Berthoud's Literary Festival Runs Through Three Buildings. The Real Event Happens Between Them.

Most people who buy a ticket to the Berthoud Literary Festival are buying a seat to hear an author talk. What they end up with is a reason to walk three different stretches of downtown they'd otherwise drive past.

The second annual festival lands September 19 through 21, 2026, with the theme "Rooted In Story." Amie Pilla, CEO of the Berthoud Community Library District, has said the theme is about legacy and local narrative, about connecting through story whether personal, historical or imagined. That framing matters more than it sounds like it should, because the festival's own organizers built the schedule to send people on foot between the library, two churches, and whatever restaurant or brewery happens to sit along the route. The Berthoud Weekly Surveyor reported plainly that the festival encourages attendees to shop and eat at Berthoud businesses between events. This isn't incidental. It's the design.

The three days, laid out

Here's what's actually on the calendar this year, venue by venue.

The Saturday daytime sessions don't need tickets. Walk in, sit down, leave whenever you want. The keynotes on Friday and both Sunday events are $15 each and limited, so if you want Hoby's opening night or Koval's closer, buy ahead rather than showing up and hoping.

R.L. Maizes, who's speaking about writing in the social media era, lives in Niwot and won the 2021 Colorado Book Award for her debut novel Other People's Pets. Laura Resau has five Colorado Book Awards to her name and has landed on best-of lists from Oprah's team and the American Library Association. Nina McConigley teaches at Colorado State University and won both a PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award for her short story collection Cowboys and East Indians. Kristin Koval, a former lawyer, closes the festival on the strength of a debut novel that landed on Barnes & Noble's Discover picks and Apple Books' staff picks the same year. This isn't a lineup of unknowns reading to an empty room. It's a genuinely strong slate for a town with one library branch.

Why the venue split isn't an accident

Last year, the daytime Saturday sessions were split between the Berthoud Community Library and the Berthoud Historical Society at 228 Mountain Avenue, right in the thick of downtown. This year, the Historical Society slot moved to First Presbyterian Church on Eighth Street, a few blocks off Mountain Avenue in the opposite direction from the library.

That's a real change in foot traffic, not a cosmetic one. If you caught last year's festival, you walked Mountain Avenue between sessions almost by default, since both venues sat on it. This year, choosing to see Maizes or Resau at First Presbyterian means walking a stretch of town you may not have had a reason to cross on foot before, then doubling back toward the library and Mountain Avenue corridor for the evening keynote.

The library CEO's comment that "the BLF events are at various locations around town, so people will see more of Berthoud than the library" reads as marketing copy until you actually plot the addresses. Then it reads as literal instructions.

What's actually along the way

If your day runs library to Eighth Street and back, you're crossing the same three or four blocks of downtown that hold most of Berthoud's newer food and drink spots. Bradford's Grub & Grog opened as a full-service restaurant in December 2024, built around elevated diner food and the local craft beer scene. Aussie's Poke Pit Stop, at 441 Mountain Avenue, runs a menu that mixes Australian meat pies and pasties with poke bowls, which is not a combination you'll find twice in Larimer County. Benny's Tacos serves scratch-made Mexican food a short walk from either venue.

City Star Brewing sits close enough to the library that during last year's inaugural festival, at least one participating author mentioned walking straight from a reading to the brewery for book signings afterward. That's the kind of detail that only shows up when someone who was actually there describes the day, and it confirms what the schedule implies: the library-to-brewery walk is short enough that nobody plans around it, they just do it.

For the Sunday crowd sticking around for the writing workshop and Koval's evening keynote, the four-hour gap between them is built for exactly this. Grab something at Berthoud Pizza Company, which makes its own chorizo and Italian sausage in house, or duck into Cocina & Cantina, open since 2011, for fajitas between the workshop wrapping up and the 6 p.m. keynote.

The numbers say intimate, not overwhelmed

The inaugural festival in 2025 drew a couple hundred people over three days, a mix of Berthoud locals and out-of-town visitors, according to the Surveyor. That's a useful number to hold onto if you've been picturing something closer to a big-city book fair with lines out the door. A couple hundred people spread across three days and up to three simultaneous venues means any single session is a room, not a crowd. If you've hesitated to go because you assumed parking downtown would be a fight or the library would be standing-room-only, the actual scale suggests otherwise.

It also explains why the event grew a second year at all. Pilla noted that attendees and authors both told the library they wanted it to happen again before the first one had even ended. A festival that size succeeds by being good, not by being big, and the organizers clearly know that, since they didn't scale up venues or add a fourth day. They just moved one session across town.

If you've never gone

The free Saturday daytime talks are the lowest-friction way to test whether this is your kind of weekend. No ticket, no registration, just show up at either the library or First Presbyterian at 11 a.m. and see what a fifteen-minute walk between the two feels like on a September Saturday in Berthoud. If you like it, the $15 keynotes on either end of the weekend are worth the price for authors with this many national list mentions between them.

Call the library at 970-532-2757 if you want the Sunday writing workshop, since that one requires registration and has limited seats. Everything else, buy or walk in as you go.

Berthoud's downtown core is small enough that a literary festival can double as a walking tour of it, and this year's map just rerouted that walk through a stretch of Eighth Street most residents don't usually have a reason to cross on foot. That's worth two hours of a Saturday even if you've never picked up a book by any of this year's speakers.

If a weekend like this is part of why you love living in Berthoud, and you're weighing whether now's the right time to make a move within the neighborhood or into it, the team at Dwellings Colorado Real Estate knows this stretch of Mountain Avenue as well as we know our own front porches. Reach out anytime, festival talk included.