Authors + Presenters

Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
Key Speaker
Terry Tempest Williams is a writer, naturalist, and activist known for her impassioned prose and fierce advocacy for environmental and social justice. She is the author of Refuge, When Women Were Birds, Erosion, and The Hour of Land, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Orion. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Sierra Club’s John Muir Award, and the Thoreau Prize for Literary Excellence. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 2025–26 Emerson Collective Fellow, she is currently writer-in-residence at Harvard Divinity School. She divides her time between Castle Valley, Utah, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder
Featured Presenter
Nina McConigley is an award-winning writer whose work explores identity, belonging, and cultural intersections in the American West. She is the author of Cowboys and East Indians, which won the PEN Open Book Award and the High Plains Book Award, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, Ploughshares, Salon, and American Short Fiction. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard, she teaches at Colorado State University and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Her play Cowboys and East Indians was presented at the 2024 Colorado New Play Summit, and her debut novel will be released in 2026.

The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America
Featured Presenter
David Baronis an award-winning journalist, broadcaster, and author of The Beast in the Garden and American Eclipse. A former science correspondent for NPR, he has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Scientific American, and other publications. David recently served as the Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, Exploration, and Scientific Innovation. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

A Guardian and a Thief
Megha Majumdar is the author of the novel "A Guardian and a Thief," which was named a finalist for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, and selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Her debut novel, the New York Times bestseller “A Burning,” was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal. It was a TODAY show Read With Jenna Book Club Pick and a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick. Majumdar is the recipient of a Whiting Award, as well as of fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri and Hawthornden foundations. Born and raised in Kolkata, India, and educated at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, she now lives in New York.

Site Fidelity
Claire Boyles is a writer and former farmer whose work captures the rugged landscapes and resilient people of the American West. A 2022 Whiting Award winner in fiction, she is the author of Site Fidelity, winner of the High Plains Book Award and longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award, the Colorado Book Award, and the Reading the West Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in Sierra Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals, and her screenwriting credits include multiple Hallmark Channel films. Boyles teaches in low-residency MFA programs at Eastern Oregon University and Western Colorado University. Her debut novel, Appraisals—developed during her 2023 Mountain Words Writer Residency—is forthcoming in 2026.

Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet
Ben Goldfarb is an independent environmental journalist, editor, and fiction writer. He is the author of Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. Ben has written for a variety of publications, including Scientific American, Orion Magazine, High Country News, The Guardian, Earth Island Journal, and many others. He is an avid fly-fisherman and SCUBA diver. You can read more at www.bengoldfarb.com.

Take It From Me
Alia Hanna Habib is a Vice President and literary agent at The Gernert Company, where she represents MacArthur Fellows, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, National Book Award finalists, and numerous New York Times bestselling authors. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

When They Came Home
Terri Lewis fell in love with history in college. Not the dates or wars, but the mysterious daily lives of people. Her debut, Behold the Bird in Flight, tells the story of an unknown British queen, Isabelle d’Angoulême, abducted by King John of Magna Carta fame. It was named one of 51 favorites of ’25 by the Washington Independent Review of Books. Her second fictionalizes her grandfather’s return from WWI with shellshock and her grandmother’s struggle to hold the family together. When They Came Home won the 2025 Miami University Press Novella Prize.

Terri’s writing has been honed through workshops with Jill McCorkle, Laura van den Berg, and Rebecca Makkai, and she has published in Embark, Hippocampus, Denver Quarterly, Blue Mesa Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review among others. Her website is TerriLewis1.com.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Mapping Your Memoir
Dan Manzanares is an award-winning literary arts advocate and educator. He received his MFA with a concentration in genre fiction from Western Colorado University. For years, he worked on staff at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and the University of Denver’s Prison Arts Initiative, teaching creative writing to the unhoused community, as well as incarcerated students. In 2016, he won a Mayor’s Awards for Excellence in Arts & Culture and in 2021 accepted a mayoral appointment to the Denver Commission on Cultural Affairs, where he served as chair. Currently, he's a writing instructor at the American Museum of Western Art, as well as Story Quest - Map Your Novel & Map Your Memoir.

Mapping Your Memoir
Doug Kurtz has spent nearly three decades teaching writers in universities, nonprofits, international retreats, and through his coaching practice. He is the co-creator of the Story Map, a holistic methodology that helps novelists write deeply impactful books. His clients have signed with literary agents, published widely, won awards, and finished novels they’re proud of. Kurtz is the author of Mosquito, holds a graduate degree in creative writing from the University of Colorado, and has served as core faculty at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

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.

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.

ROAM
Hillary Rosner is an award-winning science journalist who has reported on environmental issues from around the world for National Geographic, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Scientific American, Wired, Audubon, and many others. She specializes in telling complex, science-driven stories in ways that resonate deeply with general audiences.

Wise to the West
Wendy Videlock lives  on the Western Slope of the Colorado Rockies.  Her poems, reviews and essays appear most notably in Best American Poetry, the New York Times, Hudson Review, Rattle and O Magazine. Her syndicated newspaper column, The Barefoot Laureate, appears across the Four Corner states. Wendy currently serves as poet laureate of Western Colorado and advocates for the arts in public spaces.  Her critically acclaimed books are published by Able Muse Press and can be found wherever books are sold.  Find out more about Wendy HERE.

First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
Mitzi Rapkin is the founder, host, and producer of the podcast, First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing, which features in-depth conversations with today’s most distinguished literary writers of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and essays. Her archive contains more than 560 interviews accumulated over 12 years. She reads a book a week to produce up to 52 episodes a year and each episode meticulously covers issues of literary craft, creativity, and the themes of a writer’s work. Inevitably and consciously, she cultivates conversations that evolve from talking about the mechanics of producing a work of art to questions on what it means to be human, the mystery and awe of being in relationship with one another, and empathy. She got her start in radio at KBUT in 1998.

A Sharper Silence
Michael Hettich is the author of the poetry collection, A Sharper Silence, published by Terrapin Books in 2025. It has been called a “heartfelt, heartbreaking collection” (Marie Harris). His previous book of poetry, The Halo of Bees: New and Selected Poems, 1990-2022 won the 2024 Brockman-Campbell Book Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, and he has published more than a dozen books of poetry across four decades. His other honors include several Individual Artist Fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, The Tampa Review Prize in Poetry, the David Martinson/Meadowhawk Prize, a Florida Book Award, the Lena M. Shull Book Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society, and the inaugural Hudson-Fowler Prize from Slant magazine at the University of Central Arkansas. A new book of poems, Waking Up Alone, is forthcoming in 2026. He lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina. His website is michaelhettich.com.

The Westerners 
Born and raised in Colorado, Megan Kate Nelson is a historian and writer based in Boston, with a BA from Harvard and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa. She is the author of five books, including The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist in History) and Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (winner of the 2023 Spur Award for Historical Nonfiction). Her new book, The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier, will be published by Scribner in March 2026. 

Megan writes about the Civil War, the U.S. West, and American culture for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Slate, and Time. She is an elected member of the prestigious Society of American Historians and was the 2024-2025 Rogers Distinguished Fellow in Nineteenth-Century American History at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Blue Boy
Rakesh Satyal is the author of the novels Blue Boy and No One Can Pronounce My Name. Blue Boy won a Lambda Literary Award, the Prose/Poetry Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, and was adapted into an award-winning short film by the actor-writer-director Nik Dodani, who is currently developing it into a feature film. No One Can Pronounce My Name was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. Satyal is currently an Executive Editor at the HarperOne Group/HarperCollins and currently sits on the advisor council for Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts. He lives in Brooklyn. 

What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be?
John Hausdoerffer writes and edits books that imagine a future of deeper care for human and more-than-human communities. Book titles include Wildness: Relations of People and Place; Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations; What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be?; and An Elemental Life. John runs the Philosophy Program at Western Colorado University (where he teaches courses in ethics and postcolonial philosophy) and serves as Director of Story for the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory.

Thrill Me
Benjamin Percy is the author of seven novels, including The Sky Vault, The Unfamiliar Garden, The Ninth Metal, and Red Moon, as well as three acclaimed short story collections. His craft book, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction, is widely taught in creative writing programs. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, GQ, The Paris Review, and Tin House, and have been featured on NPR. A recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, an NEA Fellowship, and multiple Pushcart Prizes, Percy is also a screenwriter and member of the WGA, with film and television projects currently in development.