Book It: The Five Best Literary Events This Week

It’s a week full of wonderful women writers, all offering unique takes on the human experience in different forms, from graphic novels to the written word. Here are the five best events over the next seven days:

Women Writing Loss: Wendy J. Fox, Elizabeth Geoghegan & Monica Prince
Wednesday, June 19, 7:30 p.m.
Boulder Book Store
1107 Pearl Street, Boulder
$5
The Boulder Book Store welcomes Wendy J. Fox (If the Ice Had Held), Elizabeth Geoghegan (eightball) and Monica Prince (Instructions for Temporary Survival) for a reading and signing of books being hailed as some of the best releases of the summer. All three authors have strong local ties: Fox is a Denver resident, Geoghegan is a University of Colorado alumnus, and Prince was born and raised in Lakewood. Come celebrate these Colorado authors and their new — and noteworthy — work. The event is $5, and tickets are good for $5 off any purchase the day of the reading.

Ebony Flowers, Hot Comb
Thursday, June 20, 7 p.m.
Tattered Cover LoDo
1628 16th Street
Free
Award-winning Denver cartoonist and ethnographer Ebony Flowers’s new graphic novel is called Hot Comb, and offers poignant glimpses into the lives of black women of all ages, each one reconciling their lives with cultural standards of beauty. Flowers, the winner of the 2017 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, will be at the Tattered Cover to discuss the book with Denver Public Schools librarian and educator Julia Torres.

T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls
Saturday, June 22, 7 p.m.
BookBar
4280 Tennyson Street
Free
Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden brings her raw and redemptive debut memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, to BookBar for a reading and signing. The book is her story of coming of age as a queer and biracial teenager amid the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparity, rampant white-collar crime and the powerfully destructive standards of beauty define everyday life. It's full of unflinching honesty and lyric prose focusing on trauma and forgiveness, families of blood and affinity, and on being lost and found, unmade and rebuilt, crooked and beautiful.

Judy Choi & Phoenix Brown, The Cloud That Fell From the Sky
Sunday, June 23, 2 p.m.
Tattered Cover
2526 East Colfax Avenue
Free
Celebrate the release of a beautiful, limited-edition hardbound and Asian-stitched poetry coffee table book from an aunt-and-niece team from Denver. In The Cloud that Fell from the Sky, local authors Judy Choi and Phoenix Brown tell the story of a fifteen-year-old girl using poetry to cope with her parents' drug addiction; the visuals are provided by award-winning French photographer Francis George.

Rachel DeWoskin, Banshee
Sunday, June 23, 2 p.m.
Tattered Cover LoDo
1628 16th Street
Free
Noted author Rachel DeWoskin (the New Yorker, Vanity Fair) comes to the Tattered Cover for a reading and signing of her newest novel, Banshee, in which a poetry professor diagnosed with cancer disrupts her own life in increasingly dramatic and consequential ways. It’s the portrait of a perfectly good person doing things “perfectly badly,” the story of a woman whose bad news frees her in ways both good and not-so-much — but who also might finally be fully honest.

Have a literary event you think should be included on this list? Send details to [email protected].