At least four hundred poets have descended on Denver, heads full of memorized verses, for the National Poetry Slam.For those who can’t distinguish a slam poem from a verbal fistfight or the recitation of iambic pentameter, or simply readers curious about what to expect, Westword got on the phone with Executive Director Suzi Q. Smith and her right-hand woman in planning the event, local poetry and art advocate Danielle Brooks, to demystify slam poetry.

No one at the nineteenth International Aerial Dance Festival seems to be afraid of heights. At Frequent Flyers, the Boulder studio where dancers dangle from an arm wrapped in swathes of fabric or hang upside-down, practicing a swift unfurling movement that will drop them onto the thick blue mats below, everyone is committed to an art form you may not have known existed. Aerial dance, says festival founder Nancy Smith, is “anything anything that gets you off the ground dancing.” Imagine a cross between the soaring acrobatics of Cirque du Soleil, the Peter Pan flying on Broadway and the storytelling of modern dance, all requiring immense core and upper body strength. People don’t realize, Smith says, “how hard it actually is, since the aesthetic is effortlessness.”

This weekend, six Colorado playwrights will see their words brought to life in staged readings at the Vintage Theatre’s first-ever New Play Festival. The intimate Aurora venue opened up submissions for the festival last December as a way to reach out to the Colorado writing community and also meet playwrights’ need to have their plays read as a step in the editing process.

When the new Velorama Festival descends on RiNo August 11 to 13, you’ll be able to U-lock your cruiser to new, hand-crafted bike racks. In line with the festival’s ties to the Colorado Classic bicycle race, the RiNo Arts District has sponsored the creation of five artisanal, mountain-evoking bike racks by contest winners Mitch Hoffman and Tim Omspach.

For Thomas “Detour” Evans’ interactive exhibit in the Temple tonight, expect bright colors, loud music DJed live, and a chance to break the usual “look-but-don’t-touch” rule of art viewership. Detour, whose work you might recognize from his rose-backed murals, RedLine residency or if you happen to have visited soccer superstar Tim Howard lately, has put together Between the Hues, an art showcase that will culminate in an afterparty at Meadowlark Kitchen.

Arts advocacy nonprofit Americans for the Arts has chosen Denver as the host city for its annual convention in June of 2018, further cementing the city’s status as an arts hub. Approximately 1,000 attendees will arrive in the Mile High City from June 15 to 17 to learn about advancing the arts on national policy stages as well as in local communities.

Crossroads Theater had played host to many performance and community events in the decade since it opened in Five Points in 2007, but now the interior of the venue at 2590 Washington Street is gutted, making way for office space after a decade-long struggle to pay the rent as a performing arts and community space.

The African Community Center merges fashion, fundraising and vocational training at tonight’s Designing Women: A Cross-Cultural Design Collaboration. It’s the first time the organization has hosted a philanthropic event of this kind, which will showcase apparel created by refugee artisans trained through ACC’s We Made This program in collaboration with local designers.

On a sunburn-inducing Saturday in Littleton, accompanied by the occasional faint sound of bagpipes from the nearby Colorado Irish Festival, orange-jerseyed athletes slam shoulders with their opponents and sprint across a field, balancing a fist-sized ball on a paddle. This isn’t football, or lacrosse, or likely any sport you’ve seen: it’s the Denver Gaels and Regulators facing off in the final game of hurling, an ancient Irish sport, before the Rumble in the Rockies Southwest Invitational Tournament hits Lowry Sports Center this weekend.

Florence Crittenton, an alternative high school for teen moms, just commissioned a mural by Julia Morgan for its 125th year.

A tragedy centered around a woman fighting for political power may give audience members a stinging sense of deja vu, but the play in question is not about the 2016 presidential election. Rather, it’s Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s production of Hamlet which makes a bold choice: portraying the titular character as a woman.

Brian Jabas Smith has played for crowds of 10,000, but he says reading from his debut collection of short stories, Spent Saints and Other Stories, at some of the stops on his coast-to-coast book tour has actually been more nerve-wracking. Smith’s been a national-class bicyclist, rock ‘n roll frontman, alcoholic and crystal meth addict, and journalist, and it’s these experiences that fuel Spent Saints, which turn an empathetic and nuanced eye towards characters on the margins. On the third leg of a book tour that’s seen him reading in between rock sets (namely, the Tough Shits and Rocky Four) as well as leading a writing workshop at a Memphis Boys & Girls Club, Smith will be reading and screening the web series based on the collection at the Boulder Bookstore on July 11 at 7:30 p.m. In advance of the reading, Westword got on the phone with Smith, who called from the 110-degree heat of Tucson.

Since it started in 2010, the Creative Rituals Under Social Harmony festival, or CRUSH, has grown to a major celebration of street art. This year’s event will paint the town from September 11 through September 17, 2017.