Queer Creatives Guide to Lit Fest 2025
To celebrate diverse voices at Lit Fest this year, our Community Engagement team has compiled Writing in Color and Queer Creatives guides to Lit Fest. Our goal with these guides is to both spotlight Lit Fest workshops and events led by faculty that identify as BIPOC+ and/or part of the LGBTQIA+ community and to encourage Lit Fest attendees who share these identities to feel comfortable in a workshop, especially if it's their first time attending Lit Fest or a Lighthouse event.
Below you'll find the complete Queer Creatives guide to Lit Fest 2025, including workshops and readings from LGBTQIA+ writers like William Haywood Henderson, Alyse Knorr, and Poupeh Missaghi. Choose intensives, seminars, and events á la carte or sign up for one of our festival passes for the full experience.
SINGLE SESSION CLASSES
The Art of Condensary with Alyse Knorr
June 6, 2025 | 1:30PM - 3:30PM MDT | In-Person
In this session, writers of all levels and all genres will unlock the art of writing with precision, eliminating unnecessary words to make every sentence pop. Through hands-on exercises and lively discussions, you'll discover how to tighten your work without losing your unique voice. Get ready to supercharge your writing skills and leave with the tools to craft compact, captivating pieces that leave a lasting impression.
Site/Visit: Writing with the Land with Cass Eddington
June 6, 2025 | 1:30PM - 3:30PM MDT | In-Person
What does it mean to be in conversation with our local landscapes in our writing? Part experiential learning, part creative practice, SITE//VISIT provides a space to learn about native plants and local ecology and translate embodied experience onto the page through play and improvisation. We’ll draw from the practices and work of artists and writers such as Cecilia Vicuna, CA Conrad, Jake Skeets, and others.
Vocational Poetics: Working, Writing, Calling Out with Cass Eddington
June 6, 2025 | 4:00PM - 6:00PM MDT | In-Person
Most of us aren't able to support ourselves materially through what we would consider our “calling” (an idea that doesn’t recognize the inequities and issues of access shaped by capitalism, racism, and ableism). Lacking a single “vocation,” we may cobble together our livelihood through many sources. Beyond the fantasy of a consistent work/life balance, this lecture considers the root of vocation: both the labor of writing and the “calling out.” Through what forms and technologies are we able to be heard?
Writing Beyond Walls: An Exercise on Resilience in Difficult Subject Matter with Hillary Leftwich
June 6, 2025 | 9:00AM - 11:00AM MDT | In-Person
Writing can feel overwhelming, especially with challenging themes. When daunting themes leave us frozen, that's when it's time to get your game plan on. In this workshop, we'll practice exercises to help navigate obstacles in our writing, whether mountains or molehills. We'll learn techniques to tackle both big and small challenges, making difficult subjects work for us, regardless of genre or skill level. All skill levels are welcome.
Developing Writing Habits and Writing with Prompts with Poupeh Missaghi
June 6, 2025 | 4:00PM - 6:00PM MDT | In-Person
With jobs and family/personal responsibilities, sustaining a writing practice seems harder these days than ever before. We struggle to find the time and energy to find our way into our creative space. This course will offer prompts and habit-building techniques to help us sustain our writing practices, whether to exercise our muscles or to make it through long-term projects.
Erasures, Lacunae, and Voids: Writing What's Not There with Sasha Geffen
June 6, 2025 | 1:30PM - 3:30PM MDT | In-Person
Sometimes what's not in a piece of writing is just as crucial to making it tick as what's explicitly spelled out. The holes in our work can serve as invitations for readers to fall more deeply into the text and start creatively connecting the dots on their own. By breathing deliberate space into the page, we can write more engagingly—and in deeper, more active collaboration with our readers. This craft seminar will offer generative opportunities to play with withdrawal, opacity, and negative space as valuable creative techniques.
Oracle Poetry: Pushing the Veil Between the Spirit Realm and Our Writing with Hillary Leftwich
June 7, 2025 | 9:00AM - 11:00AM MDT | Virtual
Using oracle cards as writing prompts, we’ll explore messages and clues from the universe through divinatory free writing, unlocking our truths with guided cards as our mentors. We’ll use various techniques to shape our raw writings into crafted poems until we find at least one fragment that resonates deeply. Through the power of words and the oracle's wisdom, we’ll push back the veil between this world and the realm of spirits, using our intuition and awareness as an alchemical process to embrace what arises from the unknown.
Learning Craft Techniques from Literature in Translation with Poupeh Missaghi
June 7, 2025 | 4:00PM - 6:00PM MDT | In-Person
Different languages and literary traditions invite and make possible the use of different craft techniques. Fortunately, the US literary landscape is gradually holding more space for works in translation, though they still comprise a small percentage of the market. In this course, we'll study craft techniques used in some very recent publications in translation and discuss what we can learn from both the authors and the translators to adopt into our own writing practices.
Writing Food with Poupeh Missaghi
June 8, 2025 | 9:00AM - 11:00AM MDT | In-Person
Food connects us to our origins as well as to people beyond our immediate families. It has a language of its own, telling many stories with many ingredients—not all jolly and nostalgic but also complex and multilayered, sometimes hard and heavy. In this course, we'll gather around a table to nourish ourselves with many food stories and learn from a wide range of dishes and their narratives.
Practical Publishing: Journals as Models for Your Work with Hillary Leftwich
June 9, 2025 | 1:30PM - 3:30PM MDT | In-Person
This workshop will focus on studying several literary journals and the writings they publish in order to plan better where to submit our work. We'll read several genres recently published in journals such as The Adroit, The Sun, Guernica, and others to get down to business—discovering prompts from what we find for workshop exercises. We’ll also discuss cover letters, author bios, and aesthetics within journals to avoid pitfalls when submitting.
Diving Into the Wreck—Finding Your Obsessions with William Haywood Henderson
June 10, 2025 | 1:30PM - 3:30PM MDT | In-Person
Denis Johnson said, “The stories of the fallen world lay inside us. That’s the interesting stuff.” At our best, we all write about that slice of experience and knowledge that haunts and obsesses us. Does it have to be dark or fallen? No. But it has to be true to the deepest corners of your consciousness. In this seminar, we’ll look at what you write about and why. We’ll find the richest avenues for you to pursue, to set you off from the pack.
Find Your Unique Style with William Haywood Henderson
June 10, 2025 | 4:00PM - 6:00PM MDT | In-Person
Your style is yours alone. Readers will return to your writing again and again because they like the way you shape consciousness on the page. In this seminar, we’ll dig into your style, decide on what sets you apart, then hone your unique voice. You’ll come away with a clear sense of your true self on the page.
A Circle Is God Saying Yes: Strategies for Rethinking Revision with Eduardo Corral
June 12, 2025 | 4:00PM - 6:00PM MDT | In-Person
In this craft seminar, we’ll enlarge and complicate what we mean when we say “revision”. Revision isn’t just reworking language, it’s part of the poet’s practice. One should never be satisfied with the first gift: the language that arrives first. Poets should aspire to more surprising imagery and phrasing. During our conversation, we’ll put pressure on notions of attentiveness, notebooking, reading, the poetic line, sentence patterns, imagery, and language itself. How do we notice and internalize the things of the world? How can we be more attentive to our attentiveness? We’ll practice a few revision strategies during our time together and discuss the importance of wonder and bewilderment in a poet’s life.
Writing Family Members as Characters with Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
June 13, 2025 | 1:30PM - 3:30PM MDT | In-Person
Who, reading Melissa Febos's memoirs, could fail to imagine her storytelling, seafaring, nightmare-plagued father? Who, reading Meredith Talusan, can forget her doting grandmother? When we write memoir, our characters are often drawn from the people we love, the people we know best—those about whom we may have said our whole lives, “They’re such characters!” So why is it that sometimes those characters appear the blurriest in our drafts? Is it possible that how close we are to someone might be the very thing that complicates turning them into an effective character? Drawing from work by writers like Sarah Broom, Kiese Laymon, Alicia Elliot, and more, we’ll analyze how they achieved the distance necessary to bring their all-too-real family members to life as characters on the page and discuss writing exercises useful for rendering our own.
Details That Matter with William Haywood Henderson
June 13, 2025 | 1:30PM - 3:30PM MDT | In-Person
Is the sofa in your story gold or green? Does it matter? Yes, it actually does. In this seminar, we’ll work on creating specific details that add meaning and depth to your story. Specificity leads to subtext. Subtext leads to richness. The sofa is gold for a reason. Everybody wins!
TWO DAY INTENSIVES
Two-Day Intensive: Breaking the Surface—Revision with William Haywood Henderson
June 7, 2025 - June 8, 2025 | 9:00AM - 12:00PM MDT | In-Person
You finish a draft—then what? The text can seem impenetrable, but you know you need to open it to new possibilities. You can change a word, add a comma, reorder the clauses, but you know (deep down) that you’re not yet getting at what you know needs to occur in order to dramatize your idea. Noodling around on the surface won’t suffice. In this intensive, we’ll break the surface of our drafts and discover the potential for meaningful change. Writers will come away with an expanded understanding of their texts.
Advanced Weekend Nonfiction Intensive: In Pursuit of the Story with Nicole Chung
June 7, 2025 - June 8, 2025 | 8:30AM - 12:00PM MDT | In-Person
In this weekend memoir intensive, you’ll be invited to pursue your story with new curiosity: What about it feels most urgent or exciting to you? What idea, question, obsession, or truth are you inviting readers to explore along with you? This workshop is designed to help you identify the most promising threads of your story and consider several possible approaches to revision. Together, we’ll dive into your work and engage in lively, affirming craft conversations about voice, characterization, setting, chronology, structure, and more. We’ll discuss the complications of rendering the truth on the page, how to do so when memory is imperfect, and the role of imagination in memoir.
ADVANCED WEEKLONG WORKSHOPS
Advanced Weeklong Nonfiction Workshop: The Fractured, The Lyric, and the Imaginary in Contemporary CNF With Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
June 9, 2025 - June 13, 2025 | 9:00AM - 11:30AM MDT | In-Person
In this workshop, we’ll consider the “creative” part of creative nonfiction, making use of speculative, fragmentary, and lyric elements and asking how they might help us tell stories that are, counterintuitively, more deeply true or nonfictional. What possibilities arise from transcending genre convention while still being clear about what is known? In addition to reading the work of workshop participants, we’ll also consider a range of published essays and book excerpts and together derive principles of productive rupture.
Advanced Weeklong Poetry Workshop: Structure and Progression with Eduardo Corral
June 9, 2025 - June 13, 2025 | 9:00AM - 11:30AM MDT | In-Person
In this workshop, we’ll interrogate the structure and progression of poems, how the language is shaped and how the language clicks forward. Structure and progression often works in tandem. For example: many fixed forms. But they can also push against each other to charge and to disrupt patterns, time, and voice. We’ll explore if the structure and progression is strengthening the poem. If they’re halting the poem, we’ll consider other approaches, which will help the poet to dwell with possibilities.
