Lauren Chavez
Grants and Sponsorship Program Manager

Lauren is a writer hailing from the foothills of Denver, Colorado, where she had the privilege of both city life and mountain life. With easy access to libraries, museums, living history farms, campsites, hiking trails, and ski areas, she developed both a love for learning and a love for the landscapes that surrounded her.

As a grant writer, Lauren enjoys the challenge of finding the perfect balance of weaving narrative storytelling and data together to create grant proposals that garner support from funders for long-term investment. She is thrilled to be taking on this challenge at Museum of the Rockies as museums hold a special place in her heart.

On the more creative side of her writing, Lauren is fascinated by the language of landscapes and explores this in her ever-growing and changing relationship with Montana’s landscapes. She is captivated by the works of poets such as Seamus Heaney, Gillian Clarke, and Owen Sheers. Of how their vocabularies, despite writing in English, still resound with the earthiness, the rootedness of their mother-tongues, Irish Gaelic and Welsh. Of how their unique vocabularies create a certain feel and experience in their poetry. Of how this feel in their writing calls attention to the loss of a sense of place, of flora and fauna, of cultural values that once viewed relationships to the land as sacred.

Lauren hopes that this endless exploration of these poets' writing, of the writing of others she discovers, and of her own writing can call attention to the thinning connections to landscapes that the world is experiencing and emphasize the need to bring ourselves back to nature and reknit those connections that we’ve lost.

Outside of writing, Lauren enjoys reading, listening to and making music, watercolor painting, partaking in Montana InSite Theatre productions, learning languages, backpacking, rock climbing, birding, horseback riding, gardening, and sipping on her ever-growing tea collection.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English-Writing from Montana State University and a Master of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies with a focus in Ecopoetics from the University of Utah.

Please contact Lauren via email at 406.994.5278 or lauren.chavez@montana.edu.