Judy Shepard to speak during Telluride’s Gay Ski Week

International spokesperson, activist and executive director of the non-profit that bears her son’s name, Judy Shepard is everywhere you want to be during Gay Ski Week in Telluride.

On Wednesday, February 23, 5:30 – 8 p.m., Capella Telluride hosts “An Evening with Judy Shepard,” an intimate dinner in the Idarado Ballroom of the luxury Mountain Village hotel, where guests learn more about the work of the Matthew Shepard Foundation: social justice, diversity awareness/education, and equality for gay, bisexual and transgender people.

On Thursday, February 24, 2:15 p.m., at the Palm Theatre, Shepard addresses 8 – 12 graders. (The public is welcome.) Later that afternoon, Between the Covers bookstore welcomes Shepard to autograph copies of her New York Times bestseller “The Meaning of Matthew: My Son’s Murder in Laramie, and a World Transformed,” a moving up close and personal look at how her life and the fight for equal rights changed the day her son was killed. That events begins at 4 p.m.

That day was October 12, 1998. Homophobia made national headlines when Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay college student, was taken from a bar in Laramie, Wyoming, brutally beaten by a pair of bigots and left for dead. The harrowing event inspired a play, Moises Kaufman’s “The Laramie Project,” and one year later a movement and foundation to help prevent similar hate crimes.

To learn more about her life and work, click the “play” button and listen to Judy Shepard’s podcast.