Books

Bessie Coleman may not be a household name like Amelia Earhart — but she should be. As the first black woman to get her pilot’s license — in 1921, before Earhart was in the air — Coleman is the subject of the new zine series Mocha Chocolata Mamma, by Marya…

Denver’s earned its rep as a slam-poet factory: The city not only supports two competitive adult teams, each of which has taken a national title in the last decade, but it also has a strong youth wing, Minor Disturbance, one of this year’s Westword MasterMind Award-winners. And tonight is when…

What’s striking about Cheryl Strayed’s writing is its radical sincerity and vulnerability. She pens personal essays as responses in her advice column Dear Sugar (which was written anonymously until recently), dishing out loving, thoughtful advice to questioners she addresses as “honey bun” and “sweet pea.” Her new memoir, Wild: From…

Sister Spit is coming. The queer, feminist-minded, spoken-word tour will land at St. Cajetan Event Center on the Auraria campus Friday night, and at the helm of the event is founder, author and icon Michelle Tea. From her debut memoir The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in…

Like a lot of art, Serena Chopra’s debut chapbook, Penumbra, was inspired in part by a tumultuous relationship. “There was a really bad fight in which I stole a saw, literally I stole a saw from this person’s house because I did not know what else to do,” laughs the…

Richard Brautigan spent a few years basking in the celebrity sun as the author of such counterculture classics as Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar. But it was a short honeymoon, and the writer, who came up from poverty, fell into a trough of depression and alcoholism later…

Local author Kasi Alexander’s first book, Becoming sage, is an emotive and realistic peek into both the BDSM and polyamorous lifestyles. It takes readers by the hand–gently places a leather cuff on the hand–and leads them through a raw, sensual world of power exchange and many loves that mainstream readers…

That Minnesota slam poet Sierra DeMulder commands an audience is a given: The high-ranked word-slinger helped the St. Paul Poetry Slam Team take the nationals two years in a row, and that’s the top line on a list of kudos she’s received over the last few years. The author of…

On a Tuesday night on the cusp of spring, when a young man’s fancy turns and the cruelest month looms just days away, you could do worse than head to Lakewood to hear great verse declaimed at the seventh annual Poetry Out Loud state finals. Declaimed, emoted, and embraced –…

If there’s any winner in the Women of the World Poetry Slam, it’s Denver, first figuratively and now literally. The international championship, in its fifth year and Denver’s first as the host city, kicked off Thursday and held its second preliminary round on Friday before ending with two X chromosomes…

The greatest adventures are always more about the journey than the destination, but that truism can be easy to forget when you can’t wait to get that heavy pack off your back. If the actual hiking isn’t the most enjoyable part of your backpacking trips, then you just might be…

Tonight at 7:30 p.m., Keith Martin-Smith and Jun Po Denis Kelly Roshi will appear at the Boulder Book Store to celebrate the release of Martin-Smith’s biography, A Heart Blown Open: The Life and Practice of Zen Master Jun Po Denis Kelly Roshi. Martin-Smith, who lives in Boulder, sold a house…

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, as Friedrich Nietzsche observed. And for Ryan Ashley Knowles, that adage rings painfully true: He lost his mother to domestic violence when he was fourteen. But while his upbringing was filled with grief and tragedy, he is determined to carve out a career…

Fred Beckey, author of more than a dozen mountaineering guides, has made more first ascents than any other North American climber — and possibly more than any climber anywhere. And that’s not just because he’s been at it the longest, though the fact that he just turned 89 and is…

Slam Nuba is still on a roll: After winning one of Westword’s coveted MasterMind awards last year and sending a team to the nationals last summer that snagged first place, the spoken-word collective (which will also perform February 18 at Artopia ) is hard at work finding fresh ways to…

When Heather Donahue couldn’t get acting work after starring in iconic horror flick The Blair Witch Project, she decided to start growing marijuana. But the story is more involved than that, as she details in her new book, Growgirl, about moving to the California (and a town she refers to…

The Fried Twinkie Manifesto was never expected to hit the big-time. Its author, Denver local Ryan Moehring, wrote it in his spare time (concurrently holding down a day-job as a government employee), found an editor on Craigslist, got a friend to design the cover and put up the cash to…

Taft 2012, the debut novel from erstwhile Westword writer Jason Heller, hits bookstores today, and Heller will be reading from the book at 7:30 tonight at the Tattered Cover, 2526 East Colfax Avenue. Below, Heller talks about his time-traveling William H. Taft and what in tarnation the 27th president makes…

The Thorn and the Blossom — which will be released today — is a book unlike any you’ve seen before. It’s actually two stories in one; the accordion-style binding contains perspectives of both star-crossed lovers Brendan and Evelyn as they meet, are separated and then meet again over a span…

Freedom of Speech, an open microphone poetry night hosted by LadySpeech on the first and third Tuesdays of the month at Gypsy House, has become one of the city’s most dynamic and intimate evenings of poetry and song. The crowd starts trickling into the basement of Gypsy around 7:30 p.m…

The Denver Zine Library at 2727 West 27th Avenue is hosting a special Rad Dad reading on Saturday at 1 p.m. featuring Tomas Moniz, editor of the Rad Dad zine and co-editor (with Daddy Dialectic editor Jeremy Adam Smith) of the new book Rad Dad: Dispatches From the Frontiers of…

In this state, we’re blessed to live close to areas where there’s very little light pollution, so the stars of the night sky are easily visible. Local mystic Renna Shesso (and onetime Westword art critic, writing as Nancy Clegg) has been fascinated by the stars since the mid-’60s, when she…