Denver Poet Laureate
Chris Ransick, Denver’s Poet Laureate, won a Colorado Book Award for poetry in 2003 for his first book, Never Summer. His subsequent collection of short stories, A Return To Emptiness, won the 2005 Colorado Authors’ League Fiction Award and was a finalist for the 2005 Colorado Book Award in Fiction.
Lost Songs & Last Chances, published by Denver-based Ghost Road Press in 2006, is his most recent book.
A native New Yorker, he has lived the last 27 years in Montana, Wyoming, California, and Colorado, working as a reporter, editor, and professor. He served as assistant to the editors on the definitive anthology, The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology. A staunch supporter of freedom of press, he is a member of PEN USA and serves on the Freedom to Write Committee. He is also active as a volunteer in area schools, he serves on the Public Library Board in his community, and works on a broad variety of initiatives to support literacy.
Chris holds masters degrees in English/Creative Writing (University of California, Davis 1990) and journalism (University of Montana, 1988), and has been a full-time faculty member at Arapahoe Community College since 1990, where he has developed award-winning programs in creative writing and journalism, as well as helping to found the ACC Writers Studio. He lives in Englewood with his wife, son, and daughter.