In case you haven’t seen the exhibit, or have been living under a rock for the past five years or so, PostSecret is a project from Frank Warren that began when he handed out blank postcards to strangers in the Washington, D.C. area, inviting people to decorate the postcards with…
In their book, One Nation Under Sex, Larry Flynt and David Eisenbach are looking for high profile sex scandals that the history books might have missed. That might sound like a book filled with hearsay and smut, but the purpose isn’t so much to bring down our nation’s leaders, but…
Bestselling author Charlaine Harris has seen her creation (the Southern Vampire novel series) turned into a hit television show (True Blood), and she’s kept the momentum going throughout the chain of books that document the story of protagonist Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress who finds herself deeply involved in the…
When most people envision the future, they probably think about the awesome products we’ll have to make our lives easier, but author Greg Lindsay is more concerned about how those products get to us. It’s no secret most manufacturing has moved overseas, and with that move, a global economy has…
Poetry is one of the few written media that actually sounds better when it comes from the voice of the author. Unlike say, fiction, which tends to come out like a unnecessary, often drunken mess, poetry is actually enhanced by being able to see or hear the poem — case…
Denver-based sportswriter and BBC Radio baseball broadcaster Josh Chetwynd has a new book in stores this week with a catchy title: The Secret History of Balls: The Stories Behind the Things We Love to Catch, Whack, Throw, Kick, Bounce and Bat. He’ll be reading from and signing copies of the…
Paolo Giordano was working on his doctorate in particle physics when he wrote The Solitude of Prime Numbers, a beautifully rendered tale of two misfit children whom Giordano compares to twin primes — a prime number that differs from another prime number by two (like eleven and thirteen). The further…
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…
