Author and activist Erika T. Wurth puts a modern face on Native American life, which she characterizes as a vital, but invisible underground, thriving beneath the homogenized American landscape. When she’s not away teaching creative writing for her gig at Western Illinois University, Wurth, a native Coloradan who identifies as Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee, writes novels and poetry and can be heard at readings about town.

Both artist and artisan, Cal Duran creates folk art on steroids, bowing to the ancient traditions of Mexico and the Southwest and conjuring the souls of the ancestors in murals and installations of clay and papier-mâché.

As a recognizable face of the new, arts-rich Trinidad, Colorado, Rodney Wood serves as the grand poobah of what could be the southern Colorado town’s most distinguishing features: The annual ArtoCade art-car festival, and as of 2017, its year-round companion, the Bizarre Car Garage, a permanent museum where ArtoCade vehicles winter over.

Sommer Browning is primarily a poet and, by day, a librarian, but she’s also a collector and purveyor of one-liners, both in person and in hand-drawn comics, as well as a curious observer of Denver’s growing cross-cultural art scenes. Her latest project? Georgia Art Space — a new multi-disciplinary arts showcase named for her five-year-old daughter and housed in her garage.

Published author, journalist and avid traveler Monique Antonette Lewis grew up in Texas and Colorado before following her wanderlust across the U.S. and abroad. During a stint in New York City, Lewis founded the reading series At the Inkwell, which has since gone international, with outposts bringing literary communities together to read for each other — and the public — in bookstores and bars in Denver, London, New York, Richmond, San Francisco and Seattle.

Denver native and artist Lucas T. McMahon has chameleon skills as a collagist, sculptor and painter, but he’s not comfortable with finding a groove — when there are so many other avenues to explore. Dig into what it’s like to be a young artist who’s still asking questions — McMahon tells all for the 100CC questionnaire.

Bright and community-minded, Thadeaous Mighell devotes his skills in arts administration and practice to causes both above ground, as Adam Lerner’s recently named Assistant Chief Animator at MCA Denver, and under the radar in the DIY community, working with groups like Unit E and the Birdseed Collective.

As director of the Denver Museum of Miniatures, Dolls and Toys for ten years and counting, Wendy Littlepage tackles miniature problems with big ideas, making the most of the museum’s microscopic collection while constantly exploring new ways to bring visitors into her small, small world.

As a writer, singer, selfie-taker, documentarian of changes in her neighborhood and the fleeting colors of urban nature, massage therapist, MFA candidate and lover of people, art, culture and life, Coleman expresses in multiple ways what so many of us can’t or don’t know how to express: That beneath all the grit, bad politics and forces beyond our control in this world, we still live in a paradise.

Life partners Jeff Lee and Ann Martin are book people to the core: The couple’s shared love for our wild lands and the kind of socially engaged, place-based literature that argues for preserving natural spaces converge at the Rocky Mountain Land Library.

Mainly, Ryan Foo is a human, living and breathing on Planet Earth. But he’s the kind of human who draws other people together as an event producer, emcee, teacher, comedian and Illfoominati podcaster http://www.wearedenver.org/podcasts/illfoominati/, who, in his own words, is also a “guy who helped paint some trees blue downtown.”