Friday Festival Readings + Karen Chamberlain Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry. Readings from Colorado Poet Laureate, Bobby Lefebre; author of the memoir, Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, winner of the Colorado Book Award, Pam Houston; Latinx writer, director, and filmmaker Manuel Aragon; and author of Potted Meat and water & power, Steven Dunn. Award ceremony with Art Goodtimes presenting Colorado poet, Kate Kingston. In the Steddy Theater.
Bobby LeFebre is an award-winning writer, performer, and cultural worker fusing a non-traditional multi-hyphenated professional identity to imagine new realities, empower communities, advance arts and culture, and serve as an agent of provocation, transformation, equity and social change. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Huffington Post, The Guardian, American Theater Magazine, NPR, and Poets.Org. More on Bobby.
Pam Houston is the author of the memoir, Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, which won the 2019 Colorado Book Award, the High Plains Book Award and the Reading The West Advocacy Award and even more recently, Air Mail: Letters of Politics Pandemics and Place coauthored with Amy Irvine. She is also the author of Cowboys Are My Weakness as well as five other books of fiction and nonfiction, all published by W.W. Norton.
Steven Dunn is the author of the novels Potted Meat (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2016) and water & power (Tarpaulin Sky 2018) He was born and raised in West Virginia, and after 10 years in the Navy, he earned a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Denver. He teaches Creative Writing at Regis University’s Mile High MFA. Some of his work can be found in Columbia Journal, Granta Magazine, and Best Small Fictions 2018. http://www.stevencdunn.com/
Manuel Aragon is a Latinx writer, director, and filmmaker from Denver, CO. He is currently working on a short story collection, Norteñas. Norteñas is a collection of speculative fiction short stories centered in the Northside, a Mexican and Mexican- American centered part of Denver, and the people, ghosts, and demons that live there. His work has appeared in ANMLY. His short story, “A Violent Noise,” was nominated for the 2020 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.
Art Goodtimes is an American poet, farmer and politician in Colorado. Goodtimes was first elected to the San Miguel County Board of Commissioners in 1996 as a Democrat. Retired in 2016 after five terms as Colorado’s only Green Party county commissioner, Art Goodtimes has won numerous awards for his political activism including from the Dept. of Interior, the Forest Service, conservative Club 20 of Grand Junction, as well as serving on dozens of boards and commissions on the local, regional, state and national levels. He co-founded the Sheep Mountain Alliance, Telluride’s local environmental group, in 1988.