Author Announcements

Mountain Words Festival brings together a diverse lineup of nationally and internationally acclaimed authors and presenters for a three-day celebration at nine thousand feet.

Stay tuned—exciting author announcements are coming your way! We’re thrilled to reveal a lineup of incredible voices you won’t want to miss at the Mountain Words Festival. Keep an eye out as we share new names and exclusive details in the months ahead!

Tickets and passes on sale January 2026!

  • David Baron at Mountain Words

    David Baron

    The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America

    2026 Mountain Words Featured Presenter

    David Baron is 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 TimesWashington PostWall Street JournalLos Angeles TimesScientific 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.

  • Author Nina McConigley

    Nina McConigley

    How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder

    2026 Mountain Words 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.

  • Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams

    Terry Tempest Williams

    Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

    Big news! Terry Tempest Williams, author of over 20 books, will be joining the 2026 Mountain Words Festival as a 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.

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We can’t wait to meet you in the mountains.

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