Lit Fest 2024 Brings Together Literary Luminaries, Hopeful Writers Under the Lighthouse Beacon

Lit Fest 2024 will be the nineteenth iteration of Denver's own nationally recognized literary festival. It is perhaps the biggest event put on by Lighthouse Writers Workshop, itself a growing national brand that provides artistic education, support and community for writers and readers alike — and that's saying something, since Lighthouse hosts nearly as many events as there are days in a calendar year. There's always something going on, but Lit Fest is when Lighthouse shines brightest.

Lit Fest takes place from Friday, June 7, to June 14 at the new Lighthouse facility at 3844 York Street, where, in addition to a world-class roster of sixteen visiting authors, there will be an offering of advanced and craft workshops, nightly community events and conversations with working authors, daily business panels with agents and even a pop-up bookstore with official book partner the Bookies.

Lighthouse founders Andrea Dupree and Michael Henry are writers, instructors and organizers extraordinaire, but they also make room for an always-impressive roster of literary luminaries to take the stage. This year is no exception: Visiting authors for 2024 include fiction writers Steve Almond, Danielle Evans, Vanessa Hua, Alexandra Kleeman, Claire Messud, Jenny Offill and Maurice Carlos Ruffin; nonfiction writers Emily Rapp Black, Amitava Kumar, T Kira Māhealani Madden, Beth Nguyen, and Sloane Crosley; poets Mark Doty, Jane Hirshfield and Rowan Ricardo Phillips; and novelist/screenwriter Dean Bakopoulos. And that's just the writers: There will also be agents and editors and publishers and Lighthouse faculty, all there to jump in the literary pool with both feet for the event-filled week.

Lit Fest began back in 2005, in a much different form than the one it takes today. "We were much smaller then, of course," Dupree says. "We were still in the [Thomas Hornsby] Ferril House at that time, so we had to spread out a bit across the city. We had agents and editors come in, and they ran one-on-one meetings in the event space of the old Tattered Cover LoDo location. All of the salons and readings were at different bars downtown. Anything larger than fifteen or twenty people, we just couldn't fit."

Things got a little better after Lighthouse moved to its home on Race and Colfax, but the new custom-built center on York Street, which was barely completed before last year's Lit Fest, has allowed the event to be much more centralized. "Last year was still a little hectic, and we didn't have everything up and running the way we wanted to," Dupree said. But this year, Dupree and the team have not only had time to settle in, they've also made friends with the surrounding businesses, some of which are lending their indoor and outdoor spaces to make more events possible.

Dupree recalls the first time she had the realization that Lit Fest had become something of an institution, known beyond the city limits of Denver. "It was when we were in our Race Street house," she says, "and Cheryl Strayed was one of our visiting authors. I remember her saying that she was going to get a phone call while I'm teaching, and it's going to be Oprah Winfrey. She said she wasn't supposed to tell anyone about the Oprah thing yet, but she wanted to be sure taking her phone in with her was okay. That was crazy.

"That same year, Rebecca Makkai told us that [teaching at Lit Fest] was one of her favorite things, and she wanted to do it every year," Dupree continues. "It was that year I realized that people were building it into their plans for the summer. It's been such good energy ever since, and it just seems to get better and stronger every year."
Part of that strength comes from serving more writers and expanding beyond physical limits: Lit Fest 2024 is a hybrid in-person and online event, one of the more positive lingering effects of the pandemic. That aspect "has really given us a leg up on making the event more accessible to everyone," says Alexa Culshaw, Lighthouse director of marketing and communications. "People can Zoom in from all over, and get to enjoy and work with our visiting authors in a way that wasn't available before 2020." Somewhere around a quarter of all participants in the events, Dupree adds, are visiting from online.

Tickets for some of the events are already sold out, but much of Lit Fest is still available, such as CU Denver fiction professor Joanna Luloff's generative craft workshop on Image and Text at 4 p.m. on Saturday, June 8. "I look forward to Lit Fest every summer for the incredible range of events that brings writers, editors, agents and students together," Luloff says. "There's such a vibrant feeling of community engagement; I always feel inspired and energized."

Culshaw says this positive and supportive environment results from the community and culture that Lighthouse founders Dupree and Henry have fostered over the last two decades-plus. "They've curated that very purposefully," she says. "Just the way Andrea makes every visiting writer, every member of the faculty, all feel held and appreciated. That percolates into how participants feel in the workshops and events as well."

Dupree smiles, but demurs. "I think it's the community of Denver, honestly," she says. "I think from either coast, there's this assumption that we're not as urbane as those places — and we're not, not in the same way. But they're always shocked by how well-received their humor and intellect is. People here are smart and well-read."

Dupree says she'll never forget what the poet Jericho Brown said when they discussed a national writing conference she declines to name. She admits she's paraphrasing, but he said that this bigger conference with a much bigger reputation was also supposed to have the most talented writers. However, they're definitely in Denver, Brown said.

"I think there's something to that," Dupree says. "Because there's not as much energy put into the posturing, that energy can be purely true love of literature. We've gotten lucky that when we came to Denver, there was this opportunity to connect all these literary communities. Once that came together, there was such an outpouring of support and gratitude for each other. Being around people who are thoughtful, who read — now more than ever, that's a sustaining feeling for people."

Lit Fest runs from Friday, June 7, through Friday, June 14, at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, 3844 York Street. Find more information on the Lighthouse website.