Book It: The Five Best Literary Events This Week

Denver’s literary scene must figure that the whole love-and-romance angle is already well covered for Valentine's Day, because you won’t see much of that on the schedule this week. Instead, you'll find loss, pets and some really good confectionery. Here are your five best literary bets for the coming week.

Patricia Blocker, Letting in the Dog
Wednesday, February 12, 7 p.m.
Tattered Cover Aspen Grove
7301 South Santa Fe Drive, Littleton
Free
Peaceful Paws Dog Training owner Patricia Blocker, a certified professional dog trainer with over two decades in practice, brings her new book Letting in the Dog: Opening Hearts and Minds to a Deeper Understanding to Tattered Cover Aspen Grove for a discussion and signing. It’s a lighthearted and earnest approach to forming true connections with your dog, seeking the intersection between the academic and the spiritual for better communication with everyone’s canine best friend.

Susan Angel Miller, Permission to Thrive
Thursday, February 13, 7 p.m.
Tattered Cover LoDo
1628 16th Street
Free
Author Susan Angel Miller comes to Tattered Cover LoDo to discuss and sign her memoir Permission to Thrive: My Journey from Grief to Growth. The book traces Miller’s extraordinary journey from the sudden passing of her daughter from a brain tumor to the family’s decision to donate that daughter’s organs, to the saving of a life of a woman with whom the Miller family would eventually cultivate an exceptional relationship.

Prageeta Sharma, Grief Sequence
Thursday, February 13, 7:30 p.m.
Colorado State University’s Lory Student Center
1101 Center Avenue Mall, Fort Collins
Free
Fort Collins’s Old Firehouse Books teams up with CSU Creative Writing to present poet Prageeta Sharma and her new collection Grief Sequence in this reading, discussion, and signing. The book contains a series of poems rooted in the profoundly narrative yet disorienting experience of losing a loved one. It’s a demonstration that “grief...is ripe for the sort of intellectual and emotional processing of which poetry is most capable.”
Chocolate Tasting Fair
Friday, February 14, 5:30 p.m.
Boulder Book Store
1107 Pearl Street, Boulder
$5
What makes an event in which you get to partake in a decadent tasting of various delicious morsels from local chocolatiers related to the literary life? When it happens at the Boulder Book Store, of course, and said chocolates are surrounded by the romance of the written word. Over 25 vendors will supply chocolates to sample. Why spend $30 on a giant cardboard heart full of average candy when you can pay $5 for a taste of some of the best and most inspired chocolates available? As always, the entry price is good toward any purchase – sweets of either the chocolate or literary variety. And you won’t have that unfinished box of chocolates haunting your countertop well into next week, either.

Sophia Shalmiyev, Mother Winter
Saturday, February 15, 5:30 p.m.
Lighthouse Writers Workshop
1515 Race Street
Free ($5 donation suggested)
Sophie Shalmiyev, author of the Kirkus-starred memoir Mother Winter, brings her haunting and deeply personal story to Lighthouse Writers Workshop for a reading, discussion, and signing. Shalmiyev fled the Soviet Union at the age of eleven, where she was forced to abandon her estranged and alcoholic mother; she went on to search for surrogate mothers in books, art, lovers, and other lost souls. Shalmiyev will be presenting a craft talk, "Memoir Four Ways," earlier in the day. For more information on the full schedule of available events, see the Lighthouse website.

Have a literary event you think should be included on this list? Send details to [email protected].