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Attention Book Illustrators and Cover Designers!

Colorado Authors League has long been about the business of storytelling, and now we’re opening our membership to include those who tell stories through art!


Book Illustrators and Cover designers, we invite you to apply for membership and take advantage of the rich benefits that CAL provides its members from friendship to promotion

to a chance to win your very own CAL award for Illustration or Cover Design!


We want to promote your work, click HERE to see just one of the ways.

Read CAL's Statement on AI

UPCOMING EVENTS


July 21 CAL Awards Celebration


Nov 22-24 Denver Christmas Show


Dec. 7-8 Georgetown Christmas Market


Dec. 14-15 Georgetown Christmas Market



Retail Opportunities Calendar




Colorado Conference Calendar


April 18-21, 2024 Readers Take Denver



April 19-20, 2024 American Christian Fiction Writers Conference


April 24-26, 2024 Pikes Peak Writers


May 19-20, 2024 Writing Heights Conference


Sept 27-29, 2024 Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers


Sept 30, 2023 Castle Rock Writers

Introducing the CAL Speakers' Bureau


Are you searching for a speaker for your special event or book club? Look no further! Click HERE to find a Colorado author to fit your needs.

In the spotlight: Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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I didn’t want my path to be different. I wanted normal. As a undergrad in English, I thought that meant I’d get a master’s in literature, become a poetry professor at a college, publish in literary journals and live happily ever after with poetry at the center of my life.

 

Now, in my mid-fifties, I’m so grateful the path I thought I wanted kept rejecting me. I didn’t get into the literature programs. Instead, I entered an English Language and Linguistics program and learned about the science of language. Burned out, I didn’t go on for a PhD. Instead, I fell in love and moved to a mountaintop above a tiny resort town almost three hours from the nearest college. I got a job as a journalist and a substitute teacher, and I wrote poems for pleasure. Then I was a magazine editor who wrote poems for pleasure. Then I was an organic fruit grower who wrote poems for pleasure. Then a social worker for early childhood who … wrote poems for pleasure.

 

The short of it: poetry stayed with me as a passion. I took classes, taught classes, made lots of poetry friends, organized poetry festivals, wrote grants to bring poets into the schools, sent poems to journals where they were mostly rejected, and I kept reading and writing poems.

 

The practice of writing poems every day began in the peach-growing era. It was a dare—could I do it for thirty days? I doubted it. That was February, 2006. Eighteen years later, I still write daily poems. And the most remarkable thing has happened. I’m not a professor. I don’t work at a college. But I live happily with poetry at the center of my life.

 

In addition to teaching, writing, performing and speaking, I have a podcast on creative process (Emerging From) and a phone app with a daily poem and prompt (The Poetic Path on Ritual). But most importantly, all those years of meeting a blank page with curiosity, wonder, vulnerability, and trust—even when writing about very difficult thing—have informed the way I meet the world.

 

Never did I understand the value of this gift more than when my teenage son, Finn, took his life in August 2021. I believe all those years of practicing how to show up are what allow me to want to stay present and open in the most difficult chapter of my life.

 

Poetry is more path than page. It’s the practice of being human. It’s an ongoing bidding to explore what Rilke calls our “innerness.” It’s an invitation to do the work of the heart, to be wrestled by paradox, to orient ourselves again and again and again to the everything that is—even that which we’d rather say no to. Every time we sit down to a blank page, it teaches us something of spaciousness. Of possibility. Of who we really are.

 

Did you miss our gift show appearances?

2024 booth Evans, Woodward




You can still get great books by CAL authors!

Check out the CAL Genre Pages for buy links and author websites.

2024 booth Anderson, Bowersox, Scheuermann, Frisbie

The CAL Awards

The CAL Awards are now closed. They will reopen for a new submission year on Nov. 1, 2024


The CAL Awards isn't just about books. We also have categories for published Poetry, Essays, Short Stories, Articles, Illustration, Plays, Screen Plays, and Cover Design!


Find out more HERE


Finalists will be announced in June.


CAL Awards Celebration will be held in July.



Barb Lundy was the 2023 CAL Lifetime Achievement Award Winner


Watch Barb at the Awards

Watch past CAL Celebration videos


79th Annual CAL Awards, presented by Jodi & Kevin Bowersox


80th Annual CAL Awardss, presented by Jody Pritzl


81st Annual CAL Awards, presented by Jodi Bowersox, Laurie Marr Wasmund, and Claire Fishback



82nd Annual CAL Awards, presented by Jodi Bowersox, Laurie Marr Wasmund, and Kathryn Winograd

CAL Racks in Colorado Springs and Lakewood

Support these businesses that support CAL



5670 N. Academy Blvd

Colorado Springs

Third Space Rack
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Located in the

Colorado Mills Mall

14500 W. Colfax Avenue

Lakewood, CO


Perfect Gift book rack

Nowhere near our book racks?

You can still find great books by CAL authors. Check out our Genre Pages.

Autographed books make a great gift year-round. Contact authors directly to get signed copies.

CAL Authors Release New Books!

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A small town’s deadly past is exposed

Buy Your Copy Here




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New York City's unconventional superhero: Epilectra

Buy Yours Now


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Young readers learn the importance of staying true to yourself.

Available on Amazon


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Sifting through secrets and chasing the Hope Diamond

Find it on Amazon



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Amy Pritchard makes a new life as a lighthouse keeper.

Buy Yours Now

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Heal well, heal responsibly.

Find it on Amazon


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Detective Nick Severs of the award-winning series returns.

Buy Your Copy Here

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Can the explorers of the Dyson Sphere survive?

Find it on Amazon




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Who wants their client dead? And why?

Buy yours today!

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Angels and demons clash in 10th Century Rome

Buy Your Copy Here


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They have a plan. Can they pull it off? Or is it too little, too late?

Buy Your Copy Here

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Yuki and Kiyo must fight the Japanese government and a ruthless corporation to save the bay.

Buy Your Copy Here






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Meditations on love and loss and beauty

Buy Yours Now

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New from an award-winning poet

Buy yours today!



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Don't believe everything you read on the internet.

Available on Amazon

And Publish Plays, Essays, Articles, and Poems!

Cassi Clark Ward-Hunt has published her first short story, "The Woman Who Planted Men" at CommuterLit.com.

Read it here!




An Interview with CAL poet and former Colorado Poet Laureate Joseph Hutchison can be found at:


Https://compulsivereader.com/2023/08/16/an-interview-with-joe-hutchison/


Gregory SETH Harris' poem "After the Flood" was published by Lightwood.



Kathryn Winograd's essay, "Mist Nets: After the Uvalde Shooting," is now posted at Terrain.org. Another essay, "Floating in the Riparian," can be read at Shanti Arts!

https://www.shantiarts.co

/SPAQ/SPAQ49/files/winograd.pdf

Theresa Crater's story "Sugar Plum Faeries," part of the Spirit Springs series can be found at https://amzn.to/4agV8Pk. On Winter Solstice, can Willow find the Heart of Spirit Springs in time to save the town's magic?


An essay by Petra Perkins, "What Oppenheimer Didn't Show," appears in Elephant Journal. Find it here: https://www.elephantjournal.com/2024/01/what-oppenheimer-didnt-show-petra-perkins/?fbclid=IwAR1zZcTl 


 


What is Bibliotherapy


  • Storytelling has been integral to the human experience for over 40,000 years.
  • Reading fiction can build empathy, enhance theory of mind, and improve social skills.
  • Research shows that bibliotherapy can help children overcome anxiety, depression, and aggression.

Read More

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CAL Member News

CAL Authors In Action

Helping Students

In 2020, CAL members joined together to create a book of writing prompts for students of all ages.


Paperback and Kindle versions available on Amazon


Download Options in English and Spanish






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Helping the Community


CAL authors often contribute to Little Free Libraries!


Slideshow
Little Library 2021

CAL Is A Proud Sponsor of

Colorado Sun