BIOGRAPHY

Cole Nicole LeFavour is an award-winning journalist, fiction and creative non-fiction writer. Their stories and essays have appeared in The North American Review, Idaho Wilderness Considered, Confluence, Sawtooth-White Cloud, and other periodicals and essay collections. Cole is the recipient of an Idaho Press Club award for best investigative news story, "Where Have You Gone Joe Albertson?”

Their current work, LOVE AND PROTEST a True Story of Queer Resistance and Good Trouble in Red America, is represented by Leslie Meredith of Dystel, Goderich and Bourret. Cole is also in the process of completing the manuscript for A FINAL STATION, a hopeful novel from the end of the world.

LeFavour’s name is recognized in LGBTQ communities not just as Idaho’s first openly gay elected official and non-binary leader, but also from the February 3, 2014, national and international news as the leader of a series of peaceful protests which closed down the Idaho Senate and led to nearly 200 arrests.  

After eight years in elected office, gathering allies and struggling to achieve queer legal equality, LeFavour’s movement was silenced by leaders of the Idaho Legislature. Determined to bring pressure in from the outside, Cole left the Senate in 2012. In 2014, they were one of over 100 people arrested for peaceful civil disobedience while leading Idaho’s movement to include gay and transgender people in the state’s nondiscrimination laws.

Cole earned a degree in The Evolution of Cognition from U.C. Berkeley and an MFA in fiction from the University of Montana. For forty years they have taught creative writing to students of all ages, in public schools, colleges, and writing programs. Their experience is shaped by seven years as a wild-land firefighter, fire lookout, and lone backcountry ranger, and by decades living in one of the most beautiful and most politically hostile states in the nation.

An experienced speaker, debater, and story writer, LeFavour presented a TEDx Talk on emotion and politics titled, “Fear, Anger and the Manipulation of the Human Mind,” which has 107K views. Cole has spoken to audiences about activism, politics, happiness, and queer equality for over three decades.

Through it all, LeFavour’s optimism has been fed by wins, losses, unlikely friendships, and by the beauty of those who also work for social change.

Bits of Cole LeFavour’s life and work have appeared in the documentary films Breaking Through, The Legislature, and Private Idaho. Civil disobedience that Cole organized is the subject of the documentary Add the Words, and the art film Mercury.