Young poets from Denver’s slam poetry scene have taken their words and images far beyond the confines of the city. The HBO special Brave New Voices premiered this week and featured performances from Minor Disturbance, Denver’s very own youth Slam Team led by Ken Arkind. The special, co-produced by hip-hop…
Slam Nuba, one of two major ongoing slam events in Denver, meets twice a month on the the first and last Mondays at the Crossroads Theater, 2590 Washington Street; typically, one session is based on what Smith calls a “crazy theme,” while the other is a more traditional straight-on slam,…
Rick Springfield wrote a memoir. That phrase alone pretty much precludes the utility of a review of that memoir; you will either read it or not read it on that basis. All the same, when a copy of Late, Late at Night arrived unannounced in the mailbox with a photo…
The critically acclaimed author of Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane, believes in supporting libraries. Last evening, he spoke to a crowd of roughly eleven hundred at the Mile Hi Church in Lakewood as a part of the free Jefferson County Distinguished Author Series in which he explained why libraries are so…
Pomegranate Place is in one of those old mansions you find throughout the Capitol Hill neighborhood, a relic of another era. It looks like a place where a benevolent secret society might meet. But it’s a women’s center and on the cool dusky evening of Friday, October 15th, it was…
To most of us, Betty White has become a recurring annoyance on our favorite shows, and while we’ve been curious how or why she suddenly came back into fashion, we’ve never put much thought into it. We let her do her thing because after all, she’s old. However, according to…
Tucker Max is living the dream. Since his early twenties, the author of Assholes Finish First has been getting blackout drunk, chasing women and generally indulging every hedonistic whim toward the end of compiling the stories of his wild and often shockingly hilarious exploits (one ends in him covered in…
Since time immemorial, it’s been a tradition of mega-stardom: Actors become musicians and musicians become actors. Less common, though, is the musician/actor-turned-writer — and probably for a good reason: Writing is hard and not very glamorous, and also, they only let you out of your cage once every three weeks…
In MaryJanice Davidson’s new book, My, Myself and Why?, the self-proclaimed “inventor of paranormal chick-lit” takes a run-of-the-mill FBI agent main character and gives her dissociative identity disorder — otherwise known as multiple personalities. But that isn’t just a challenge she has to face: “They’re not solving crime in spite…
I don’t know how many stories Scott Simon has told during his long tenure as an NPR commentator and host. I would guess it’s in the tens of thousands at this point. But I do imagine that the one he tells in his book Baby, We Were Meant for Each…
For all intents and purposes, it’s pretty clear from the book jacket that Gray Matter, by local author Nick Pirog, is a crime novel. Just the cover, which features a red, black and white color scheme and a stylized illustration of the Seattle skyline, was enough for me to guess…
I’m supposed to know everything that goes on in town, but here’s something that passed me by completely: For the last five years, the local firm BurstMarketing has been recording and posting podcasts of Tattered Cover book events, as many as three or four a week, online for free at…
MaryJanice Davidson turned the chick-lit world upside-down in 2004 with the release of Undead and Unwed, which follows the story of a fashionista-secretary-turned-queen-of-the-vampires; since then, she’s been exploring the boundaries of paranormal literature combined with the world of shoes, shopping and romance. Her latest offering is Me, Myself and Why?,…
Just the other day, when a friend of mine and I were arguing about Virginia Woolf, I told her that, however good it may be, you just can’t write with that kind of acrobatic Victorian ornament anymore. “You’d sound like a dingleberry,” I remarked. She disagreed — and if Stephanie…
Kelly Shortandqueer is small in stature but big on words, especially when it comes to the Denver Zine Library, which he co-founded with Jamez Terry in 2003. Over the past seven years, the library, a herculean underground effort to cataloue a variety of zines, from independent music chatter and literary…
Lots of authors dream of their books scoring glowing praise from the New York Review of Books, topping the bestseller lists, getting optioned for a Hollywood movie. But getting turned into a musical? How often does that happen? That could be the fate for Nine Lives, a nonfiction account of…
When you go through all the trouble of writing a book — and perhaps you don’t have any illusions of grandeur about being the next James Joyce or anything, but even a just-okay book requires an enormous amount of creative energy and personal investment — it must be tough when…
Poetry is the structural rhetoric used to evoke emotional qualities. Rap is, at the etymological root, the chanting of rhymed lyrics in time to a beat. The literary facet of poetry has been around for ages, long before the stories were translated into reading interpretations, while rap was used in…
Like cooking, the art of yoga is bound by that stolid type of sociological stereotype claiming that although more women on the planet earth cook — and in the modern world, practice traditional yoga — it’s the men who are always considered the greatest chefs… and yogis. But Neal Pollack,…
Say what you will about his policies, but it’s pretty much official at this point that Barack Obama is the most accomplished individual since Leonardo Da Vinci. For one thing, he’s president of the United States — which, okay, George W. took a little of the prestige out of that…
In the past decade, Ken Arkind has seen the Denver poetry scene morph and evolve. A fixture in the local scene for a decade, Arkind has made multiple trips to national competitions across the country, bearing the banner of Denver poets from the Mercury Cafe and earning a title spot…
You can’t judge a book by its cover, they say, but most people do. Because this is America, by God, and there has got to be a better way to judge a book than to actually read it. That’s why we’re bringing you One-Chapter Book Reviews, where we’ll pick one…
