Book Fest Reading List: 2025
Discover books and publications written by authors hosted at Fort Collins Book Fest in 2025.
Want to purchase a copy of a book? Visit The Crowded Bookshelf online.
by Deborah Jackson Taffa (Headlining Author)
Awards & Recognition: Finalist for the National Book Award, Longlisted for a Carnegie Medal for Excellence, A Best Book of the Year: Washington Post, Esquire, Time, The Atlantic, Elle, Electric Lit, and Publishers Weekly. An Oprah Daily “Best New Book,” A New York Times “New Book to Read”
Deborah Jackson Taffa was raised to believe that some sacrifices were necessary to achieve a better life. Her grandparents—citizens of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe—were sent to Indian boarding schools run by white missionaries, while her parents were encouraged to take part in governmental job training off the reservation. Whiskey Tender offers a sharp and thought-provoking historical analysis laced with humor and heart. As she reflects on her past and present—the promise of assimilation and the many betrayals her family has suffered, both personal and historical; trauma passed down through generations—she reminds us of how the cultural narratives of her ancestors have been excluded from the central mythologies and structures of the “melting pot” of America, revealing all that is sacrificed for the promise of acceptance.
by Christine Day (Headlining Author)
A thoughtful and heartfelt middle-grade novel by American Indian Youth Literature Honor–winning author Christine Day (Upper Skagit), about a girl whose hopeful plans for Indigenous Peoples’ Day (and plans to ask her crush to the school dance) go all wrong—until she finds herself surrounded by the love of her Indigenous family and community at an intertribal powwow.
Wesley is proud of the poem she wrote for Indigenous Peoples’ Day—but the reaction from a teacher makes her wonder if expressing herself is important enough. And due to the specific tribal laws of her family’s Nation, Wesley is unable to enroll in the Upper Skagit tribe and is left feeling “not Native enough.” Through the course of the novel, with the help of her family and friends, she comes to embrace her own place within the Native community.
Fiction
by Stephen Graham Jones
From New York Times bestselling horror writer Stephen Graham Jones comes a classic slasher story with a twist—perfect for fans of Adam Cesare and Grady Hendrix.
1989, Lamesa, Texas. A small west Texas town driven by oil and cotton—and a place where everyone knows everyone else’s business. So it goes for Tolly Driver, a good kid with more potential than application, seventeen, and about to be cursed to kill for revenge. Here Stephen Graham Jones explores the Texas he grew up in, and shared sense of unfairness of being on the outside through the slasher horror Jones loves, but from the perspective of the killer, Tolly, writing his own autobiography. Find yourself rooting for a killer in this summer teen movie of a novel gone full blood-curdling tragic.
by Riley Odell
This anthology of new and original short stories reveals the fantastic and futuristic through a new lens. A struggling father discovers why his autistic daughter becomes consumed with a virtual reality simulator in the wake of her mother’s death. An android who can’t stop ruminating about her consciousness being trapped inside a machine for all eternity confronts her worst fear to stop a sentient AI. Authorities deny a man with a distractible mind a position navigating a chaotic place outside space and time that provides access to other universes, only to realize he’s their only hope to recover their lost agents.
Divergent Realms showcases the wide spectrum of neurodiversity through the open worlds of speculative fiction. Written and edited by the neurodiverse themselves, these stories express a new side of ADHD, Autism, OCD, and more.
by Devon A. Mihesuah
Under the shadow of gray clouds, three children venture into the woods, where they spot the corpse of an old man on a scaffold. Suddenly a wild figure emerges, with long fingernails and tangled hair. It is the Hattak fullih nipi foni, the bone picker, who comes to tear off rotting flesh with his fingernails. Only the Choctaws who adhere to the old ways will speak of him. The frightening bone picker is just one of many entities, scary and mysterious, who lurk behind every page of this spine-tingling collection of Native fiction, written by award-winning Choctaw author Devon A. Mihesuah.
In the tradition of Native and Choctaw storytelling, Mihesuah spins tales that move back and forth fluidly across time.
by Kate Shelton
True crime podcaster and self-published author Ana Adams struggles to reach the success her co-host sister Bex believes they’re both capable of. She finds herself stuck in a comfortable (if dreary) loop of isolation, social media, medication and instability. But when an email arrives detailing a grisly murder that follows the plotline of Ana’s first book, she’s thrust into the spotlight. Sudden fame, overnight bestsellers and a national profile are every author’s dream but that soon turns to nightmare as the killer strikes again. And again. While Bex and Ana race to catch the murderer they must navigate their newfound celebrity, unwanted attention from obsessed fans and the suspicions of the FBI. With the bodies and the scrutiny starting to pile up Ana knows she must publish another story in order to catch the killer and clear her name, discovering unexpected connections, buried secrets and the fact that even true criminals read true crime.
by Amalie Howard
Marriage, magic, and ancient prophecy intertwine deliciously in this heady new romantasy. When local blacksmith Suraya Saab receives an invitation to present herself at court as a potential bride for Prince Javed, she’s certain there must be some mistake. While she can craft exquisite blades and deal easily with handsy locals, Suraya is the daughter of a widowed innkeeper and could never land a prince. But duty calls, and once she’s firmly ensconced behind the palace walls, she discovers that all is not as it appears in the royal court. Prince Javed is a rake with nefarious intentions, the king’s bastard son is constantly snooping around, and the queen is likely trying to kill them all. More dangerous by far is an ancient, untapped magic that Javed will stop at nothing to track down and unleash, even if it means destroying Suraya and all she loves in the process.
by Lindsay King-Miller
Chaotic bisexual Wendy is trying to find her place in the queer community of San Lazaro, Arizona, after a bad breakup—which is particularly difficult because her ex is hooking up with some of her friends. And when the people around them start turning into violent, terrifying mindless husks, well, that makes things harder. Especially since the infection seems to be spreading.
Now, Wendy and her friends and frenemies—drag queen Logan, silver fox Beau, sword lesbian Aurelia and her wife Sam, mysterious pizza delivery stoner Sunshine, and, oh yeah, Wendy’s ex-girlfriend Leah—have to team up to stay alive, save Pride, and track the zombie outbreak to its shocking source. Hopefully without killing each other first.
Unmasked
by Kendra Merritt
The world has always been a bit baffling to Lysandra with its unspoken rules and unnecessary metaphors. Even magic doesn’t work the same way for her as it does for the council of mages. Luckily, Lys has always had Issy, the princess of their island nation, who has shielded Lys from the world that doesn’t quite understand her. But as a princess, Issy has new duties while Lys wants nothing more than to live quietly, protecting the islands from the storms that ravage them. But to do that, Lys will have to go to the mages and explain the impossible way she does magic.
So begins the scheme that will give them both what they want. The girls trade places, and Issy goes to plead with the mages while Lys pretends to be royalty. But as soon as Issy leaves, Lys learns there’s a visiting prince and a king vying for the princess’s hand. Now she’s stuck hiding who she is with a king who is determined to start a war and a prince who is determined to see Lys as her true self. Keeping her secret might be the most important thing she’s ever done when the truth could break the fragile peace of the islands. Not to mention her heart.
by Vanessa Rasanen
One of the few humans at the palace, Lykke has served the royal family her whole life, enjoying their protection from the fae who hate her kind. Unfortunately, nothing could protect her heart from falling in love with her best friend—the prince. Even if he returned her love, he could never marry a human, let alone a servant. But holding onto her mother’s words that love can conquer all, she refuses to give up, no matter the costs.
As the crown prince, Connor is preparing to be king and doing his best to rebuild the king’s armies and neutralize a rebel threat. Tasked with also ensuring his younger brother ends his licentious ways and marries a neighboring princess, he thinks things can’t get any worse—until a human servant, a woman he saved years ago, catches his brother’s eye and threatens to ruin everything. In a world jaded by war, where love is weakness, a fae prince finds himself torn between his desire to save his country and his growing love for a human. He can’t save both, but how can he choose between his duty and his heart?
Nonfiction
by Tim Z. Hernandez
A haunting, an obsession, a calling: Tim Z. Hernandez has been searching for people his whole life. Now, in this highly anticipated memoir, he takes us along on an investigative odyssey through personal and collective history to uncover the surprising conjunctions that bind our stories together. Hernandez’s mission to find the families of the twenty-eight Mexicans who were killed in the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon formed the basis for his acclaimed documentary novel All They Will Call You, which The San Francisco Chronicle dubbed “a stunning piece of investigative journalism,” and The New York Times hailed as “painstaking detective work by a writer who is the descendent of farmworkers.”
In this riveting new work, Hernandez continues his search for the plane crash victims while also turning the lens on himself and his ancestral past, revealing the tumultuous and deeply intimate experiences that have fueled his investigations–a lifelong journey haunted by memory, addiction, generational trauma, and the spirit world.
by Brandon Shimoda
In a series of reflective, multi-layered, sometimes multi-voiced essays, poet Brandon Shimoda explores the “afterlife” of the U.S. government’s forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII, excavating the ways these events continue to resonate today. What emerges is a panoramic, yet intimate portrait of intergenerational trauma and healing.
Informed by personal/familial history, years of research and travel, including visits to museums, memorials and the ruins of incarceration sites, these essays take us on both a physical and a metaphysical journey. What becomes increasingly clear are the infinite connections between the treatment of Japanese Americans and other forms of oppression, criminalization, dispossession, and state violence enacted by the United States, past, present, and ongoing.
by Daisy Montgomery
We’re having more conversations about Autism Spectrum Disorder than ever before, yet somehow autistic voices are left out of the discussion. Often, we are so focused on the clinical definitions of autism and the perceived deficits that we completely overlook the humanity of autistic people.
Through lived experience as an autistic woman, wife, and mother, Daisy Montgomery takes autistic and neurotypical readers alike on a journey of self-discovery, empowerment, and acceptance. With vulnerability and humor, Daisy sheds light on how it feels to be autistic everyday, and how the world can be the allies the autistic community deserves.
Poetry
by Teow Lim Goh
In September of 1885, the Chinese coal miners who were brought into Wyoming as strikebreakers were ambushed and driven out of the town of Rock Springs at gunpoint by white coal miners. Bitter Creek revisits this dark episode—known today as the Rock Springs Massacre—revealing the stories beneath this violent, decade-long culmination of labor struggles and racial hostilities in the Union Pacific Coal Mines.
Through the eyes of the struggling railroad workers, their families, and the corporation working them to the bone, Teow Lim Goh creates an ode to buried history that blends epic tradition with modern composition and astonishing empathy to ask the question, “What turns ordinary people into monsters?”
by Carol Guerrero-Murphy
After the remarkable death of her father, followed by her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s, complicated by the death of her horse and her husband’s heart surgeries, Guerrero-Murphy entered a world of mystery. She finds answers in dreams, metaphor, childhood memories, and living animals to the questions, “Where do the dead go, how do they speak to us, what endures, how do we go on, what are good deaths, how do we now go on?” Perhaps “it is the dark that comforts.” Her poems invite readers to join her in speculations humorous, intimate, surreal, and real.
edited by CMarie Fuhrman (and others)
Awards & Recognition: 2024 Pacific Northwest Book Award Winner. 2024 Independent Publisher Book Award Silver Medal in Anthologies. 2024 Washington State Book Award Finalist in Poetry. 2023 Banff Mountain Book Award finalist in Mountain Fiction & Poetry. 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Gold Medal in Nature.
Cascadia stretches from Southeast Alaska to Northern California and from the Pacific Ocean to the Continental Divide. Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry blends art and science to celebrate this diverse yet interconnected region through natural and cultural histories, poetry, and illustrations. Organized into 13 bioregions, the guide includes entries for everything from cryptobiotic soil and the western thatching ant to the giant Pacific octopus and Sitka spruce, as well as the likes of common raven, hoary marmot, Idaho giant salamander, snowberry, and 120 more! Both well-established and new writers are included, representing a diverse spectrum of voices, with poems that range from comic to serious, colloquial to scientific, urban to off-the-grid, narrative to postmodern. Likewise, the artists span styles and mediums, using classic natural history drawing, form line design, graffiti, sketch, and more. All writers and artists have deep ties to the region.
by Erica Reid
Awards & Recognition: Winner of the 2023 Donald Justice Poetry Prize
Erica Reid’s debut collection, Ghost Man on Second, traces a daughter’s search for her place in the world after estrangement from her parents. Reid writes, “It’s hard to feel at home unless I’m aching.” Growing from this sense of isolation, Reid’s poems create new homes in nature, in mythology, and in poetic forms—including sestinas, sonnets, and golden shovels—containers that create and hold new realizations and vantage points. Reid stands up to members of her family, asking for healing amid dissolving bonds. These poems move through emotional registers, embodying nostalgia, hurt, and hope. Throughout Ghost Man on Second, the poems portray Reid’s active grappling with home and confrontation with the ghosts she finds there.
online multimedia piece by Sasha Steensen
This deeply personal and evolving project began over a decade ago when Sasha Steensen and her family moved to a piece of land in Fort Collins, Colorado. Initially, it involved gathering photos, videos, sound recordings, poems, and prose without a clear direction. The project was revived after the author discovered that their land was part of a 160-acre plot purchased from the Arapahoe and Cheyenne tribes for 86 cents. This discovery, combined with the exploration of a trail leading to Colorado State University’s Foothills Campus, inspired a deeper examination of the land’s complex history.
You can find this project online, where it houses diverse materials such as writing, videos, photos, sound recordings, and research done by the author. Its digital medium allows for ongoing exploration and experimentation. “Overland” remains a work in progress, blending history, creativity, and personal reflection.