Three poetry and book events for the week of June 23-29

Whether you’re looking for summer reading, poetic inspiration or just a good time with a side of culture, there’s a literary event for you this week. Read on and we’ll tell you where the poets are rhyming and the hottest authors are reading. See also: Ed Ward’s “Stories, Stories, Bring…

Author Antonya Nelson on LitFest, buying books and Funny Once

Paint the town read! As LitFest 2014 continues at Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop, we caught up with award-winning author Antonya Nelson, who’ll be teaching two classes this week and participate in a free reading on Thursday, June 19. Nelson teaches creative writing at the University of Houston and is the author…

Gary Reilly’s posthumous pre-war novel shows some life

We’ve written before about the strange career of Denver cabbie and secret author Gary Reilly, who wrote more than two dozen novels over decades but never tried to publish any of them before his death from cancer in 2011, at the age of 61. That long silence is now being…

Erica Sodos gets metaphysical at the Mercury Cafe

Abracadabra: She’s out of the box with a wand of her own. Erica Sodos is a magician, psychic entertainer and motivational speaker currently in residence at the Mercury Cafe. In advance of her May 31 show there, The Magic Within: Psychic Explorations in Telepathy and Empathy, we chatted with Sodos…

Denver’s Washington Park looks back at more peaceful times

Washington Park is the focus of a major brewhaha right now. Last week Denver City Councilman Chris Nevitt, who represents the area, sent a letter to the Denver Department of Parks and Recreation asking for a six-month alcohol ban at the park due to abuse and “bad behavior.” The only…

Trista Sutter opens her heart in Happily Ever After

Was it really dozen years ago that Trista Sutter, a pediatric physical therapist moonlighting as a Miami Heat dancer, had her heart broken on the first season of The Bachelor and then became the very first Bachelorette, falling for poetry-writing firefighter Vail Ryan Sutter and getting married on national TV?…

Bruce Weber on bicycling, mortality and Life Is a Wheel

As an obituary writer, Bruce Weber confronts mortality more than most. So he decided to bid farewell to middle age by taking a cross-country bike trip which he used to reflect on aging and mortality in his memoir: Life Is a Wheel: Love, Death, Etc., and a Bike Trip Across…

Ari Kelman’s book on Sand Creek Massacre site wins Bancroft Prize

On Monday, Governor John Hickenlooper announced the creation of the Sand Creek Massacre Commemoration Commission, designed to further understanding of that dark chapter in Colorado history as the 50th anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre approaches on November 29, 1964. And that process just got a big boost when Columbia…

Poet Yosimar Reyes on the power of personal narratives

Your story matters, says poet Yosimar Reyes, who denies the dominant narrative of United States citizenship, that “real Americans” are blue-eyed, blond-haired, white, upper-middle class men fully assimilated into the American Dream. This isn’t historical; this isn’t reality, he says:This is a nation founded on immigrants. Living in the United…

Jason Heller on The Time Travelers Almanac

If there’s one thing science-fiction writers love as much as exploring space and meeting aliens, it’s traveling back in time and screwing things up. From H.G. Wells to the recent reboot of Star Trek, time travel is one of the genre’s most well-explored tropes, but authors keep finding new ways…

Dayton Foster’s coffee-table book for true deadheads

It may seem downright unChristmasy to be talking about the dead, grateful or not, at this time and season. But if you’ve got an eccentric, contemplative, bookish, introspective type on your shopping list, then I have a suggestion: Dayton Foster’s The Dead Do Speak To Us…of Love, Life & Death…

Local author Robert Rutherford on his debut poetry release

As a member of Rabbit is a Sphere and Everything Absent or Distorted, Robert Rutherford helped bring some of Denver’s finest indie rock and pop to life. Those bands have since ceased to be, but Rutherford is still writing in the same idiom, even if the final form is a…