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.
Those who wish to attend are asked to register with their name and ZIP code at the festival’s website.
To close the event, award-winning authors Pam Houston and Tim Reed will speak to attendees, among other notable authors.
Houston, whose novel Without Exception is nominated for the 2025 Colorado Book Award, will present at Fenceline Cider at 5 p.m. with Diné poet Byron Aspaas. Houston’s works include the memoir Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, novels Contents May Have Shifted and Sight Hound, short story collections Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat and essay collections A Little More About Me and Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics and Place.
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.
Aspaas, presenting alongside Houston, is a Diné (Navajo) poet published in RedInk, Yellow Medicine Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Diné Reader. 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.
Tim Weed will deliver his talk, “Storytelling to Save the World: the Fiction of Climate Apocalypse,” at 7 p.m. at the Mancos Opera House. Weed’s works include the story collection A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing, short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and the novel Will Poole’s Island, named a Best Book of the Year by Bank Street College of Education.
His upcoming novel, The Afterlife Project, a finalist for the Prism Prize in Climate Fiction, received a starred review from Library Journal and was a Middlebury Magazine editor’s pick. It is set for release on June 3.
Weed has won the Writer’s 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’s Digest, Literary Hub, The Millions and The Writer’s Chronicle.
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.
A festival bookstore, managed by Hand in Hand, will sell books by visiting authors, with signing opportunities available.
There will also be two writing workshops for teens, which will be held at the Mancos Commons.
A full schedule and author list are available online. For more details, visit the event’s website at www.mesaverdewritersconference.org/festival.
