Megan E. Freeman attended an elementary school where poets visited her classroom every week to teach poetry, and she has been a writer ever since. Her debut middle-grade novel, Alone, won the Colorado Book Award, the High Plains Book Award, was an NCTE Notable Verse Novel and a Goodreads Choice Award finalist, and was included on over a dozen “best of” and state reading lists. Megan is also a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and the author of the poetry chapbook Lessons on Sleeping Alone. An award-winning teacher with decades of classroom experience, Megan is nationally recognized for her work leading workshops and speaking to audiences across the country. She lives in northern Colorado. Learn more at www.MeganEFreeman.com.
Megan’s topics for presentation will be:
#1: The Possibility of Poetry: Considering Verse in Middle Grade and Young Adult Novels
#2: Think Like a Poet: Revision Strategies for Every Writer
Karen Auvinen is a poet, writer, mountain woman, outlier, and life-long westerner, and the author of the memoir Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living (Scribner), finalist for the Colorado Book Award and the Willa Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, LitHub, Real Simple, Westword, as well as High Desert Journal, Ascent Magazine, Cold Mountain Review, and The Columbia Review, among others. Her fiction has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and her poetry has won two Academy of American Poets Awards. A collection of short stories about outliers in the West is forthcoming. Karen is on the Graduate Faculty in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University and also teaches at CU-Boulder. She lives with her partner, the artist Greg Marquez, at 8600 feet within the Roosevelt National Forest and the ancestral territories of the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho peoples. More at Karenauvinen.com
Karen’s topics for presentation will be:
#1: The Land Beneath Your Feet: Writing the Natural World
#2: Exploring our Wild Selves
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