Mountain Words Festival 2026

Acclaimed author of the books The Paris Wife, Circling the Sun, and Love and Ruin, Paula McLain sits down with Colorado author Shelley Read to discuss her newest novel, Skylark. 

The New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Wife weaves a mesmerizing tale of Paris above and below—where a woman’s quest for artistic freedom in 1664 intertwines with a doctor’s dangerous mission during the German occupation in the 1940s, revealing a story of courage and resistance that transcends time.

1664: Alouette Voland is the daughter of a master dyer at the famed Gobelin Tapestry Works, who secretly dreams of escaping her circumstances and creating her own masterpiece. When her father is unjustly imprisoned, Alouette’s efforts to save him lead to her own confinement in the notorious Salpêtrière asylum, where thousands of women are held captive and cruelly treated. But within its grim walls, she discovers a small group of brave allies, and the possibility of a life bigger than she ever imagined.
1939: Kristof Larson is a medical student beginning his psychiatric residency in Paris, whose neighbors on the Rue de Gobelins are a Jewish family who have fled Poland. When Nazi forces descend on the city, Kristof becomes their only hope for survival, even as his work as a doctor is jeopardized.
A spellbinding and transportive look at a side of Paris known to very few—the underground city that is a mirror reflection of the glories above—Paula McLain’s unforgettable new novel chronicles two parallel journeys of defiance and rescue that connect in ways both surprising and deeply moving.

Nina McConigley, the West's brightest literary star will share her new novel, How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder. Join her and award winning writer, Megha Majumdar in this lively discussion of McConigley's work. 

NOTE: This will be a shorter session without q&a. Nina will be available for questions at the Townie Books signing table afterwards. 

How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder is the author’s dark debut novel about two Indian-American sisters growing up in rural Wyoming in the 1980s.-NPR, 'How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder' is a dark new novel about sisterhood. 

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/04/nx-s1-5698541/nprs-book-of-the-day-nina-mcconigley-how-to-commit-a-postcolonial-murder

I have two writing degrees and have taken tons of other writing workshops, but for the last twelve years, our weekly writing group has been the absolute best thing for my writing career/life. Inspired by the Soulquarians music collective and Gail McGuire and Jo Reger’s ideas of Feminist Co-Mentoring, we’ll discuss a possible model for a writing group that centers collaboration, longevity, and care for individuals.  

Unstuck: 101 Doorways Leading from the Blank Page to the Last Page is about staying in love with your writing: feeling excited, mischievous, productive, and hopeful—the opposite of being stuck.

Critically acclaimed, award-winning author and beloved teacher Ramona Ausubel offers 101 exercises that promise to welcome you back to the page again and again; to reinvigorate your process and help you see your writing through to the end. Full of personal stories and hard-earned wisdom of a veteran writer, Unstuck is written in the first person, human to human, writer to writer. Practical, clear, and welcoming, Unstuck offers immediately useable strategies for beginning, continuing, and finishing a piece of writing.

Organized into doorways and keys, Unstuck turns problems into possibilities, offers keys to put into use right now, all designed to lead the writer back to the art, not toward an outside idea or formula. With Ausubel’s steady, encouraging advice—find your doorway, unlock the lock, and get writing again.


Ramona Ausubel’s fifth book, The Last Animal was a national bestseller, a Barnes & Noble book of the month and named a best book of 2023 by NPR, Kirkus and the Oprah quarterly. Her previous books are Awayland: stories, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, A Guide to Being Born and No One is Here Except All of Us. She is the recipient of the PEN/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award and has been a finalist for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review daily, One Story, Tin House, The Oxford American, Ploughshares and elsewhere. She is a professor at Colorado State University and lives in Boulder with her family

Fiction workshop with Nina McConigley