Join Us For The Foco Book Fest 2025!
Schedule of Events:
Open Book Connections: Speed Dating & Friending
5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
Old Town Library 201 Peterson St., Fort Collins, CO, United States
Are you a book lover looking to build connections with fellow readers in a fun and relaxed setting? Join us for an evening where books, conversation, and new connections come together! Register via the Library's online calendar to participate. How it Works Bring Your Favorite Book: Choose a book that you absolutely love
The Possibilities of Nonfiction Writing
Old Town Library 201 Peterson St., Fort Collins, CO, United States
1:00 pm – 2:30 pm
The essay—the most flexible, shapeshifting genre—has much to offer writers. This workshop led by National Book Award finalist Deborah Jackson Taffa is designed to explore the dynamic possibilities of creative nonfiction. How do we weave public histories into individual stories? What is the impact of emotional truth versus factual truth? How do we distinguish memoir from autobiography? The lyric essay from the traditional essay? And how do we use the form to enrich any type of material? We'll look at a range of essays—from the historic to the modern—and seek to understand what defines these works in all their permutations. Explore how various writers have navigated its possibilities and discuss ways to experiment with the typologies to create new directions for our own work.
Ask Me Anything: Poetry and Essays with Western Colorado University
Center for Creativity 200 Mathews St., Fort Collins, Colorado
3:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Craft, revision, publication, education, and beyond — writers, bring all of your burning questions! This panel, made up of faculty, alumni, and leadership from Western Colorado University's MFA program in Creative Writing, seeks to open the floor to writers of all levels to ask whatever's on your mind, with a focus on poetry and essay-writing. No question is too small (or too big). Let us help you get past your roadblocks and get back to writing!
Featuring CMarie Fuhrman, Teow Lim Goh, Carol D. Guerrero-Murphy, and Erica Reid. Sponsored by Western Colorado University.
Untold Histories: Exploring Marginalized Voices Through Memoir, Poetry, and Essay, Free
4:30 pm – 5:30 pm
Hear how three authors investigate and share the untold stories of marginalized voices through unique forms of storytelling. Through his memoir, Tim Z. Hernandez (They Call You Back) investigates the plane crash that killed 28 Mexicans in Los Gatos Canyon. In an epic poem, Teow Lim Goh (Bitter Creek) explores the buried history of Chinese coal miners during the labor strike. In a series of essays, Brandon Shimoda (The Afterlife is Letting Go) reflects on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.
An Evening with Deborah Jackson Taffa, Free
Fort Collins Marriott 350 East Horsetooth Road, Fort Collins, CO
7:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Award-winning author Deborah Jackson Taffa headlines this year's Fort Collins Book Fest: Open Pages Open Minds. Taffa's memoir, Whiskey Tender, was a finalist for the National Book Award and was named to best lists at Oprah Daily, The Washington Post, Elle, and Esquire Magazines. Whiskey Tender traces how a mixed tribe native girl—born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico—comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent's desires for her to transcend the class and "Indian" status of her birth through education, and despite the Quechan tribe's particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories.
Doors open at 6:30 p.m. Free tickets to the author talk are available through the library's event calendar. A book signing will follow the presentation. The Crowded Bookshelf, the official bookseller of the Fort Collins Book Fest, will be on-hand before and after Taffa's session for book sales.
Additional Dates:
