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.