Biography/Memoir

Sgt. Ron Stallworth, Ret., was a member of the Colorado Springs Police Department in the 1970s.

Marie Loerzel is the author of Rock the Kasbah: A Memoir of Misadventure, a memoir about her life as an expat living in Morocco with her family during Arab Spring. She has since moved back to Colorado Springs where she continues to write her blog of the same name. These days, when she's not writing you can find her refusing to iron work shirts for her husband, embarrassing her 4 kids, wrangling her 2 wily dogs, dancing, daydreaming about traveling to pungent exotic places and just generally screwing things up royally.

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.

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. 

Mike Hamel is a storyteller by trade and the author/editor of more than 40 books on topics as wide-ranging as business, finance, political theory, healthcare, nonprofits, theology, and children’s books. He is a cancer survivor who has chronicled his physical journey toward the Valley of the Shadow of Death in Stumbling Toward Heaven, and his spiritual musings along the way in We Will Be Landing Shortly: Now What?

For younger audiences, Mike has written the juvenile chapter book series Matterhorn the Brave and The Lighthouse Company, and the illustrated books Lady Allium, Lizzy the Leatherback, Queen Quillabee, and The Legend of Songa Ping.

Mike's books are listed on his Amazon Author Page. 

To learn more about Mike, check out his blog OPEN Mike and his Wikipedia entry.

Kathy Brandt is the co-author with son, Max Maddox, of Walks on the Margins: A Story of Bipolar Illness, has published four mysteries in the Hannah Sampson Underwater Investigation Series, and taught writing at the University of Colorado for ten years. She is a vocal advocate for those with mental illness and writes and speaks about mental health. She is past President the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Colorado Springs and in 2012 she received the NAMI National Award for her leadership and service on behalf of those living with mental illness. She has a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Rhetoric. She lived in Colorado Springs for twenty-five years before moving to Woodland Park.

Dr. Nancy Saltzman grew up in Bloomington, Indiana and moved to Colorado Springs to attend Colorado College in 1970. Upon graduation she taught elementary school in Colorado Springs, received her master’s from the University of Colorado then completed her doctorate at the University of Denver. She served as the principal of Broadmoor Elementary School for 16 years before retiring in 2006. During Nancy's 31 year career in education she was recognized as Colorado’s National Distinguished Principal, the recipient of the Milken Family Foundation Educator Award, and as the American Cancer Society's Sword of Hope winner for her work with breast cancer survivors.

Saltzman continues to stay busy as an emeritus member on the board of Kidpower, working as a volunteer at the Humane Society, participating in three book clubs, and speaking about her recently published memoir, Radical Survivor: One Woman’s Path Through Life, Love, and Uncharted Tragedy. The memoir chronicles Saltzman’s extraordinary saga as a two-time cancer survivor who lost her entire family in a small-plane crash. Told with honesty, insight, and laugh-out-loud flashes of humor, plus the added richness of letters Saltzman received, Radical Survivor traverses the full spectrum of human emotions. Her journey reminds us that the heart can make
room for both loved ones lost and happiness found, offering a compelling gift of hope.

Saltzman presently lives in Colorado Springs with her fiancé, Greg Roman, and her dogs, Nacho and Macy.

Mary Irwin is an expert on the topic of Noah’s Ark and has conducted more than 25 years of research on the subject. She traveled the world with her late husband, astronaut James Irwin, who served on the historic Apollo 15 flight. The pair climbed Mount Ararat numerous times looking for the ark and searched for biblical antiquities throughout the Middle East. In 1972, they founded the nonprofit Christian organization High Flight Foundation. Irwin has published four books on her life experiences.

I'm a native of Colorado and grew up in the Denver area. I left after finishing college, but returned after 27 years.