General Nonfiction

I have lived in Colorado Springs since 1959. I volunteer at the Fine Arts Center, Cheyenne Mt. Zoo, Bear Creek Nature Center, Garden of the Gods, and White House Ranch. Inspiration from out-of-town walking tour books led to Trips On Twos. I am actively involved in presenting bus tours, walking tours, slide presentations, talks, school programs, adult education, and Elderhostel classes (Local, Colorado, Rocky Mountain West).

I came to Colorado in 1973 because of the beauty of the land and the promise of the future.

The author was born in Colorado Springs and has lived here all her life.

Mark A. Adams is an accomplished professional with diverse experience in business, education, and coaching. Mark is the author of Responsible Conflict: Building Trust and Respect and Courageous Conflict: Leading with Integrity and Authenticity. Mark is the President of Achievement Edge, LLC, a consulting practice focused on coaching leaders, groups, and individuals in the areas of conflict, leadership, teamwork and thinking skills. As a conflict management consultant, certified mediator, and speaker, Mark is available for group facilitation and conflict coaching. His experience includes team building, communication, conflict resolution and leadership development. His primary focus is about helping people learn better ways to think about, learn from and resolve conflicts while challenging limiting beliefs. Mark lives in Colorado with his wife, two children, three dogs, and cats where he enjoys kayaking, hiking, camping, and photography.

A resident of Colorado and a storyteller since 1970, John has told stories professionally since 1979. During that time he has performed for more than one million listeners (thankfully, not all at once) in a great variety of settings. John's programs of stories and a cappella ballads feature: Western History and Environment; Literature Aloud!; and, World Folklore, especially American lore. He reenacts the lives of national park pioneers Enos Mills and John Otto, as well as Charles Fox Gardiner, frontier physician. A former classroom teacher, he is a specialist in storytelling in education, having taught storytelling and other courses at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. In 1989, he founded the Rocky Mountain Storytelling Festival, now the Douglas County Libraries Storytelling Festival. He spends his spare time hiking, skiing, and working to protect Colorado's wild places.

In a nutshell: born, lost, found, raised in Los Angeles as a dancer, graduated, married best friend at 18, had two daughters plus half the neighborhood who came to dinner and stayed, husband died suddenly in his early thirties, life ended, then began again when I was hired by the Department of Defense to teach overseas. 

Stayed 21 years in Germany, seven of them on the Cold War Border, remarried a pilot, and we CHOSE Colorado Springs when we came home in 1995. Seeing the tension on the military border, the extensive travel, the think tank topics, all offered opportunities to observe people under pressure...a favorite topic of my novels. It's not so much what happens to my characters as how they handle it. Where do human beings find the resilience to keep on fighting for their dreams, even through disaster? All my stories are based on true events and people (for whom I change the names to protect the guilty), and all are stories I felt needed to be told. I find our mountains, wildlife, and town spirit conducive to creativity.

K.D. Huxman’s first love, after reading, was space. She wanted to be the first veterinarian astronaut. In college, she studied biology and was in Air Force ROTC. After college she became an Air Force officer. But rocketing to the stars was not to be. She married a fellow Air Force officer and settled into raising a family. But she never forgot her love of books or science. Many of her books have a science fiction or fantasy element. K.D. went on to earn an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Norwich University. Her first picture book is Dragon Talk. Her second picture book, Grizzelda Gorilla won an EPPY for Best Children’s/YA Ebook. Both picture books are from Dragonfly Publishing. She writes non-fiction for children at Apprentice Shop Books. After travelling around the country with the Air Force, K.D. settled in Colorado. On a clear night she enjoys looking up at the stars, dreaming, and writing.

An honor graduate of Widefield High School in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Bev Sninchak first moved to the Pikes Peak region in 1979 when her stepfather was stationed at Ft. Carson. She majored in Applied Communication and minored in Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Previously, she attended Phillips University in Enid, Oklahoma, where she majored in Mass Communications and Psychology. Bev has been a professional freelance writer, author, and copy editor since May 1997. In 2013, she added professional blogger to her creative toolbox. To date, her work has been published hundreds of times in print and online. She writes and edits from her home office in the Knob Hill area of Colorado Springs. Writing under the pen names of Bev Walton~Porter and Star Ferris, she has authored five books, including Sun Signs for Writers (published by Writer's Digest Books), Secrets of the Professional Freelancer (Triple Crow Publishing), Mending Fences (Whiskey Creek Press), Hidden Fire (Whiskey Creek Press), and Shadows of the Soul (Triple Crow Publishing). Bev also co-authored The Complete Writer: A Guide To Tapping Your Full Potential, published by Red Engine Press. She was editor and publisher of the award-winning e-zine for writers, Scribe & Quill, for over 15 years. On Friday, April 13, 2013, she launched )0(Triple Crow Publishing)0(, a small, exclusive eBook publisher based in the Springs. For more details, visit her website at http://www.nocturnalmuse.com.

From The Gazette obituary, Oct. 3, 2021:

Alexander L. Blackburn of Colorado Springs, CO., educator, novelist, literary critic, editor, and artist, passed away Sunday, October 3, 2021 after a short illness. Alex was born in Durham, NC. in 1929 to Elizabeth Cheney and William Blackburn. His father was a teacher of writers at Duke University. His youth was greatly shaped by this environment of imaginative writers, including such future luminaries as William Styron, Mac Hyman, and Reynolds Price. Inspired by his father, Alex carried a passion for writing across his academic training at Andover, Yale, UNC Chapel Hill, and University of Cambridge, England, where he earned his Ph.D. in English in 1963.

After graduating from Yale, Alex volunteered as an enlisted man in the U.S. Army during the Korean War and worked his way to the rank of First Lieutenant. He served proudly, and remained for eight years in the Army Reserve.

After stints teaching creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania and World Classics at the University of Maryland's European Division, he made his home in Colorado Springs in 1973 and pioneered in the teaching of those subjects at the newly formed UCCS. At UCCS he also founded and edited Writers' Forum, a literary journal devoted to discovering and publishing new writers from the West. Alex retired from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs in 1994.

As an author and editor, Alex has published and edited more than 30 books and was a recipient of numerous national and international awards and citations including the Frank Waters Award for Excellence in Literature in 2005. His novel, Suddenly a Mortal Splendor, was runner-up for the 1996 Colorado Book Award in Fiction. His The Voice of the Children in the Apple Tree, a Pulitzer nominated novel, received the International Peace Writing Prize. These two works, along with his novel The Door of the Sad People, a coming-of-age story placed against the background of the Colorado coal mining wars long remembered for the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, make up his literary opus, the trilogy Age of Atoms, an epic novel that casts a critical eye on American warfare in the twentieth Century. Blackburn has also won book awards from the University of Colorado, the Academy of American Poets, and the Chancellor's Award for outstanding service to the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Bloomsbury Review quoted: "Alexander Blackburn is one of the most important writers in the American West today."

Alex is survived by his loving wife of 46 years, Dr. Inés Dölz-Blackburn, author and professor of Spanish Language and Literature.