Denver’s proved, again, that it’s a straight-up poetry town, and also that it takes a village to make it that way. The city’s stellar Minor Disturbance youth slam poetry team crowned its weekend by taking it all at the Brave New Voices 2012 national slam-off, following in the footsteps of…
In Abattoir, the new novel by local horror authors Christopher Leppek and Emanuel Isler, an aging building gets renovated into trendy lofts, but its violent past remains hidden beneath the new surface. The duo’s second novel — following 2001’s Chaosicon — is, as Leppek puts it, a “haunted house on…
With fires raging across Colorado, many artists are putting their talents by holding fundraisers or using events to simply send good vibes to those affected by the fires. Tonight Denver’s youth slam team, Minor Disturbance, a 2012 MasterMind winner, will use what it’s got to bring awareness (and raise some…
In author Sapphire’s new novel, The Kid (a semi-sequel to Precious — the Hollywood adaptation of her ’96 novel, Push), we are treated to another relentless marathon of abuse, rape, failed dreams and unsettling conclusions. “Commercial media looks at things in terms of heroes and villains,” Sapphire told us in…
In her 1996 novel Push, Sapphire ventured into the profoundly dark territory of a young black girl’s experience growing up in late-’80s Harlem. The book dealt with the difficult topics of incest, rape, AIDS, illiteracy, poverty and violence toward infants, yet none of this prevented the 2009 film adaptation, Precious…
Doron Petersan is the owner of Sticky Fingers Sweets & Eats shop in Washington, D.C., but folks around here know her as the vegan cupcake warrior who slayed the Food Network’s Cupcake Wars and Cupcake Wars All-Stars competition, alongside Sticky Fingers’ head baker Jenny Webb. Petersan’s become something of a…
For Colorado native and Hollywood screenwriter Daniel Pyne, writing a little Wild West thriller set in mining country in the Rockies is like a vocational vacation. The book in question, A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar, was inspired by a thread of truth — Pyne’s brother once…
Dark fantasy epics, as every hunger-gamer knows, are all the rage at the box office and on cable. The latest New Yorker to clog my mailbox is the special “Science Fiction Issue.” And I’m happy to report that Paolo Bacigalupi, Colorado’s own doctor of dystopia — who recently discussed his…
Aaron Angello is co-curator of “e-Poetry: The Past, Present and Future of Electronic Poetry,” both a showcase and laboratory for engaging works of digital literature, which comes to Counterpath Gallery + Performance Space at 7 p.m. tomorrow, on Saturday, May 26. “e-Poetry” will include multimedia installations and live readings from…
As it turns out, a good Twitter account doesn’t necessarily make a good television show. Nonfiction funny man Justin Halpern learned that lesson the nationally televised way when real-life anecdotes from his hilariously crabby father translated poorly from social media into a cheesy, laugh-grabbing sitcom starring William Shatner. (Captain Kirk…
In this week’s cover story, “Water World,” Westword writers explored the South Platte, the river that runs through Denver and is showing new life. Our favorite spot on the Platte, though, could well be my favorite spot in Denver: the point at Confluence Park where the past and the present…
You’ve heard of running away from home. But author Jennifer Wilson, after losing her savings to the stock-market crash, gathered up her family in Des Moines and ran away to home, or at least that’s the way she characterizes it in her memoir/travelogue Running Away to Home…
It seems counterintuitive for a business book to tout the virtues of unpopularity, but author Erika Napoletano has thoroughly embraced the concept of unpopularity — which is not a pejorative term, as she explains in the Q&A that follows. Basically, unpopularity means you don’t have mass appeal for everyone, which…
After racking up awards — Nebula and Hugo honors for Best Novel — for his debut novel The Windup Girl in 2009, Paulo Bacigalupi followed up with Ship Breaker, set in an equally dismal, dystopian future, and won another round of awards, including a National Book Award nomination and a…
If Denver four-year-olds make small talk about literature, surely Maybe a Bear Ate It! would come up. The picture book has been selected as the book in the state’s One Book 4 Colorado preschool reading campaign. In theory, every kid in the sandbox will be reading it. The story by Robie E…
It’s hard to ever really recover from losing a spelling bee: You remember the terror as you tentatively said another letter, that awful buzzer sound, the eternal shame that you misspelled the word “satellite.” But now the first annual Denver Bee this Saturday night is offering a way to put…
Bessie Coleman may not be a household name like Amelia Earhart — but she should be. As the first black woman to get her pilot’s license — in 1921, before Earhart was in the air — Coleman is the subject of the new zine series Mocha Chocolata Mamma, by Marya…
Denver’s earned its rep as a slam-poet factory: The city not only supports two competitive adult teams, each of which has taken a national title in the last decade, but it also has a strong youth wing, Minor Disturbance, one of this year’s Westword MasterMind Award-winners. And tonight is when…
What’s striking about Cheryl Strayed’s writing is its radical sincerity and vulnerability. She pens personal essays as responses in her advice column Dear Sugar (which was written anonymously until recently), dishing out loving, thoughtful advice to questioners she addresses as “honey bun” and “sweet pea.” Her new memoir, Wild: From…
Sister Spit is coming. The queer, feminist-minded, spoken-word tour will land at St. Cajetan Event Center on the Auraria campus Friday night, and at the helm of the event is founder, author and icon Michelle Tea. From her debut memoir The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in…
Like a lot of art, Serena Chopra’s debut chapbook, Penumbra, was inspired in part by a tumultuous relationship. “There was a really bad fight in which I stole a saw, literally I stole a saw from this person’s house because I did not know what else to do,” laughs the…
Richard Brautigan spent a few years basking in the celebrity sun as the author of such counterculture classics as Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar. But it was a short honeymoon, and the writer, who came up from poverty, fell into a trough of depression and alcoholism later…
