About The LBWR Faculty

LBWR Founder and Host Darla Worden

Darla Worden is editor in chief of Mountain Living and Colorado Homes & Lifestyles magazines and has written over 100 magazine articles about art, architecture, travel and the West. A bona fide Francophile and Hemingway scholar who has spent time living and working in Paris, she frequently teaches writing courses and workshops, was invited to speak to the 19th biannual Hemingway Society Conference in 2022 and is the author of COCKEYED HAPPY: Hemingway’s Wyoming Summers with Pauline (Chicago Review Press), available in hardcover and paperback. She has an MFA from Goucher College in Creative Nonfiction.

As a teenager, Darla spotted a photograph of Ernest Hemingway hanging above the jukebox at the Last Chance Saloon in Big Horn, Wyoming. That moment sparked her decades-long fascination with Hemingway, including reading reams of original source materials. Wanting to better understand the great author’s life, in 2009 she spent a summer following in Hemingway’s footsteps from his expatriate days in Paris, using A Moveable Feast as a guide and pursuing additional clues she’d discovered over years of research. While she eventually returned to parsing the mystery of the author’s little-written-about days in her home state of Wyoming, culminating in the publication of Cockeyed Happy, her Paris adventure led to the 2010 founding of her Left Bank Writers Retreat in Paris, dedicated to inspiring writers in a small-group, salon-style setting and exploring the city’s deep literary roots through the context of Hemingway and the Left Bank writers of the 1920s.

Instructor Travis Cebula

A former classically-trained chef and sommelier, Travis Cebula graduated from the MFA program at Naropa University in 2009—the same year he founded Shadow Mountain Press, a small press that focuses on hand-made editions of poetry chapbooks. His poetry, stories, essays, reviews, and photography have appeared internationally in various print and online journals. The most recent of his chapbooks, …but for a brief interlude at Versailles, was released in 2011 by Highway 101 Press. Also in 2011, Western Michigan University awarded him the Pavel Srut Fellowship for Poetry. In 2012, his book Ithaca was published by BlazeVOX, and in January 2018 his new collection of poetry will debut.

Instructor Sarah Suzor

Sarah Suzor’s full-length collection of poetry, The Principle Agent, won the 2010 Hudson Prize and was recently published by Black Lawrence Press. She also has a published After the Fox, which is co-authored with Travis Cebula and is available from Black Lawrence Press. Suzor’s poetry has been published widely, as well as anthologized, translated and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Venice, California where she is a founding editor for Highway 101 Press and a book coach/editor at Ink.com