This festival honors the inspiring life of poet and naturalist Karen Chamberlain, who passed away Sept. 11, 2010. Karen truly lived a life of service to art. She established the Aspen Writers' Foundation. She co- founded "Nature Within," a summer outdoor writers' program based at a wildlife sanctuary in the Colorado Rockies, and for 10 years served as literary coordinator for the Canyonlands Field Institute's Desert Writers Workshop, near Moab, Utah. She co-founded the Glenwood Springs Writers' Workshop, a bi-monthly critiquing and support group. For five years Chamberlain was also the poetry editor for Mountain Gazette magazine. Her poems, essays and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Hudson Review, The Nation, Poetry, Orion, The Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature, and The Geography of Hope: Poets of Colorado's Western Slope. She was honored with a 1983 The Nation/Discovery Prize, a 1989 Fellowship in Poetry from the Colorado Council on the Arts, a 1993 Poetry Program Award from Poets and Writers Magazine and the Poetry Society of America, and a 2004 Contribution-to-Poetry Award from Sparrows Poetry Festival in Salida. She supported and encouraged other writers and artists without fail.