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Best New Book by a Colorado Author -- Literary

Augusta Locke

If you like Annie Proulx and Kent Haruf, pick up William Haywood Henderson. Having grown up in Colorado and Wyoming, he has an innate sense of how to write Western characters, with reserve and isolation broken up by glimpses of deep emotional currents. Augusta Locke follows six generations through the eyes of a matriarch who defines what it is to be a woman of the West. Turn the page.

Best New Book by a Colorado Author -- Vampire

The Nymphos of Rocky Flats Mario Acevedo

Felix Gomez was a soldier in Iraq. Now he's a vampire -- and a detective sent to look into a sweeping case of nymphomania at Rocky Flats. We're serious. With Gomez, Mario Acevedo has created a new literary hero for Colorado. Though a vampire, he doesn't drink blood; he works for the forces of good instead of evil; and he's quite charming. Fangs a lot, Mario.

Best Online Poetry Slam

www.podslam.org

Conceived in the '80s, propagated in the '90s and formalized in the 2000s, Slam Poetry is once again evolving, this time to meet the demands of the YouTube era. Since last year, Podslam.org has featured dozens of videos of local and national Slammers spitting words, ideas and everything in between for the camera. But rather than just posting slams online, the cooperative venture between Denver-based Just Media and Cafe Nuba has online voters choose which poet will move on to new rounds. Organizers hope to expand their video archive by filming this August at the 2007 Slam Nationals in Austin, Texas, where Denver's Slam Team will be the defending champions.

Best Therapeutic Poetry Organization

Art From Ashes

Life isn't always easy for the young. And high-risk youth whose lives are impacted by violence, drugs and alcohol sometimes don't have the opportunity to find their voices or learn to express themselves. To combat that, Art From Ashes collaborates with other youth-service organizations to offer poetry and spoken-word workshops for kids who are homeless, incarcerated, in the court system or residing in treatment centers or just urban settings. Art From Ashes encourages emotional catharsis and expression through writing therapy, giving kids their voices before they lose them forever.

Best Original Play -- Local Authors

A Synopsis of Butchery

Buntport mined an odd little piece of Victorian history for this play. Washington Irving Bishop was a mentalist, possibly a bit of a fraud. He collapsed on stage one night, and an autopsy was immediately performed. His mother, Eleanor Fletcher Bishop, was convinced that he had been cut up while still alive, murdered by a doctor's curiosity about his brain. She wrote a book called A Synopsis of Butchery of the Late Sir Washington Irving Bishop (Kamilimilianalani) a Most Worthy Mason of the Thirty-Second Degree, the Mind Reader, and Philanthropist and dedicated her life to the search for justice and the prevention of similar catastrophes. There is only one certain proof of death, she informed us sternly in the play: putrescence. Fletcher Bishop took to the road in a series of lecture-performances, and this device shaped Buntport's play, which is kind of funny and kind of creepy and reveals both the woman's monstrous, smothering egotism and her genuine grief. It was the smartest, most interesting locally written piece we'd seen in quite a while.

Best Original Play -- Non-Local Author

1001, by Jason Grote

Director Ethan McSweeny had his actors use a deliberately arch, hammy style for the first twenty or thirty minutes of this play, and even though the script is ironic and humorous as written, the style grated. But as the action continued, the play -- a kind of swirl of images and words surrounding the affair between a contemporary Palestinian woman and a New York Jew who finds himself somehow reenacting portions of the Arabian Nights -- began to enchant. Grote is an intelligent, deep-thinking playwright who is looking for new forms to fit the bold, original things he wants to say. How lucky for us that DCTC artistic director Kent Thompson decided to have him say them here.

Best News for Playwrights -- Small Venue

Curious Theatre Company

It's very hard for playwrights to get their work produced, yet without production, it's impossible for a playwright to hone his craft. And new playwrights are, of course, the heart and soul of a living theater culture. Curious has joined a group of theaters nationwide that believe in showcasing new work -- even guaranteeing three or more productions for each work they select. The resultant "rolling" world premiere allows the play to evolve through testing by several audiences, casts and directors.

Best News for Playwrights -- Large Venue

Denver Center Theatre Company

Artistic director Kent Thompson has taken strides toward his goal of bringing the work of more women and writers of color to the Denver Center. He has also instituted an annual two-day New Play Summit. Jason Grote's 1001 was seen at last year's summit before being mounted this February. This year saw readings of new plays by Theresa Rebeck, Evangeline Ordaz and Neal Bell, as well as an adaptation of Kent Haruf's novel Plainsong by Eric Schmiedl. We look forward to seeing where Thompson takes us next.

Best Theater Production

The Caretaker

You knew from the moment you entered the theater and saw David Lafont's beautifully detailed set -- stacks of papers, a hanging toilet seat, a shopping cart, a bucket set under a leak in the ceiling -- that someone had put a lot of thought into this production, someone with an understanding of subtlety, a passion for detail and an acute sense of place. That someone was director Terry Dodd, who also assembled a first-rate cast. The owner of the disheveled flat -- sad, slow, befuddled Aston -- was played to perfection by Warren Sherrill, who gave the character a subdued and penetrating sweetness. There were also Jarrad Holbrook as Aston's vicious brother, Mick, periodically interrupting his own romantic monologues with jarring spurts of violence, and Jim Hunt as the whiny, manipulative tramp Davies, invited by Aston into the flat. In a play that's all about mystery, futility and power, these three actors gave performances riveting in their focus and intensity. Of course, it always helps to have a brilliant script like Harold Pinter's to work with.

Best Theater Season

Buntport Theater Company

You know a theater's something special if you always find people of all ages and types in the audience, and if you keep hearing yourself recommending the place to friends (and, later, the friends call up to thank you). From script to set, this troupe of seven creates every piece they mount from scratch. They're youthful, literate, experimental and unpretentious; on stage, the actors often manage to be both profound and silly beyond belief at the very same moment. Of Buntport's three plays this season, Winter in Graupel Bay was the least successful, but it was still a soulful, interesting mixture of joy and melancholy. The other two were absolute winners: Something Is Rotten, the Buntporters' insane take on Hamlet in which Ophelia was played by a live goldfish and her father, Polonius, by a Teddy Ruxpin bear; and A Synopsis of Butchery, which explored the Victorian obsession with death, the occult and premature burial.

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