Writing in Color 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 Writing in Color guide to Lit Fest 2025, including workshops and readings from BIPOC+ writers like Suzi Q. Smith, Poupeh Missaghi, and Eduardo Corral. Choose intensives, seminars, and events á la carte, or sign up for one of our festival passes for the full experience.
SINGLE SESSION CLASSES
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.
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.
The Laundry Line with Natalie Hodges
June 9, 2025 | 1:30PM - 3:30PM MDT | Virtual
The journalist Michael Pollan asserts that every piece of nonfiction needs a “laundry line”: a main conceptual through-line that is strong yet flexible enough to hold the various vignettes and reflections that make up the piece. The same is true for fiction: even with plot to guide us, fiction writers need to think about how to balance the narration of physical events with psychological ones, how to weave backstory with present action. This class will offer writers a new vocabulary for articulating and experimenting with structure through lecture, discussion, and a writing exercise.
Finding the Ghost with Ingrid Rojas Contreras
June 9, 2025 | 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM MDT | In-Person
This all-genre craft seminar will include a literature survey, highlighting moments when strangeness enters the room, and what it can offer a narrative, as well as in-class generative prompts based on readings. We will take a look at nonfiction from Daisy Lafarge and Anna Lindsey, the poetry of Anna Swir, the prose-meets-poetry of Anne Carson, and the fiction of Victor Heringer. One of the most valuable modes a writer can be in is a blissful state of porosity. No matter our genre, we’ll open ourselves to the possibilities and tools of other genres to see what we can take away and bring back to our own. This seminar will encourage you toward strangeness, to investigate and play with structure and form.
The Situation and the Story with Natalie Hodges
June 11, 2025 | 1:30PM - 3:30PM MDT | Virtual
In her craft book "The Situation and the Story," Vivian Gornick differentiates between what a work is about on its surface and what it is "about" more deeply; the themes and motivating questions that allow it to contribute to our understanding of others and ourselves. This class will focus on how to identify the relationship between situation and story in both fiction and nonfiction, offering strategies for clarifying that relationship in our own work and concrete tips on how to build in both elements at the level of the prose. Writers can expect to participate in large group discussion, short break-outs, and a writing exercise.
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.
Sell Essays that Boost Your Book's Potential with Gloria J. Browne-Marshall
June 12, 2025 | 1:30PM - 3:30PM MDT | In-Person
In this seminar, we'll infuse law into our fiction, memoir, or nonfiction, without sounding like an info dump cut from Law & Order. Explore nuances in courtroom scenes, and add social justice as a timestamp. Law is human conflict. Whether history, classic tales, speculative, or contemporary stories, we'll find strategies to imbue your work with intriguing legal dimensions while using prompts from films, nonfiction, and fiction.
TWO-DAY INTENSIVES
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.
Two-Day Intensive: Experiments In Form—Audre Lorde with Suzi Q. Smith
June 7, 2025 - June 8, 2025 | 9:00AM - 11:00AM MDT | In-Person
Participants in this two-day intensive will enjoy close reading and discussion of excerpts from Audre Lorde's poems and essays, accompanied by generative exercises designed for writers to begin drafting poems and lyric essays.
ADVANCED WORKSHOPS
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.
Advanced Weeklong Nonfiction Workshop: Truth in Nonfiction with Ingrid Rojas Contreras
June 9, 2025 - June 13, 2025 | 9:00AM - 11:30AM MDT | In-Person
The rigors of nonfiction are tied to telling the truth, fact-checking the truth, and working with evidentiary materials. The factually accurate in nonfiction is of utmost importance—but how do we write the factually accurate when, for example, the history of a people hasn’t been kept or has actively been erased? Or how can we acknowledge on the page the murk and the inexact quality of memory? In this workshop, thinking of Michael Taussig’s important summation of the work of anthropology, the “subject is not the truth of being but the social being of truth,” we will think about the lenses available to us in nonfiction. We’ll read some work that widens the scope of nonfiction, utilize different lenses, and write in class using prompts inspired by our readings, in addition to workshop participant pieces.
