Join us for our new series, “Literary Living Room”, a literary series based in Ridgway, Colorado. We invite a featured writer to read or perform their work and then we host a community open mic.

November’s presenter will be Daiva Chesonis. Daiva Chesonis is a fiercely proud Baltimore-born daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, transplanted to Colorado in 1992 to build Telluride’s gondola transportation system. Although birthing chairlifts was not part of her initial goal after a Cold War-era B.A. in Russian Studies, she decided to bed down in the dead-end box canyon to see what would unfold. She most recently was co-owner of Between the Covers Bookstore in Telluride for over a decade. Stints in between included snowboard instructor, owner/operator of Vision Design, Art Director at Telluride Magazine, founder and 5-year director of the Telluride AIDS Benefit Fashion Show, co-founder of the Telluride Literary Arts Festival, and a traveling minstrel for Mountainfilm on Tour. In 2005, she earned an M.A. in Diplomacy and International Conflict Resolution, mostly for fun. From 2109 to 2022 she was the San Miguel County Poet Laureate. In her spare time, this mom of one amazing adult can be found writing and performing poetry, wandering local forests on the hunt for mushrooms, and finding herself wonderfully lost in nearby deserts and canyons, not far from where she and her always writing husband Craig Childs live off-grid with Atlas, a chunky feral-that-crossed-over cat that they hope will never be eaten by their resident mountain lion.