{"id":22028,"date":"2025-05-31T19:59:47","date_gmt":"2025-05-31T19:59:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/mancos-creative-district-to-host-first-annual-mesa-verde-literary-festival-on-july-12\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T04:10:23","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T04:10:23","slug":"mancos-creative-district-to-host-first-annual-mesa-verde-literary-festival-on-july-12","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/mancos-creative-district-to-host-first-annual-mesa-verde-literary-festival-on-july-12\/","title":{"rendered":"Mancos Creative District to host first annual Mesa Verde Literary Festival on July 12"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Mancos
Mancos will be conducting a tree inventory this summer. (Courtesy photo)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

The Mancos Creative District will launch its inaugural Mesa Verde Literary Festival on Saturday, July 12, transforming downtown Mancos into a vibrant hub for literature. The free, public event, will run from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. It will feature 48 authors from across the United States, offering 38 individual presentations and 11 panels on various reading and writing topics.<\/p>\n

Those who wish to attend are asked to register with their name and ZIP code at the festival\u2019s website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To close the event, award-winning authors Pam Houston and Tim Reed will speak to attendees, among other notable authors.<\/p>\n

Houston, whose novel Without<\/em> Exception<\/em> is nominated for the 2025 Colorado Book Award, will present at Fenceline Cider at 5 p.m. with Din\u00e9 poet Byron Aspaas. Houston\u2019s works include the memoir Deep<\/em> Creek<\/em>: Finding<\/em> Hope<\/em> In<\/em> The<\/em> High<\/em> Country<\/em>, novels Contents<\/em> May<\/em> Have<\/em> Shifted<\/em> and Sight<\/em> Hound<\/em>, short story collections Cowboys<\/em> Are<\/em> My<\/em> Weakness<\/em> and Waltzing<\/em> the<\/em> Cat <\/em>and essay collections A<\/em> Little<\/em> More<\/em> About<\/em> Me<\/em> and Air<\/em> Mail<\/em>: Letters<\/em> of<\/em> Politics<\/em>, Pandemics<\/em> and<\/em> Place.<\/em><\/p>\n

Her stories have appeared in The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Travel Writing and Best American Short Stories of the Century. She has received the Western States Book Award, the WILLA Award for contemporary fiction and the Evil Companions Literary Award. Along with being an author, Houston teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts, is a professor of English at UC Davis and cofounded the nonprofit Writing By Writers.<\/p>\n

Aspaas, presenting alongside Houston, is a Din\u00e9 (Navajo) poet published in RedInk<\/em>, Yellow<\/em> Medicine<\/em> Review<\/em>, Denver<\/em> Quarterly<\/em>, and The<\/em> Din\u00e9<\/em> Reader<\/em>. He works remotely from Colorado as adjunct faculty at San Juan College and teaches courses with the Institute of American Indian Arts and the Identity Project.<\/p>\n

Tim Weed will deliver his talk, \u201cStorytelling to Save the World: the Fiction of Climate Apocalypse,\u201d at 7 p.m. at the Mancos Opera House. Weed\u2019s works include the story collection A<\/em> Field<\/em> Guide<\/em> to<\/em> Murder<\/em> &<\/em> Fly<\/em> Fishing<\/em>, short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and the novel Wil<\/em>l Poole\u2019<\/em>s Islan<\/em>d, named a Best Book of the Year by Bank Street College of Education.<\/p>\n

His upcoming novel, The<\/em> Afterlife<\/em> Project<\/em>, a finalist for the Prism Prize in Climate Fiction, received a starred review from Library<\/em> Journal<\/em> and was a Middlebury<\/em> Magazine<\/em> editor\u2019s pick. It is set for release on June 3.<\/p>\n

Weed has won the Writer\u2019s Digest Annual Fiction Awards twice and has been short-listed for the Tobias Wolff Award, Fish International Short Story Award and others. His writings have appeared in Writer\u2019<\/em>s Diges<\/em>t, Literar<\/em>y Hu<\/em>b, Th<\/em>e Millions<\/em> and Th<\/em>e Writer\u2019<\/em>s Chronicl<\/em>e.<\/p>\n

The festival will feature other authors from Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Wyoming, Montana, Missouri, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont and Pennsylvania, representing genres including nonfiction, poetry, memoir, literary fiction, mystery, thriller, horror, young adult and romance.<\/p>\n

A festival bookstore, managed by Hand in Hand, will sell books by visiting authors, with signing opportunities available.<\/p>\n

There will also be two writing workshops for teens, which will be held at the Mancos Commons.<\/p>\n

A full schedule and author list are available online. For more details, visit the event\u2019s website<\/a> at www.mesaverdewritersconference.org\/festival.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Authors from across the country will attend and present<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22029,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[364,28,83,60,29],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-22028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-community","tag-headlines","tag-mancos","tag-montezuma-county","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22028"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77551,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22028\/revisions\/77551"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22028"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=22028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}