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing and her research centers on the history of exile, India’s Partition, precarious borders and boundaries, global folklore and fairy tales, and the relationship between humans, machines and the environment. Her novels include BALANCE OF FRAGILE THINGS, RISE OF THE RED HAND, FALL OF THE IRON GODS. She is a contributor to the anthologies THE GATHERING DARK, MAGIC HAS NO BORDERS, and the STAR WARS anthology, Return of the Jedi: From A Certain Point of View.
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Coming soon!