It can be hard to know what to make of art, especially when the art in question is that of Vance Kirkland, Colorado’s foremost abstract expressionist. Sometimes, you need a little help with the interpretation — and as far as that goes, what better to interpret art than poetry, another…
If poetry is, as writer J. Patrick Lewis described, “prose, bent out of shape,” then Sandra and Ben Doller have made a career out of bending. This poet duo will bring its crooked prose to the University of Colorado at Boulder for a reading this evening that’s sure to be…
There are slam poets, and then there are SLAM POETS: Though there’s more than a little love and support spread around in the performance poetry community, it’s still everybody for themselves when they hit the stage. That means there’s going to be some fierce nitty-gritty going down at Westword MasterMind-winning…
At 3 p.m. on Sunday, Sarah Vowell will sign copies of her latest tome, Unfamiliar Fishes, at the Tattered Cover LoDo, 1628 16th Street. We caught up with Vowell about her inspiration for the book, what she learned and how this book fits into her previous body of work…
Cristy Road is a queer punk-rocker radical feminist Cubana artist and writer; her career as a ‘zinester dates back to the 7th grade and a time when she struggled with personal gender and identity issues, masking over her true feelings with a combination of deep-felt loneliness and an obsession with…
Kevin Anderson has lost track of the number of books he’s written. He knows it’s over a hundred, and when it gets to that point it’s not a matter of not remembering. There are other factors — this one didn’t make it to print, that one was reissued, and it…
For much of his career, David Sirota has been a hard-hitting leftist political operative, running campaigns with what former Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta once called his “instinct for the jugular” and later moving into the world of Journalism and commentary; these days, he’s a Denver-based syndicated…
Jasper Fforde (pronounced “ford”) has a quirky side. This comes as no shock to fans of this British author, but folks who aren’t familiar with him might be pleasantly surprised by his somewhat skewed take on life. For instance, the main character of his popular Thursday Next series, is… Miss…
In 2009, Tracy Ross, senior editor for Backpacker Magazine, won a National Magazine Award for her December 2007 essay The Source of All Things, a story quite unlike any of the tales of outdoor adventure she’d previously written. The essay centered on a hike she took as an adult with…
It’s not like the story of Grandpa Bredo, the dead guy who unwittingly inspired Colorado’s favorite oddball festival Frozen Dead Guy Days (in Nederland this weekend), is any secret: When he died, his family cryogenically preserved him in a shed out back to await the technology that might one day…
Author Benjamin Percy has his feet in pretty much every pair of shoes on the writing track: he’s a novelist, a short story writer and an essayist, he’s worked on graphic novels and short films and he teaches on top of all that. Since he’s in town tonight at St…
Today is the 107th anniversary of Dr. Seuss’s birth. It is marked with National Read Across America Day, which happens each year to promote literacy and remember one of the greatest children’s authors of all time. And he was a great children’s author, no matter how you look at it:…
Memorizing and reciting great verse kept the epics of the ancient world alive. It helped former hostage Terry Anderson survive years of dismal captivity — and countless closet poets from losing their sanity in a tin-ear world. And last night the act of performing classic poems became a group celebration,…
If we learned anything from Akeelah and the Bee, it’s that spelling bees can be pretty exciting, even if the subject matter is boring — who nedes speling anyway? That shit is for lossers. It’s the do-or-die elimination format that give the bee its drama, and tonight, Poetry Out Loud…
As far as fictional characters go, there is maybe no archetype so boring as the Hero, that figure of unwavering nobility and poise. Whether that hero is deftly vanquishing foes like Superman or valiantly overcoming adversity a la Odysseus, the construct is the same: The Hero represents the David-like ideal…
We generally don’t think much about who is narrating our stories, but in the case of Benjamin Hale’s new novel, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, we have to. Mostly because the narrator is an ape. Hale, who grew up in and around Boulder but who currently lives in New York,…
John Rodwan Jr. has long been writing critically about music, boxing and literature. His essays have found homes in The American Interest, The Mailer Review, Blood and Thunder, Open Letters Monthly, and Spot Literary Magazine, among others. Last year, he published a book, Fighters and Writers, examining the relationship between…
In the way that anything has at least its category in common with its opposite (red is the opposite of green, for example, but they’re both colors), a magazine and a zine are opposites: Where magazines tend to be slick, polished and pandering (ours excepted, of course — we never…
At some point in the career of many a celebrity (probably too many a celebrity) comes the dubious decision of writing a memoir, a book people will read presumably on the basis that it’s written by a famous person. Of course, for most of those famous people, it actually isn’t…
Watching the Whirlwind Company deliver their energetic brand of live verse at the Mercury Café on Wednesday night felt a bit like being in the crowd for a Cream show. Indeed, taking in the combined forces of Mindy Nettifee, Brian Ellis, Jon Sands and Mike McGee — along with a…
Borders filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this morning in New York, making it one more casualty of the continuing slow death of physical media. Six Colorado stores will close in the coming weeks, though none of the Denver locations. They’ve still got some time to right this thing, but it…
Penguin Books, eager to eclipse Twilight with a new moon of its own, sharpened its stakes and rounded up five authors of hot new fantasy titles for Young Adult readers from its various imprints, unleashing them on the world for the Breathless Reads National Book Tour, which haunts the Tattered…
