September 11 - 13, 2026
In Beautiful Cedaredge, Colorado
Christie Aschwanden
Christie Aschwanden is author of the New York Times bestseller, Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn From the Strange Science of Recovery, co-host of Emerging Form, a show about the creative process airing on KVNF, and host and producer of UNCERTAIN, a podcast from Scientific American. She’s the former lead science writer at FiveThirtyEight and was previously a health columnist for The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Wired, Smithsonian, Slate, Popular Science,
Discover, Science and Nature.She’s received fellowships from the Santa Fe Institute, the Carter Center and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. She was a National Magazine Award finalist in 2011 and has received numerous prizes including a National Association of Science Writers Science in Society Award, an Information is Beautiful Award and a AAAS Kavli Science Journalism prize.
Claire Boyles
Claire Boyles (she/her) is a writer and former farmer. Her debut novel, Appraisals, is forthcoming in August 2026. A 2022 Whiting Award winner in fiction, she is the author of Site Fidelity, which won the High Plains Book Award and was 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 and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other journals, and she is a screenwriter with multiple credits on the Hallmark Channel. She teaches in low-residency MFA programs at both Eastern Oregon University and Western Colorado University.
Amy Irvine
Amy Irvine is a sixth-generation Utahn who descends from notorious Mormons. Her books have received the Orion Book Award, the Ellen Melloy Desert Writers Award, and the Colorado Book Award. Her essays have been featured in Best American Science & Nature Writing, Best American Food Writing, Orion, Outside, Backpacker, Climbing and High Country News. Her second memoir, Almost animal: Motherhood, Wildness & the American West, will be published by Spiegel & Grau in November. For thirteen years, Irvine taught in the Mountainview MFA Program in New Hampshire and teaches regularly in workshops for Orion, Fishtrap, Freeflow Institute and other outdoor programs. After twenty years in Norwood, Colorado, she lives and writes on a mesa overlooking the North Fork of the Gunnison River.
Rene’ Janiece
Rene’ Janiece is fascinated with the play and power of words - how they string together, how they hold space, how they resonate, how they hang in the air when they are offered the opportunity to breathe. While she is many things, she is a writer, musician, and artist, exploring what it means to meet this world with the heart of a poet. She finds inspiration in what is often overlooked – rusted wire, a fallen bird’s nest, the blooming bindweed, the moment right in front of us. She believes it is her job to be witness to all of it.
Rene’ is a six-year Inflammatory Breast Cancer survivor, still in treatment, doing her best to be present with whatever each day brings. She has released two music albums with her husband, Wayne McKinzie, as part of the duo Bittersweet Highway, and she is the creator of the on-line writing workshop A Moment’s Notice. Her new poetry chapbook, Rosemary and Rust, will be released in July of 2025. She lives in Cedaredge, Colorado with her husband Wayne, dog Naia-Grace, still-sometimes-feral house-cat Sydney, and her rescue cows (steers) Remy and Connor.
Shelley Reed
Shelley Read’s debut novel, Go as a River, is an international bestseller that has sold over a million copies worldwide, has been translated into thirty-four languages, and is currently in development for film with the Mazur Kaplan Company. Winner of the High Plains Book Award, the Reading the West Book Award, and le Prix de l’Union Interalliée, Go as a River is also a Sunday Times bestseller, a Goodreads Choice Award finalist, an Amazon Editors’ Pick Best Debut, an Indie Next Pick, and a Colorado Public Radio Books We Love selection, among other national and international accolades.
Shelley taught writing, literature, environmental studies, and honors at Western Colorado University for nearly three decades. She is a mom, mountaineer, world traveler, and fifth-generation Coloradan who lives with her family in the Elk Mountains of Colorado’s Western Slope. Learn more at www.shelleyread.com.
Laura Resau
Laura Resau is the award-winning author of the upmarket novels The Alchemy of Flowers and The River Muse (May 2026), and eleven acclaimed books for young people. Her books have won five Colorado Book Awards and spots on “best-of” booklists from Oprah, the American Library Association, and more. Trilingual, she’s lived in Provence and Oaxaca, and studied cultural anthropology and languages. She teaches in the genre fiction and nature writing concentrations in the low-residency graduate creative writing at Western Colorado University. You might find her writing in her cozy vintage trailer in Fort Collins, Colorado, where she lives with her rock-hound husband, musician son, wild husky, and a hundred house plants. Learn more at www.LauraResau.com.
Emily Sinclair
Emily Sinclair is a writer, teacher, and bookseller. Her fiction and nonfiction have
been published in numerous literary journals and has been acknowledged by Best
American Essays and Best of the Net.
Wendy Videlock
Wendy Videlock lives on the outskirts of Palisade at the foot of The Grand Mesa. She's authored five books of poetry, a children's book and a collection of essays. Her work appears most notably in Best American Poetry, the New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Hudson Review, Rattle and O Magazine. Wendy is the winner of the Keats Soul Making Prize, The PTB Sonnet Prize, The AMP Sonnet Prize, the Fisher Prize and the Cantor Prize. Her syndicated newspaper column, The Barefoot Laureate, appears across the Four Corner states.
Wendy also teaches for THINK360 and directs several literary programs across the region, advocating for the arts in public spaces. Wendy serves as poet laureate of Western Colorado. Learn more HERE.
William Wright
William Wright was a Fulbright Scholar in American Studies at the University of Tromsø in Norway and a Writing Fellow at the Fishtrap Gathering of Writers in Wallowa Lake, Oregon. He is the author of the poetry chapbook Cosmonauts and was a finalist for the May Swenson Award and the Cider Press Review Book award, among others. He has published in 14 Hills, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Field, The Ninth Letter, Permafrost, The Seattle Review, Third Coast, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and featured on Poetry Daily. He has published articles on North American Poetry and presented academic papers in Paris, London, Oxford, Glasgow, Stavanger, and in North America.