Speakers Bureau
We help non-profit organizations identify the kind of literary event that is right for their community, book one of our Speakers Bureau authors, and promote the event. Organizations then schedule the event directly with the author, pay travel expenses, may contribute to honorarium (paid by Colorado Humanities) and work with us to promote the event. Colorado Humanities contracts with the speakers and pays honoraria, which hosts may also contribute to.
Our speakers include 2023 Colorado Book Awards finalists and winners and 2023 Colorado Poet Laureate finalists. They can read from their work, lecture, lead workshops, or join book club discussions about their work. If you are interested in booking one of our Speakers Bureau presenters, please complete the application at least 8 weeks prior to your desired event date.
Our mission at the Colorado Center for the Book is to encourage a love of reading and books among people of all ages through diverse cultural activities. For more information, contact Valerie Eddy, 303.894.7951 x15, valerie@coloradohumanities.org.
2023 Finalists and Winners
Click on the speakers below for a biography and information about their work.
Young Adult Literature
Olivia Abtahi
Growing up in the DC area, Olivia devoured books and hid in empty classrooms during school to finish them. Her debut novel, Perfectly Parvin, was published in 2021 by Penguin Random House Putnam Books for Young Readers, receiving the SCBWI Golden Kite Honor, and YALSA Odyssey Honor, and numerous starred reviews. She lives in Denver.
Azar on Fire
Fourteen-year-old Azar Rossi’s first year of high school has mostly been silent, and intentionally so. After a bad case of colic as a baby, Azar’s vocal folds are shredded—full of nodules that give her a rasp the envy of a chain-smoking bullfrog. When she hears about a local Battle of the Bands contest, it’s something she can’t resist. Azar loves music and songwriting, but with her vocal folds the way they are, there’s no way she can sing her songs on stage.
Juvenile Literature
Jeffrey Bennett
Astrophysicist and educator Jeffrey Bennett is the author of numerous college textbooks and six previous award-winning books for children, including the American Institute of Physics Science Communication award, and have been read by astronauts aboard the International Space Station for the Story Time from Space program. Dr. Bennett lives in Boulder.
Totality! An Eclipse Guide in Rhyme and Science
This book features a unique combination of rhyme and science that makes it suitable for a wide range of ages. The rhyme has been pedagogically constructed to serve as a mnemonic device for the underlying science explained with illustrations and “Big Kid Box” sidebars. The book concludes with a glossary, suggested activities, and an eclipse science summary.
Juvenile Literature
Jennifer Chambliss Bertman
Jennifer Chambliss Bertman is the New York Times bestselling author of the Book Scavenger series and the picture book A Good Deed Can Grow, illustrated by Holly Hatam. Jennifer holds an MFA in creative writing and lives in Erie.
Sisterhood of Sleuths
Maizy always assumed she knew everything about her grandmother, Jacuzzi. So when a box full of vintage Nancy Drew books gets left at her mom’s thrift store, Maizy is surprised to find an old photo of her grandmother and two other women tucked beneath the collection. Determined to learn the truth, and inspired by the legacy of Nancy Drew, Maizy launches her own investigation with the help of new friends.
Creative Nonfiction
Will Betke-Brunswick
Will Betke-Brunswick is a cartoonist and a recent graduate of the California College of the Arts MFA in Comics program. Will’s work has appeared in the new print edition of Trans Bodies, Trans Selves; How to Wait: An Anthology of Transition; and the websites INTO and Autostraddle. Will lives in Boulder.
A Pros and Cons List for Strong Feelings
During Will Betke-Brunswick’s sophomore year of college, their beloved mother, Elizabeth, is diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. They only have ten more months together, which is documented in evocative two-color illustrations. In between therapy and bedside chats, they navigate uniquely human challenges, as Betke-Brunswick comes out as genderqueer and negotiates familial tension.
Science Fiction/Fantasy
L.R Braden
L.R. Braden is the bestselling author of the Magicsmith urban fantasy series and several works of short fiction. Her writing has won the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Sci-Fi/Fantasy, the First Horizon Award for debut authors, the Imadjinn Award for Best Urban Fantasy, and the Colorado Authors League Award in multiple categories. She lives in Broomfield.
Demon Riding Shotgun
Possessed by a demon since she was a child, Mira Fuentes maintains a fragile alliance with the snarky soul who shares her body. Together they hunt down unstable Rifters, demon-controlled humans sowing chaos in the mortal realm. But when a routine hunt leads to a powerful Rifter with plans for Baltimore, Mira finds herself in over her head and at the top of the city’s Most Wanted.
Young Adult Literature
Samantha Cohoe
Samantha Cohoe writes historically-inspired young adult fantasy. She was raised in San Luis Obispo, California and divides her time among teaching Latin, mothering, writing, reading, and deleting adverbs. A Golden Fury is her debut novel, and she lives in Denver.
Bright Ruined Things
The only life Mae has ever known is on the island, living on the charity of the wealthy Prosper family who control the island’s magic and its spirits. Mae longs for magic of her own and to have a place among the Prosper family, where her best friend, Coco, will see her as an equal, and her crush, Miles, will finally see her. As Mae and her friends unravel the mysteries of the island and the Prospers’ magic, Mae starts to question the truth of what her world was built on.
Juvenile Literature
Kellye Crocker
Kellye Crocker is a journalist who has written for Better Homes and Gardens, Parents, and Glamour. She holds an MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BA in news-editorial from the Missouri School of Journalism. She lives in Denver.
Dad’s Girlfriend and Other Anxieties
Dad hasn’t even been dating his new girlfriend that long, so Ava is sure that nothing has to change in her life. That is, until the day after sixth grade ends, when Dad whisks her away on vacation to meet The Girlfriend and her daughter in terrifying Colorado, where even the squirrels can kill you! Managing her anxiety, avoiding altitude sickness, and surviving the mountains might take all of Ava’s strength, but at least this trip will only last two weeks.
Biography/History
Mark Lee Gardner
Mark Lee Gardner is the author of Rough Riders, To Hell on a Fast Horse, and Shot All to Hell, which received multiple awards, including a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. Gardner has appeared on PBS’s American Experience as well as on the History Channel, AMC, the Travel Channel, and NPR. He has written for National Geographic History, American Heritage, the Los Angeles Times, True West, and American Cowboy. He lives in Cascade.
The Earth Is All That Lasts: Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the Last Stand of the Great Sioux Nation
Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull: Their names are iconic, their significance in American history undeniable. Together, these two Lakota chiefs, one a fabled warrior and the other a revered holy man, delivered a crushing defeat to George Armstrong Custer’s vaunted Seventh Cavalry. Yet their legendary victory at the Little Big Horn has overshadowed the rest of their rich and complex lives.
General Nonfiction
John Giordanengo
John Giordanengo began building his career in ecological restoration throughout the western U.S. in 1996. While studying business in the eighties, he became intrigued by a universal challenge: preserving earth’s ecosystems while meeting humanity’s economic needs. He offers lecture series at universities and public venues across the U.S. and lives in Fort Collins.
Ecosystems as Models for Restoring Our Economies
Using thirty years of work and research in ecology, economics, and business, John Giordanengo explores the elusive structure of our global market economy and presents fresh clues to the resilience and productivity of our national economies. Informed by his depth of experience in ecological restoration, the book outlines a path for restoring our economies to a sustainable state.
General Nonfiction
Temple Grandin
Temple Grandin is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University and the author of the New York Times bestsellers Animals in Translation, Animals Make Us Human, The Autistic Brain, and Thinking in Pictures, which became an HBO movie. She lives in Fort Collins.
Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions
Drawing on cutting-edge research, Temple Grandin takes readers inside visual thinking and argues that visual thinkers constitute a far greater proportion of the population than previously believed, from the purest “object visualizers” to the abstract and mathematically inclined “visual spatial” thinkers who excel in pattern recognition and systemic thinking. She also proposes new approaches to educating, parenting, employing, and collaborating with visual thinkers.
Creative Nonfiction
Teow Lim Goh
Teow Lim Goh is the author of two previous books, Islanders and Faraway Places. Her essays, poetry, and criticism have appeared in The Georgia
Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Los Angeles Reviewof Books, PBS NewsHour, and The New Yorker. She lives in Lakewood.
Western Journeys
Teow Lim Goh charts her journey immigrating from Singapore and spending the last fifteen years living in and exploring the American West. Goh chronicles her lived experiences while building on the longer history of immigrants from Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, bringing new insights to places, the historical record, and memory. In exploring history, nature, politics, and art, Goh asks, “What does it mean for an immigrant to be at home?”
Mystery
Chuck Greaves
Attorney, author, and screenwriter Chuck Greaves has been a finalist for many national mystery awards, including the Shamus, Macavity, Lefty, and Audie. He is the author of seven novels, including Tom & Lucky (Bloomsbury), a Wall Street Journal “Ten Best Mysteries of 2015” selection and finalist for the 2016 Harper Lee Prize. He lives and writes in Cortez.
The Chimera Club
Hired to solve the mystery of how the only possible suspect in the murder of film producer Ari Goldstone cannot possibly have committed the crime, L.A. attorney Jack MacTaggart must soon solve the more urgent mystery of how to stay alive long enough to bring the real killer to justice.
Poetry
Katherine Indermaur
Katherine Indermaur is the author of two chapbooks and an editor for Sugar House Review. She is the winner of the Black Warrior Review 2019 Poetry Contest and the 2018 Academy of American Poets Prize, runner-up in the 92Y’s 2020 Discovery Poetry Contest, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. She lives in Fort Collins.
I|I
This full-length debut is a serial lyric essay that explores the mirror’s many dimensions–philosophical, spiritual, scientific, mythological, historical–alongside the author’s own experiences. Anyone who has struggled with the disconnect between their outward appearance and their inner self knows how fraught and fragmentary it can be to behold one’s own reflection.
General Fiction
Kevin T. Jones
Kevin Jones has a Ph.D. in anthropology and served as the Utah State Archaeologist for 17 years. He is the author of The Shrinking Jungle, an anthropological novel, and Standing on the Walls of Time, essays about and inspired by Native American rock art (with photographs by Layne Miller). Kevin lives in Pleasant View.
A Quick Trip to Moab
Anti-wilderness protesters have taken over a portion of eastern Utah. Stan Watson, driving to Moab, stops by the highway to walk his dog Speck and encounters a woman named Lily who begs him for help. When he offers Lily and her injured husband Frank a ride, they are confronted by armed men. Chased through the wildlands by ragtag extremists riding all-terrain vehicles, they face dehydration, starvation, and murder.
Literary Fiction
Rachel King
Rachel King is the author of the novel People Along the Sand. Her short stories have appeared in One Story, North American Review, Green Mountains Review, Northwest Review, and elsewhere. A former resident of Colorado, she now lives in her hometown of Portland, Oregon.
Bratwurst Haven: Stories
Linked stories trace the vocational and emotional bargains made by workers at a Colorado sausage factory almost a decade after the Great Recession. Over the course of these twelve interrelated stories, Rachel King gives life to diverse, complex, and authentic characters who are linked through the sausage factory and through their daily lives in a vividly rendered small town in Boulder County.
Creative Nonfiction
Erika Krouse
Erika Krouse is the author of Come Up and See Me Sometime, a New York Times Notable Book, and Contenders. Erika’s fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, One Story, and more. Her debut memoir, Tell Me Everything, has been optioned for TV adaptation by Playground Entertainment. She lives in Boulder.
Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation
In Fall 2002, Erika Krouse accepts a new job investigating lawsuits as a private investigator, and a lawyer named Grayson assigns her to investigate a sexual assault, a college student who was attacked by football players and recruits at a party. Erika knows she should turn the assignment down. Her own history with sexual violence makes it all too personal, but she takes the job anyway, inspired by Grayson’s conviction that he could help change things forever.
Thriller
Barbara Nickless
Barbara Nickless is the bestselling author of At First Light in the Dr. Evan Wilding series as well as the Sydney Rose Parnell series, a Suspense Magazine Best of 2016 selection, and winner of the Colorado Book Award and the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence. She lives in Colorado Springs.
Dark of Night
When esteemed historian Elizabeth Lawrence is found in her car, killed by a cobra’s bite, only a brilliant professor of semiotics, Dr. Evan Wilding, can see the signs around her strange death. As he helps homicide detective Addie Bisset decipher the scene, the puzzles left behind offer Evan chilling passage into the mind of a killer. In a race where there can be only one winner, the final victim might be Evan.
General Fiction
Melissa Payne
Melissa Payne is the bestselling and award-winning author of The Secrets of Lost Stones, Memories in the Drift, and The Night of Many Endings. For as long as she can remember, Melissa has been telling stories in one form or another, from high school newspaper articles to a graduate thesis to blogging about marriage and motherhood. Melissa lives in Conifer.
A Light in the Forest
Vega Jones escapes an abusive relationship with nothing but her two-month-old baby and the van she grew up in. Her destination is an Ohio town her late vagabond mother left years ago. But even in this welcoming community, there’s an undercurrent of something unsettled, talk of a tragedy that unfolded in the woods years ago, and a mystery connected to Vega in ways she couldn’t have anticipated.
Anthology and Poetry
Emily Peréz
Emily Pérez grew up in a bicultural family on the U.S./Mexico border and is an English and gender studies instructor and grade level dean at Colorado Academy. She is the author of House of Sugar, House of Stone, and the chapbooks Backyard Migration Route and Made and Unmade. She lives in Denver.
The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood
This is a collection of poems, essays, and writing prompts that celebrates motherhood and creates a space, as poet Molly Spencer has written, to “tell an unlovely truth about family life and not have to take it back.” The poets in this book represent and describe a wide range of experiences.
What Flies Want
Disaster looms in domesticity: a family grapples with its members’ mental health, a marriage falters, and a child experiments with self-harm. With its backdrop of school lockdown drills, #MeToo, and increasing political polarization, the collection asks how these private and public tensions are interconnected as the speaker learns she must play a role in a culture that prizes whiteness, patriarchy, and chauvinism.
Thriller
Leanne Kale Sparks
Leanne Kale Sparks is returning to her first love, writing about murder and mayhem. She is currently working on a series featuring an FBI agent hunting down her best friend’s murderer. The backdrop is the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, the playground of her youth, and the place that will always be home. She now lives in Texas.
The Wrong Woman
Sole survivor of Denver’s notorious “Reaper” serial murders, FBI Special Agent Kendall Beck grapples with her past by seeking justice for victims of abuse. She’s neck deep in a particularly ugly case involving the disappearance of five-year-old Emily Williams, but her investigation is derailed when her best friend and roommate, Gwen, turns up dead floating in a nearby lake. With every new clue, Kendall questions how well she really knew her friend.
Juvenile Literature
Jessica Speer
Jessica Speer is the award-winning author of BFF or NRF (Not Really Friends)? A Girls Guide to Happy Friendships. Blending humor, a dash of science, stories, and insights, her writing unpacks the social stuff that peaks during adolescence. She lives in Steamboat Springs.
Middle School: Safety Goggles Advised
Yes, there are cool things about middle school, like more independence, new friends, and new activities. But there’s baffling stuff too, like harsh judgment, the whole “popularity” thing, and, of course, drama. With engaging illustrations and choose-your-own-adventure-style scenarios, this book is designed to help middle schoolers deal with the drama and define who they are when things get, well, weird.
Romance
Davalynn Spencer
As a child, Davalynn Spencer fell in love with horses. As a teen, she fell in love with a cowboy. That’s how she became the wife and mother of professional rodeo bullfighters and an award-winning rodeo journalist. She is a two-time Will Rogers Medallion winner and lives in Cañon City.
Hope Is Built
Mary McCrae is running from a planned future on the dairy and heads west to Colorado only to learn her aunt and uncle have died and left their farm to her. But there’s more on the land than orchards and good grazing, and others will do anything to get it. Neighbor Hugh Hutton doesn’t have time for a woman who’s after the same thing he is, and he doesn’t have time for second chances. Especially not at love.
Anthology
Cynthia Swanson
Cynthia Swanson writes literary suspense, often using historical settings. Her debut novel, The Bookseller, was a New York Times best seller, an Indie Next selection, and the winner of the 2016 WILLA Literary Award for Historical Fiction. Cynthia lives in Denver, Colorado.
Denver Noir
Even a city that boasts three hundred days of sunshine a year has its sudden, often violent storms, and writers have long taken advantage of that metaphor. Today, Denver is home to a thriving literary scene, with writers of all stripes finding inspiration in its people and streets, and the authors and stories featured in Denver Noir are no exception.
2023 Colorado Poet Laureate Finalists
Click on the speakers below for a biography and information about their work.
Dominique Christina
Dominique Christina is an an award-winning poet, author, curator, conceptual installation artist, and Arts Envoy to Cyprus through the U.S. Department of State. She holds five national poetry slam titles in four years, including the 2014 & 2012 Women of the World Slam Champion and 2011 National Poetry Slam Champion. Her work is greatly influenced by her family’s legacy in the Civil Rights Movement. Her aunt Carlotta was one of nine students to desegregate Central High School in Little Rock Arkansas and is a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient. Dominique is the author of four books. Her third book, “This Is Woman’s Work”, published by SoundsTrue Publishing, is the radical exploration of 20 archetypal incarnations of womanness and the creative process. Her fourth book “Anarcha Speaks” won the National Poetry Series award in 2017.
She is a writer and actor for the HBO series High Maintenance, does branding and marketing for Under Armour, was a featured performer at the Tribeca Film Festival NYC 2021 and is Arts Envoy to Cyprus.
Meca'Ayo Coleman
Meca’Ayo (Tameca L Coleman) is a queer singer, multi-genre writer, itinerant nerd, massage therapist, and point and shoot art dabbler who currently lives in Denver Colorado. Their writing and photography have been featured in literary magazines, art exhibits, newspapers, and other venues and publications. Their first book an identity polyptych debuted from The Elephants in 2021.
Meca’Ayo Cole is a published author of poetry, creative nonfiction, journalism, fiction, and hybrid works. Their books include an identity polyptych (2021, The Elephants), and their work has been anthologized in Poems from the Back Forty from Columbine Poets of Colorado 2018, Cellar Door: December 2010, Tales to Oddify: Fall/Winter 2009.
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