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…
Dreams & Directions, the fourth annual anthology of poetry written by Denver Public Schools elementary school students, will be released at a celebration from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. today at the Tattered Cover in LoDo. DPS teacher Steve Replogle compiled the work, which DPS superintendent Tom Boasberg calls “an inspiring…
In advance of the January 17 release of Jason Heller’s first novel, Taft 2012, Quirk Books has offered up a gorgeously constructed film teaser. A glimpse into the fictional candidacy of a long-dead William Howard Taft, resurrected and running in next year’s actual presidential election, the preview features looming shadows…
The core philosophy of Corey Henderson and Dan Rollman’s book, The RecordSetter Book of World Records, is that everyone can be the world’s best at something — even if it is something ridiculous. They’ll sign their book tonight at the Tattered Cover LoDo and tomorrow at the Boulder Bookstore. In…
The New Yorker might be just as well known for its cartoons as it is for its 10,000-word stories, and one of its illustrators, Roz Chast, who’s been cartooning for the magazine since 1978, will speak tonight at the Newman Center for the Performing Arts, with a book signing to…
If you’ve been around Denver a while, you might know that septuagenarian songstress Judy Collins grew up here and attended East High. The daughter of blind bandleader Charles Collins, Judy’s first official performance as a singer was at the age of 17 seventeen, when she won the local Kiwanis Club’s…
Which dog in this town has the most “person”ality? For the One Book One Denver “Dogs Are People Too” photo contest, pet-owners got to submit pictures of their dogs that best captured the feel of this year’s book, The Art of Racing in the Rain, in which author Garth Stein…
Counterpath was founded in 2006 as a small press publisher, but since then it has expanded into much more. The nonprofit now not only publishes experimental work, but is also a physical space that sells other small press books and hosts art installations, readings, and film screenings. Tonight at 7…
This is part of a series of posts in honor of Denver Arts Week, saluting some of our favorite people and places on the arts scene. A few weeks ago, I got a text from a friend excitedly telling me that she had come across a zine I made when…
Author Gregory Maguire will be in town tonight at the Tattered Cover LoDo to celebrate, sign and talk about his newest book, Out of Oz, the final installment in his series of Wizard of Oz-based novels. The series, which debuted with Wicked sixteen years ago and spawned a hit Broadway…
Poet, humorist and writer Jack Collom has been an integral part of the Boulder poet community for a long while, and his work has ranged from traditional books of poetry to CDs of yodeling. Tonight, at The Laughing Goat in Boulder, Jack will be celebrating his 80th birthday with a…
There’s a lot more to Carré Otis’s new book than her famous ex-husband, Mickey Rourke. But he is a big part of her story. The Colorado resident and supermodel will be signing her new memoir, Beauty, Disrupted, Saturday at 2 p.m. at the Boulder Book Store. The book details everything…
