Colorado
Colorado’s literary identity is building, page by page
The customer at the counter of West Side Books in North Denver was trading thoughts with Terry, the ponytailed, bespectacled, thoughtful employee at the register.
Which Jack Kerouac book should he start with?
“On the Road,” Terry answered, then added, “It’s probably easiest.” Somehow that sounded like the kind of understatedly perfect advice one so often receives at an independent bookstore.
Published in 1957, the roman à clef carved Kerouac (as Sal Paradise) and his pal Neil Cassady (Dean Moriarty) into the cornerstone of American letters but also into the history of this town. Kerouac famously bopped around Writers’ Square, My Brother’s Bar and Five Points.
One could argue that the next soul to shape Denver’s sense of its literary self as deeply wasn’t a writer but a purveyor of literature, and ardent defender of the First Amendment: Tattered Cover Book Store founder Joyce Meskis (who died in 2023). And then there was Clara Villarosa, the force behind one of the most robust Black-owned bookstores in the nation: the Hue-Man Bookstore, first in Denver and later, Harlem.
This wee bit of namechecking might be achingly nostalgic were it not for a palpable surge in literary oomph about town. Bookstores continue to have their share of existential challenges, but in the face of the too constant dirge that people (young people, they’re throwing you under the bus!) aren’t reading much, people are still visiting and opening bookstores, enrolling in craft workshops, launching reading series.
Next week features back-to-back events that speak to a surge in literary engagement: Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s gala, Illumination (Sept. 19) and the Margins Book Festival, a program of the Word: A Storytelling Sanctuary (Sept. 21-22).
The best arts ecosystems are both rooted and itinerant: locals stick around but also head out into the world even as folks come and decide to stay awhile. Kathryn Eastman, founding editor of the newly launched site the Rocky Mountain Reader, recalled recognizing something familiar in “Hum,” the well-reviewed, latest novel by Helen Phillips, who grew up in Colorado but currently lives in Brooklyn. “The main character’s desire — her desire for her children [is] to experience nature and the wild,” said Eastman during a recent video call. “It’s such a good book. And as soon as I found out that she was born and raised in Colorado, that aspect of the book made so much sense to me.”
On the other hand, Canada-born Vauhini Vara — her “Immortal King Rao” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist — makes her home in Colorado; she teaches at Colorado State University. Peter Heller, author of the bestselling novel “Dog Stars,” lives in town. His most recent novel, “Burn,” was published last month.
It’s not just an uptick in local luminaries or the parade of authors in and out of the city that suggest a sea change. It’s the cumulative effect of people rethinking how literature works in their lives.
“Booksellers all over the state are more and more becoming community centers,” said Eastburn. “Where there’s writing instruction, places where there are book clubs and places where mothers can gather and let their kids go over to the children’s section and all kinds of things that they do.”
“Denver’s a deliciously unpretentious place in which to engage in art making,” said Lighthouse’s program director Andrea Dupree, who co-founded the organization in 1997 with Michael Henry. “There’s something that feels both lower stakes and higher touch about the mountain West to many of us, especially if we’ve experienced other ecosystems.”
Here are five signs the local ecosystem is flourishing.
Illumination: A (Wild) Literary Soiree
Last year, the Lighthouse Writers Workshop gala’s honoree was the fearsome Roxane Gay. Arguably gentler but no less dynamic, Cheryl Strayed — author of “Wild” — headlines the Sept. 19 celebration. Lighthouse (where I sometimes teach) has much to celebrate. Summer’s Lit Fest was among the best attended in the organization’s near 20-year history and the second to take place in their sleek home in the York Street Yards complex.
“To many who participate in Denver’s literary scene, I think the result is a feeling of freedom — to take risks in their writing, to embrace their feelings of struggle (Michael Cunningham called it, memorably, that “writerly feeling of ineptitude”), to get it right, Dupree stated. “I’ve seen so many writers find their support teams here, and so many of those teams cross generations, race, gender and walk of life.”
Among the workshops, gatherings and retreats (the Writing in Color Retreat and the Queer Creatives Retreat), the organization offers its lauded Hard Times program, which provides space to writers experiencing — or who have experienced — homelessness, addiction, poverty or other challenges.
Tickets for the gala are selling briskly; tickets for a streaming version of an event featuring Strayed the next night are also available. Lighthouse Writers Workshop. 3844 York Street. lighthousewriters.org.
Margins Book Festival
Two years ago, the Margins Book Festival featured one of the most inspiring keynotes I’ve seen. It wasn’t so much a speech but more of a conversation between Nicole Counts, senior editor at the Random House imprint “One World,” and two of her writers, Nate Marshall and K-Ming Chang. In addition to sweetly confessional stories from the authors, the event offered a master class in what an insightful, supportive rapport between editor and writer looks — and sounds — like. So, the bar has been raised for next week’s edition of the biannual event.
The Margins Book Festival is the handiwork of the Denver-based literary arts organization Word: A Storytelling Sanctuary, founded in 2016 by Viniyanka Prasad, a criminal defense attorney. The Word places BIPOC writers with publishing professionals so that authors can find a path to sharing the stories that speak to and of them and deepen our broader cultural conversations.
Headlining the upcoming festival are authors R.O. Kwon, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio and Aaliyah Bilal. This year’s installment of the two-day festival will unfurl on the Santa Fe Arts District corridor.
Margins Book Festival, Sept. 21-22 at Su Teatro, Center for Visual Arts and other locations along the Santa Fe Arts District corridor. Admission is free, although passes are encouraged.
Two bookish hubs for the soul
On a recent and hot Sunday afternoon, Petals & Pages was cool, quiet, oasis-like. How apt. After all, this feminist, queer-owned haven in the Santa Fe Arts District sells a selection of smartly curated books, as well as flowers and plants. It also offers respite for the weary writer with its Writers Corner, and workshops galore. In a clever touch, the shop has memberships, which helps keep it chugging but also seeds its community-nurturing atmosphere. Petals & Pages, 956 Santa Fe Drive, Denver. petalsandpagesofdenver.com.
Flowers and book leaves? Who doesn’t appreciate a hybrid? In the Ballpark neighborhood sits the print-and-social-justice go-to, The Shop at MATTER. The creation of printmaker Rick Griffith and his partner Debra Johnson, MATTER is writing the good fight with its savvy collection of books and other printed treasures. Just bought the handsome (and prescient) “W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America.” Barely resisted “Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror,” edited by “Get Out” auteur Jordan Peele, (because a budget is a budget is a budget).
The bookstore is adjacent to MATTER’s design studio, where graphics and printmaking whiz Griffith plies his craft and teaches others to do the same. The Shop has room for gatherings, screenings, readings and more. This Saturday, it will host the monthly installment of the Silent Book Club. Think of it as a foxy reading room with very cool people who zip in and read in what the founders of the global gathering call “companionable silence.” The Shop at MATTER, 2114 Market St. shopatmatter.com
Reading Den
One of the coolest watering holes in town — pour me another one of those Kinda Tropicals, why don’tcha? — the woman-owned Fort Greene bar on 45th Avenue in Globeville plays host to a reading series that has its own burgeoning identity as wonderfully hip. The brainchild of Adam Vitcavage and Sarah Ann Noe, Reading Den’s next installment (Sept. 25) mixes a potent cocktail of local and visiting writers: Stefanie Kirby, Danny Goodman, O.O. Sangoyomi, Johnny Redway and Isabella Welch. The Reading Den at Fort Greene, 321 E. 45th Ave. fortgreenbar.com
Rocky Mountain Reader
Kathryn Eastburn modeled the new literary hub on Chapter 16, an online lit journal created in 2009 by the essayist Margaret Renkl (Reese Witherspoon’s beloved high-school teacher) and supported by Tennessee Humanities. Chapter 16’s tagline — “A Community for Writers, Readers & Passersby” — captures the expansive spirit of building camaraderie between those who write and those who read, and those who are sometimes one in the same.
“I just think what they’re doing makes sense,” said Eastburn, who lives in Colorado Springs. “They provide a hub for the whole state. And, you know, as media has become so fragmented and literary arts coverage is siloed, each organization has its own thing. It seemed like it was a good idea to bring together readers and writers, book lovers, in general, and publishers all together in one place.”
For her own, statewide site, which launched Sept. 1, Eastburn wants “people to know who’s out there and what they’re doing.” And this isn’t just an invitation for city dwellers.
“I want rural readers to know what’s going on, whatever population center is nearest them. There’s fascinating stuff going on all over the state, but people in Greeley don’t know what people in Durango are doing.” rockymountainreader.org
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, In The Know, to get entertainment news sent straight to your inbox.
Colorado
‘We couldn’t do this in another place’: Horror film looks to make Southern Colorado the next Hollywood
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KKTV) – It’s commonly understood that many of the best blockbusters are made in Southern California but a group of local filmmakers wants to prove Southern Colorado can be a destination for both aspiring and established auteurs.
Shooting began in Fountain this spring on ‘Devil In The Trunk’, a new horror film set in Colorado’s eastern plains.
“Devil In The Trunk is about a small-town woman who encounters a mysterious traveler driving this car right here who claims to have the actual devil trapped in the trunk of her car,” executive producer Leon Kelly said. “As you can imagine, when the devil comes to your small town, terrible and dangerous things can happen.”
Director, writer, and producer Evan Alderson said they wanted to make the film as Colorado as possible.
“We ended up finding a local Colorado writer, and we ended up collaborating to come up with this idea that could act as a love letter to Colorado,” he said.
While Colorado may be most famous for its soaring mountain peaks, Kelly said the plains were a much more fitting setting.
“It’s both beautiful and dangerous at the same time,” he said. “One of the underlying themes is the desolation and the loneliness and how vulnerable some folks can be in small towns and out in rural areas.”
Kelly said not only is the film meant to showcase Colorado’s natural beauty, but also to showcase the talent of the people who live there.
“It’s a proof of concept, to show that we have not only the talented people but the infrastructure that can support really high-quality, independent films,” he said. “We know we’ve got great filmmakers here, we know we have really talented craftspeople here, but they don’t necessarily have the opportunities to work on something like this on this scale that’s a narrative film.”
With the Sundance Film Festival set to make its debut in Boulder in 2027, Kelly said people are asking new questions about what Colorado can do for those looking to tell stories on the big screen.
“Can Colorado become a hub? Can that be a place, a destination where others come? Can that be a place where our own filmmakers can come into their own?” he said.
Alderson said once the film is finished they will put it out on the film festival circuit, and even look for distribution.
“That will look like a theatrical release, potentially, in an ideal world, or it will be straight to streaming services like Amazon, Hulu, that type of stuff,” he said.
Copyright 2026 KKTV. All rights reserved.
The now 19-year-old victim, who Brent Metz is accused of shooting in the face, took the stand in Metz’s trial Thursday. Metz, a former town of Mountain View councilman, was in the second day of his trial hearings.
The teenager, who has recovered well physically from the shooting back in September of 2024, told the story of what led up to the shooting, then said he blacked out for a period after he was shot.
The young man, Jack (CBS Colorado is not sharing the victim’s last name) said he and his younger friend went to ask for permission to take pictures at a scenic home near Conifer. At first, they parked outside the gated driveway and tried to figure out how to contact someone there. They then hopped a low fence and went up to the house.
Jack said he had difficulty locating a front door on the home, but the large property also had a garage and barn. They heard music coming from the barn, which is a common practice for people with animals to leave music playing to calm animals while away.
“We decided to knock on the barn door and then after a couple a minutes we decided to go back down the driveway,” Jack said in court.
The two friends went back over the fence and moved the car to a spot not blocking the driveway along the right-of-way at the road. Minutes later, Brent Metz drove up in his black GMC pickup truck, blocking their car in. Metz got out. Jack testified that he raised his hands at some point, a claim the defense questioned in cross examination. He related that he was getting out to try to greet the person getting out of the truck.
“I just (got) the door open I kind of turned to open my door and then turned to get out, and I saw someone get out, and then it was black,” Jack said.
The victim soon awoke bleeding and injured. “I looked down and I thought I was going to die. So I said that a couple times,” Jack testified.
“My mouth was on fire and it felt like my upper lip was gone, and I could taste little fragments,” Jack told the court. Jack’s friend and Metz tried to help him out of the car.
“The one who shot me was trying to help me get out of the car.”
Soon after, Metz left his side.
“He helped me sit down, and then he walked away,” Jack said.
“I started to realize I needed to stay as calm as I could, and when I got out of the car, I sat down, but I was very anxious,” Jack recalled.
Later, the victim had to have surgery in order to have the bullet fragments removed from his face. One of the fragments was more than an inch in size. He had trouble breathing through his right nostril due to the injuries to his nose. His eye was blackened for a long time, and a tooth was shattered.
Jack did not remember Metz saying much.
The testimony followed hours of testimony from a gun testing expert who looked at the weapon at the request of the prosecution. Derek Watkins is an engineer who said he has seen many claims of weapons not working properly.
“My experience is that, if you manufacture a firearm, at some point in time, it’s going, you’re going to run across the claim that it behaves in a defective manner,” Watkins said.
Metz’s defense is centered on a claim that the Sig Sauer P320 he had fired on its own without Metz pulling the trigger.
“There was nothing about the gun through the testing or through the examination of the components indicating it would function any other way than it was designed and left the factory,” Watkins said.
The defense had little luck getting Watkins to agree the gun could fire on its own, but did try to point out to the jury in questions that Watkins has previously testified in civil litigation about the gun’s integrity on behalf of the manufacturer.
The case continues Friday when it could wrap up. Metz faces four charges, the most serious of which is second-degree assault, but also two menacing charges and one of illegal discharge of a firearm.
On the cusp of the United States’ 250th anniversary and Colorado’s 150th, the Centennial State and its Catholic witnesses show modern Catholics a path forward.
Colorado celebrates its own 150th anniversary this year, as the rest of the country marks 250 years since the founding of the United States. The two milestones bear an interesting connection. In the very year of independence, one of the most important explorations of Colorado was undertaken by two Franciscan friars: Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante.
Faith Crosses the Rockies
While the importance of the Domínguez-Escalante Expedition should not be overestimated — it didn’t lead to any settlements and mostly focused on Utah — it nonetheless symbolizes the coming of the Christian faith into Colorado. Their expedition traces the path the Church followed into the Rockies, initially coming up from the south, to be met later from the East by miners. Leaving Santa Fe in the very month independence was declared, the two friars and their companions crossed into the modern-day boundaries of Colorado at the beginning of August 1776. They were not the first Spaniards to enter the territory of the Ute and Arapahoe tribes north of Nueva Mexico — Juan de Oñate was in 1598, and they also relied on the previous expeditions of Rivera — but the friars opened up more regular access to it as they laid the foundation for the Santa Fe Trail that would lead from New Mexico to Southern California.
The friars found in Colorado beautiful mountain vistas, remarking that it was cold even in the summer, as well as dangerous canyons and abandoned settlements in the Mesa Verde area. Their journal remarks: “We traveled a league and turned west through very pleasant narrow valleys with woods, very abundant with pastures, with different blooms and flowers.” (The Domínguez-Escalante Journal, translated by Fray Angelico Chavez, University of Utah Press, 15). Focusing on possible mission sites more than a continental passage, they insisted to all their companions that they should not “have any purpose other than the one we had, which was God’s glory and the good of souls” (40). Their desires would take 110 years to come to fruition with the founding of the first Catholic mission to Native Americans in Colorado, St. Ignatius, on the Southern Ute Reservation in Ignacio, Colorado, in 1886.
From Frontier Territory to Catholic Settlement
Catholic life was slow to arrive in Colorado compared to other parts of the nation, especially given the early settlement of New Mexico not far to the south. The Spanish were never able to create permanent settlements in Colorado, with one failed attempt near Pueblo in 1787. This is where 1776 regains its significance, even for the Church’s development in the region. It was only after the United States annexed the Southwest following the Mexican-American War in 1848 that Catholic settlement began. From the south, settlers arrived from Taos to establish San Luis on April 9, 1851. Not long after, in 1858, the Pikes Peak Goldrush brought a flood of miners from the East. From this mix of New Mexican settlers, Native missions and Catholic miners, the Catholic Church of Colorado finally emerged.
In 1860, Father Joseph Projectus Machebeuf arrived from Santa Fe and, in the eight years before he became Denver’s first bishop, the energetic priest established eighteen churches. I first encountered him through Willa Cather’s fictional portrayal of him as the character Vaillant in her novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop (and she relied heavily on Machebeuf’s letters for the book). Though primarily set in New Mexico, Cather brings the history of the Church in the Southwest to life through the vibrant, often tense meetings of Natives, Mexicans, newly arrived Americans and the French clergy seeking to unite them into a cohesive whole. It was Bishop Machebeuf who presided over the Church when Colorado became a state in 1876.
A Little-Known Bishop With An Important Lesson
His successor, Bishop Nicholas Matz, likewise came to Colorado as a missionary from France and experienced firsthand the difficulties miners faced in mountain towns, especially as a pastor in Georgetown. Seth Fabian brings this lesser-known figure to life in his new book, The Pilgrim Bishop: The Spiritual Biography of Nichols C. Matz (TAN Books, 2026).
Even after living in Colorado for nearly twelve years and working for the Archdiocese of Denver for six, I didn’t know much about this misunderstood and even controversial bishop, who often lacked support from his clergy. Even in a newly established state, still riding high from its mining operations, Bishop Matz interpreted the events around him with a lens formed by the violent revolutions of the Old World, fearing and overestimating the “potential reach of radical socialists or anarchists” (11).
Bishop Matz’s difficulty in addressing the social question in his diocese points to an ongoing difficulty for both Colorado and the entire nation in this celebratory year marking their founding. Dr. Fabian raises a fundamental question we must consider: “the question of how individual Catholics live their daily lives in a pluralist society” (386).
We have a strong legacy of Catholic settlement across the continent, of our ancestors seeking to consecrate this land to God. In fact, in just a few weeks, on June 11, the U.S. bishops will do so again when they consecrate the nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Yet we face pressing challenges that call us to wade into difficult social questions, especially those related to technology and artificial intelligence, as Pope Leo XIV is expected to do in his first encyclical, to be released on May 25.
Despite the real challenges, if we advance, as Domínguez and Escalante did, seeking “God’s glory and the good of souls” above all else, we can continue our great Catholic legacy and open a path for future generations to follow.
-
South-Carolina5 minutes agoTrump jumps into 2 GOP governor primaries, backing Evette in South Carolina and Feenstra in Iowa – WTOP News
-
South Dakota11 minutes agoMaternity care deserts: Where they are and how to improve
-
Tennessee17 minutes agoAnswering Tennessee Football’s Burning Questions Less Than 100 Days Until Kickoff | Rocky Top Insider
-
Texas23 minutes agoWhy are Mississippi State softball fans wearing broccoli shirts vs Texas at WCWS?
-
Utah29 minutes agoVideo: Utah startup employs those right out of prison and celebrates new milestone – KSLTV.com
-
Vermont35 minutes agoWith two major vacancies, who will lead the Vermont House and Senate? – VTDigger
-
Virginia41 minutes agoNetflix casting Central Virginia singles for “Love on the Spectrum” after Danville man joins show
-
Washington47 minutes agoAs an AI tech-hub, Washington must lead with conscience
