2025 Authors + Presenters

Karen Russell at The Mountain Words Festival.

Karen Russell

The Antidote

Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She has received MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, son, and daughter. The Antidote is her second novel.

Deborah Jackson 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.

Ben Goldfarb

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.

The War Below at Mountain Words Festival

Ernest Scheyder

The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power our Lives

Ernest Scheyder is a journalist for Reuters and author of "The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power our Lives," (One Signal/Simon & Schuster, 2024), which tells the untold story of the people and places at the center of our global energy transition. The book was longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the Financial Times/Schroders Business Book of the Year. It was also named the American Energy Society's 2024 Energy Book of the Year. A native of Maine, Scheyder previously wrote about the U.S. shale oil revolution, politics, and the environment. He is a graduate of the University of Maine and Columbia Journalism School and lives in Houston with his family.

Elizabeth Gonzalez James

The Bullet Swallower

Elizabeth Gonzalez James is a screenwriter and bestselling author of the novels, The Bullet Swallower and Mona at Sea, as well as the chapbook, Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. The Bullet Swallower was named a best book of 2024 by NPR, Esquire, and elsewhere, was a Book of the Month Club pick, and was featured on “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon” as one of their spring book club picks. Elizabeth was featured on the MSNBC documentary “My Generation” representing the Millennials. She has taught fiction writing at Grub Street, Pioneer Valley Writers Workshop, Story Studio, and elsewhere. Originally from South Texas, Elizabeth now lives with her family in Massachusetts.

Will Cockrell

Everest, Inc.

Will Cockrell has spent more than twenty years as a senior editor, writer, and consultant for national magazines including Men’s Journal, Outside, Men’s Fitness, and GQ. His work has been acclaimed by the American Society of Magazine Editors and the Professional Publishers Association (UK). A former outdoor guide, Cockrell has covered Everest throughout his career and has visited Everest base camp in Nepal. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.

Shelley Read Author of Go as a River.

Shelley Read

Go as a River

Shelley Read’s international bestselling debut novel, Go As A River, is translated into thirty-four languages and appears on bestseller lists worldwide. Winner of the 2024 High Plains Book Award for Fiction and the 2023 Reading the West Award for Best Debut, Go As A River is also a Sunday Times and ABA bestseller, Goodreads Choice Award Finalist, Amazon Editor's Pick Best Debut, Indie Next Pick, and Colorado Public Radio Books We Love selection, among other national and international accolades. The novel is currently in development for film with Mazur Kaplan Productions. Shelley was an award-winning Senior Lecturer at Western Colorado University for nearly three decades where she taught writing, literature, environmental studies, and honors. A long-time Crested Butte local and regular contributor it Crested Butte Magazine and Gunnison Valley Journal, Shelley is also a mom, mountaineer, world traveler, and proud fifth generation Coloradan. More information is at www.shelleyread.com.

Leah Sottile's book Blazing Eye Sees All.

Leah Sottile

Blazing Eye Sees All

Leah Sottile is the author of two books: Blazing Eye Sees All and When the Moon Turns to Blood. Her journalism has been published by The Washington Post, The New York Times Magazine, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Outside, the BBC, The Atlantic and High Country News, where she is a correspondent. She is the host of the podcasts Hush, Burn Wild, Two Minutes Past Nine and the National Magazine Award-nominated series Bundyville. She lives in Oregon.

Paolo Bacigalupi

Navola

Paolo Bacigalupi is an internationally bestselling author of speculative fiction. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, John W. Campbell and Locus Awards, as well as being a finalist for the National Book Award and a winner of the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. His latest book is NAVOLA, an epic fantasy set in a world inspired in part by the settings and politics of the Italian Renaissance. He can be found online at windupstories.com.

Ramona Ausubel's new book The Last Animal.

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.

David Wroblewski with his book Familiaris.

David Wroblewski

Familiaris

David Wroblewski is the author, most recently, of the novel Familiaris, a 2024 Oprah Book Club pick and follow-up to his internationally bestselling debut, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, also an Oprah Book Club pick, and selected as one of the best books of the year by numerous magazines and Newspapers.

David has been featured in Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers program and is the recipient of a Colorado Book Award, Indie Choice Best Author Discovery award, and the Midwest Bookseller Association's Choice award. He lives in Colorado with the writer Kimberly McClintock and their dogs, Pie and Luci.

Hillary Leftwich's book Aura.

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.

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

  • Coming soon!

Mapping Your Novel by Doug Kurtz.

Doug Kurtz

Mapping Your Novel

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

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.

Our Moon, a book by Rebecca Boyle.

Rebecca Boyle

Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

As a journalist, Rebecca Boyle has reported from particle accelerators, genetic sequencing labs, bat caves, the middle of a lake, and the retractable domes of some of Earth’s largest telescopes. Her first book, OUR MOON: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are (Random House, 2024) is a new history of humanity’s relationship with the Moon, which Rebecca has not yet visited on assignment. Based in Colorado Springs, Colo., Rebecca is a contributing editor at Scientific American, a contributing writer at Quanta Magazine, and a columnist at Atlas Obscura. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and The Atlantic, and her work appears in a wide variety of publications for adults and kids. Rebecca’s work has been anthologized multiple times in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series, and she is the recipient of numerous writing awards, and her first book was longlisted for the National Book Award. Rebecca is a former daily newspaper reporter and lifelong Moon enthusiast.

Rajiv Mohabir, author of Whale Aria

Rajiv Mohabir

Whale Aria

Poet, memoirist, and translator, Rajiv Mohabir is the author of five books of poetry that have been awarded gold in Forward Indies and Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His other honors include being finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and both second place and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature. His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets. Currently he teaches poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Laura Kratz, Author of The Search for Sasquatch

Laura Krantz

The Search for Sasquatch

Laura Krantz is a journalist, editor and producer, in both radio and print, and co-founder of Foxtopus Ink. Her podcast, Wild Thing has received critical acclaim from Scientific American, Rolling Stone, and The Atlantic, which named it one of the best 50 podcasts in 2018 and 2020. Wild Thing is also the inspiration for a series of non-fiction, middle-grade books from ABRAMS Kids, including The Search for Sasquatch, Is There Anybody Out There?, and Do You Believe In Magic?.

In addition to Wild Thing, her recent work includes reporting, editing and production work on Master Plan (The Lever), The Syndicate (Imperative Entertainment/Foxtopus), Side Door (Smithsonian), Air/Space (Smithsonian), and others. Laura's prior experience includes a decade of editing and producing at NPR in Washington, DC, and at KPCC in Los Angeles.

Teow Lim Goh, author of Bitter Creek.

Teow Lim Goh

Bitter Creek

Teow Lim Goh is the author of three poetry collections, Islanders (2016), Faraway Places (2021), and Bitter Creek (2025). Her essay collection Western Journeys (2022) was a finalist for the 2023 Colorado Book Awards in Creative Nonfiction. Her writing has been featured in The Georgia Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, High Country News, and The New Yorker.

Michael Engelhard, Author of Arctic Traverse

Michael Engelhard

Arctic Traverse

Trained as an anthropologist with a degree from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Michael Engelhard worked for twenty-five years as a wilderness guide and outdoor instructor in Alaska and on the Colorado Plateau. The editor of four anthologies and author of Ice Bear, a cultural history of the polar bear, he has won three Alaska Press Club Awards, and a Rasmuson Individual Artist Award. Recent books include the National Outdoor Book Award-winning memoir Arctic Traverse as well as What the River Knows: Essays from the Heart of Alaska, and the Grand Canyon essay collection No Walk in the Park. His writing has also appeared in publications like Outside, Sierra, Backpacker, National Parks, Audubon, Utne Reader, and Times Literary Supplement, with more than a hundred articles in Alaska magazine. Engelhard currently lives in Moab again, working on a book about Nome, where he also has been a resident.

Erica Reid author of Ghost man on second

Erica Reid

Ghost Man on Second

Erica Reid is the author of Ghost Man on Second, winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize (Autumn House Press, 2024). Erica’s poems appear in Rattle, Cherry Tree, Colorado Review, and more. Erica is a 2025 Fellow at the Vermont Center for the Creative Arts and teaches in Western Colorado University’s MFA program. ericareidpoet.com

Jonathan P. Thompson, Author of Sagebrush Empire

Jonathan P. Thompson

Sagebrush Empire: How a remote Utah county became a battlefront of American public lands

Jonathan Thompson is a writer, editor and journalist who has been covering the lands and communities of the Western U.S. since 1996, when he signed on as the Silverton Standard & the Miner’s sole reporter. Since then he has worked in a variety of roles — from editor-in-chief to correspondent — at High Country News and as a freelancer, with work appearing in a variety of publications. He has authored two non-fiction books, River of Lost Souls: The science, politics and greed behind the Gold King Mine disaster and Sagebrush Empire: How a remote Utah county became a battlefront of American public lands, as well as Behind the Slickrock Curtain, a novel. He now runs the Land Desk, a newsletter focusing on public lands. He currently lives in Greece with his wife Wendy and a menagerie of dogs and cats and olive trees.

Dan Manzanares at the Mountain Words Festival.

Dan Manzanares

Mapping Your Novel

Dan Manzanares’ passion is helping novelists professionalize their writing process. The Story Map, a holistic storytelling model he co-created in a Costa Rican jungle, transforms writers to authors, people committed to connecting with readers. Working relationally, instead of structurally, Mappers learn essential storytelling elements to create meaningful novels in their chosen genres.

Dan is a literary arts advocate, teacher, and novelist who holds an MFA in creative writing from Western Colorado University. As an author and editor, he’s published award-winning anthologies as well as a nationally recognized community engagement toolkit. A chess dad from Denver, Dan serves on multiple advisory boards, including Rocky Mountain Reader, Sidewalk Poets, and the Denver Commission on Cultural Affairs.

Becoming little shell by chris la tray

Chris La Tray

Becoming Little Shell

Chris La Tray is a Métis storyteller, a descendent of the Pembina Band of the mighty Red River of the North and an enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians. His third book, Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home, was published by Milkweed Editions on August 20, 2024. His first book, One-Sentence Journal: Short Poems and Essays from the World at Large won the 2018 Montana Book Award and a 2019 High Plains Book Award. His book of haiku and haibun poetry, Descended from a Travel-worn Satchel, was published in 2021 by Foothills Publishing.

Chris writes the weekly newsletter "An Irritable Métis" and lives near Frenchtown, Montana. He is the Montana Poet Laureate for 2023–2025.

The Crazies by Amy Gamerman

Amy Gamerman

The Crazies

Amy Gamerman is a longtime contributor to the Wall Street Journal's Mansion section. Prior to, she was a WSJ’s drama critic and a staff writer. Her writing has appeared in Vogue and Redbook and been recognized with several awards, including from the National Association of Real Estate Editors. She attended Yale University and King’s College, Cambridge. Gamerman lives in Connecticut with her husband, writer and editor Kevin Conley, and their four children. The Crazies is her first book.

  • Events Coming Soon!

The Wild Dark by Craig Childs

Craig Childs

The Wild Dark

An Arizona native, Craig Childs has lived within the bounds of the Gunnison River and the nearby Dolores for thirty-five years. He has published more than a dozen books of adventure, wilderness, and science and is a contributing editor at Adventure Journal Quarterly. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, The New York Times, Orion and High Country News. He lives off grid with his wife, the poet Daiva Chesonis, between Telluride and the Utah border.

Potted Meat by Steven Dunn

Steven Dunn

Potten Meat

A 2021 Whiting Award winner, and shortlisted for Granta magazine’s “Best of Young American Novelists,” Steven Dunn is the author of two books from Tarpaulin Sky Press: water & power (2018) and Potted Meat, which was a co-winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, and has been adapted for a short film entitled The Usual Route, from Foothills Productions. Steven was born and raised in West Virginia, and after 10 years in the Navy he earned a B.A. in Creative Writing from University of Denver.

Manuel Aragon

Writer — Filmmaker — Photographer

Manuel Aragon is a Latinx writer, director, and filmmaker from Denver, CO. He is currently working on a short story collection, Norteñas. Norteñas is a collection of speculative fiction short stories centered in the Northside, a Mexican and Mexican- American centered part of Denver, and the people, ghosts, and demons that live there.

Thomas Kostigen

Cool Food: Erasing Your Carbon Footprint One Bite at a Time

Thomas Kostigen is an award-winning and New York Times bestselling author and journalist. He founded the Climate Survivalist column for USA Today and has written for numerous publications, including the Washington Post, National Geographic, Discover, Departures, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Wall Street Journal, among others.

He is the coauthor with celebrated actor and philanthropist Robert Downey Jr. of the instant New York Times and USA Today bestselling book Cool Food: How to Erase Your Carbon Footprint One Bite at a Time — a game-changing new food category and way of thinking that can help fix the climate.

Mark Easter

Blue Plate: Food Lovers Guide to Climate Chaos

Mark Easter is an ecologist, greenhouse gas accountant, and writer who explores the beauty, wonder, and challenges of life on the spinning blue marble we call Earth.

Originally from Nebraska, Mark attended college in Indiana and Vermont, and has been fortunate to work around the globe. Since 1994, he has called Fort Collins, Colorado, home.

Mark’s life’s work centers on contributing to the body of science that examines how human decisions affect the Earth’s land, oceans, and climate—whether through food production, forest management or clearing, river damming, or urban development.

Outside of his professional life, Mark is a backcountry skier, hiker, gardener, and avid reader, who also enjoys cooking for his wife, family, and friends.

Jim O’Donnell

FOUNTAIN CREEK: Big Lessons from a Little River

Journalist and archeologist Jim O’Donnell grew up exploring among the beavers and discarded beer bottles that have long populated Fountain Creek. Irreverent, deeply knowledgeable, and endlessly curious, O’Donnell guides us through the contradictions and complexities of one of the most heavily urbanized areas in one of the fastest-growing states in the nation.

Luke Mehall

Great American Dirtbags

Luke Mehall is the publisher of The Climbing Zine and host of the Dirtbag State of Mind podcast. He's written five books, including American Climber and The Desert, and is currently working on American Climber 2. He splits his time in Durango, Colorado and northern Mexico. These days he feels like his life mission is to get people offline and into a book or zine.

Steven Cole Hughes

We Can See into Another Place

Steven Cole Hughes is an award-winning playwright and Associate Professor of Theatre at Western Colorado University. His full-length plays include: Indiana, The Bad Man (2011 Denver Post Ovation Award for Special Achievement), Billy Hell (2008 Ovation Award for Best New Work), Slabtown, cowboyily, and Battleground State. His plays for young audiences are: The Presidents!, The Wright Stuff, and The Geography of Adventure. His plays have been produced at the Bloomington Playwrights Project, the Coterie Theatre, Creede Repertory Theatre, Curious Theatre Company and the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. His short play A Brief History of Banned Books was published in 2024 in an anthology called We Can See into Another Place: Mile High Writers on Social Justice. He has a BA in theatre from Indiana University and an MFA from the National Theatre Conservatory.

Poems for the end of the world by Suzi Q. Smith

Suzi Q. Smith

Poems for the End of the World

Suzi Q. Smith is an award-winning author, artist, educator, and organizer who lives in Denver, Colorado. While primarily known for her poetry, Suzi is also a singer-songwriter, playwright, and interdisciplinary creative. She has created, curated, coached, and taught for over 20 years, touring throughout the United States.

Salmon Weather by CMarie Fuhrman

CMarie Fuhrman

Salmon Weather

CMarie Fuhrman is the author of Salmon Weather: Writing from the Land of No Return, Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems and the co-editor of Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, and Poetry and Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations. She has published poetry and nonfiction in numerous magazines, including Terrain.org, Emergence Magazine, The Ex-Puritan, Northwest Review, Yellow Medicine Review, Poetry Northwest, and various anthologies.  CMarie is an award-winning columnist for the Inlander and the Director of the Elk River Writers Workshop. CMarie is the Associate Director of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Western Colorado University, where she teaches poetry and nature writing. CMarie is the host of Colorado Public Radio's Terra Firma podcast. She is a former Idaho Writer in Residence and lives in the Salmon River Mountains of Idaho.

CMarieFuhrman.com

Justin Farrell, author of Billionaire wilderness

Justin Farrell

Billionaire Wilderness

Justin Farrell is a writer and professor at Yale, School of the Environment. He writes on nature, modern belief, and American culture, often using the rural American West as a setting. His work has won national awards and regularly appears in major media. He frequently presents work to policymakers, including the U.S. Senate, the White House, the Vatican, and the United Nations. His research has been published by Science, Princeton University Press, PNAS, the American Sociological Review, Nature Climate Change, among others, and funded by the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Science Foundation. Justin is a first-generation college graduate and Wyoming native. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. He splits time between rural Wyoming, Denver, and New Haven.

  • Saturday, May 24

    4:45pm | Crazies

Sara Dant's book Losing Eden

Sara Dant

Losing Eden

Dr. Sara Dant is an award-winning writer, historian, distinguished professor emeritus, and avid outdoor enthusiast currently residing in the Galisteo River Valley outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her most recent book is Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West (2023) and she was featured as an advisor and interviewee in a recent Ken Burns documentary film, The American Buffalo (2023). Her work focuses on environmental politics in the United States with a particular emphasis on the creation and development of consensus and bipartisanism. She has also provided expert witness research and testimony, including a precedent-setting report on Stream Navigability upheld by the Utah Supreme Court. Sara was born and raised in the West, got all of her degrees at western universities, and is proud to live in the part of the country where the air is dry and the mountains are high.

Ted Genoways's Tequila Wars

Ted Genoways

Tequila Wars: José Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico

Author and journalist Ted Genoways has penned a definitive, revelatory history of the vast tequila empire born from the fires of the Mexican Revolution. TEQUILA WARS: José Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico (on sale May 6, 2025) is a gripping, propulsive, and bloody first history of Cuervo and other influential distillers who fundamentally shaped Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century.

Ted Genoways is a two-time James Beard Award winner and the author of five books, including This Blessed Earth. His reporting on the tequila industry has appeared in Bloomberg, the Daily Beast, and Mother Jones. He lives outside of Lincoln, Nebraska.

Athena aktipis's a field guide to the apocalypse

Athena Aktipis

A Field Guide to the Apocalypse

Athena Aktipis is the Director of the Interdisciplinary Cooperation Initiative and an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University. Aktipis is an avid science communicator, hosting the science podcast, Zombified, and producing events across the country and internationally at Universities, community spaces, and festivals. She is passionate about building interdisciplinary teams to tackle tough questions, empowering students to learn about the topics they are most curious about, and leveraging cooperation science to improve our universities and the broader communities in which we are all embedded. Her first book, The Cheating Cell: How evolution helps us understand and treat cancer (Princeton University Press, 2020), explains how cancer is a result of a breakdown of multicellular cooperation. She is currently on tour for her second book, A Field Guide to the Apocalypse: A mostly serious guide to surviving our wild times (Workman, 2024).  Aktipis also writes for Scientific American, Slate, Aeon, and other magazines.

Dan Flores

Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

Dan Flores is a Santa Fe-area writer originally from Louisiana who spent much of his career at the University of Montana. His essays have been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and Time Magazine. Along with appearances on the History Channel, on Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown on CNN, and in The Joe Rogan Experience podcasts, he was featured in Ken Burns's 2023 film on the story of the American buffalo. Flores has written 11 books, the most recent of which are American Serengeti, winner of the Stubbendieck Distinguished Book Prize in 2017; Coyote America, a 2017 New York Times Bestseller, winner of the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, and Finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award; and Wild New World, winner of the 2023 Rachel Carson Environmental Book Prize, and winner of the 2023 National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature.

Aaron John Curtis

Old School Indian

Aaron John Curtis is an enrolled member of the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, which he’ll tell you is the white name for the American side of Akwesasne. Aaron has judged for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance prizes, the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, and the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Since 2004, Aaron has been Quartermaster at Books & Books, Miami’s largest independent bookstore. He lives in Miami.

Eli Francovich

The Return of Wolves: An Iconic Predator’s Struggle to Survive in the American West

Eli Francovich is a journalist who covers the environment, conservation and outdoor recreation in Washington. His work has been published in the Seattle Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Miami Herald, the Charlotte Observer, and elsewhere. He lives in Spokane, Washington.

Megan Freeman

AWAY

Megan E. Freeman attended an elementary school where poets visited her classroom every week to teach poetry, and she has been a writer ever since. Her New York Times bestselling novel in verse, ALONE, won the Colorado Book Award, the California, Illinois, Indiana, Japan, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nebraska, and Vermont Children’s Book Awards, is an NCTE Notable Verse Novel, and is included on over two dozen "best of" and state reading lists. Megan is also a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, and her poetry chapbook, Lessons on Sleeping Alone, was published by Liquid Light Press. Her latest novel, AWAY, was an instant New York Times and Indie Bestseller and is a companion novel to ALONE, told in hybrid formats. Megan used to live in northeast Los Angeles, central Ohio, northern Norway, and on Caribbean cruise ships. Now she divides her time between northern Colorado and the Texas Gulf Coast.

Jonathan Ellsworth

BLISTER Founder / Editor-in-Chief

Jonathan Ellsworth is the founder of the outdoors-focused media company, BLISTER (blisterreview.com) that’s based here in Crested Butte. Prior to starting BLISTER, Jonathan was a philosophy professor (he did his graduate work at the University of Chicago), a published author (primarily in academic philosophy), and a personal trainer (he trained a former presidential candidate & governor of New Mexico). These days, in addition to running BLISTER and hosting numerous BLISTER podcasts, he gets out in the mountains most days to ski, mountain bike, hike, or trail run.

Nick Bowlin

High Country News

Nick Bowlin is a freelance journalist and a contributing editor with High Country News. His freelance work has appeared in Harper’s, The Guardian and ProPublica, and has been anthologized in the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology.

Ryan Warner

Colorado Public Radio

Ryan Warner is senior host of Colorado Matters, the flagship daily interview program from CPR News. His voice is heard on frequencies around the state as he talks with Coloradans from all walks of life — politicians, scientists, artists, activists and others. Ryan's interviews with Colorado's governor now span four administrations. During his tenure, Colorado Matters has consistently been recognized as the best major market public radio talk show in the country. He speaks French, geeks out on commercial aviation, adores and tolerates his tuxedo cat Bob, and owns too many shoes.

Maria Whelan

Literary Agent, InkWell

Maria graduated from University College Dublin with a BA in English and Drama, then obtained her Masters in Modern Literature from the University of Edinburgh. She moved from Dublin to New York in the hopes of pursuing a career in publishing. Before joining InkWell, she worked as a Foreign Rights Assistant at Janklow & Nesbit and interned at Akashic Books. Maria enjoys a blend of literary and commercial fiction, as well as speculative fiction and magical realism. She is particularly fond of novels that straddle the cultural divide. She is looking for books in the fiction and nonfiction space that speak to the current cultural moment or examine overlooked facets of society.

Kim Peticolas

Literary Agent, Rudy Agency

Kimberly Peticolas is a literary agent with the Rudy Agency, as well as an experienced editor, writing coach, and ghostwriter. She works with authors across many genres, including business, leadership, self-help, history, sci-fi/fantasy, mystery/thriller, literary fiction, YA, and children's. She has a passion for immersive fiction and content-rich nonfiction, and has a soft spot for history, particularly military history regarding WWII and the American Revolution. Kimberly is a self-proclaimed "forever student" of all things relevant . . . (and some not-so-relevant). She has a BA from University of Southern California, and an MA from University of Leicester (England).

Join us for the sixth annual Mountain Words Festival

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Join us for the sixth annual Mountain Words Festival *