Fort Collins Book Fest - The Possibilities of Nonfiction Writing

The essay—the most flexible, shapeshifting genre—has much to offer writers. This workshop with National Book Award Finalist Deborah 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.

Fort Collins Book Fest combines the community’s passion for the literary arts and our unique cultural heritage in a celebration of literature, literacy, and social conversation for all ages. For more Fort Collins Book Fest events, visit focobookfest.org.

About the Author

Deborah Taffa’s debut, Whiskey Tender, a 2024 National Book Award Finalist, and a 2025 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction longlisted memoir, has been named to best lists at Esquire, Oprah Daily, ELLE, Publishers Weekly, and The Washington Post. With awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, MacDowell, the Ellen Meloy Foundation, Tin House, the University of Iowa, and the NY Summer Writers Institute, Deborah received her MFA in Iowa City. A citizen of the Kwatsaan Nation and Laguna Pueblo, she is the director of the MFA CW program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM.