Though poet and author Gloria Velásquez was born dirt poor in Loveland and later settled with her family in nearby Johnstown, she left northern Colorado long ago for California, where she earned her doctorate at Stanford and now teaches at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. But Colorado provides the…

Denver artist Carlos Frésquez views the world through kaleidoscope glasses — or, to be more exact, collide-oscope glasses — by layering elements from his own cultural background with a strong pop-cultural sensibility and an awareness of art’s long march through history. It’s Batman meets Picasso on a retablo, with homies…

It’s National Poetry Month, but trying to find things to do in Denver when you’re a poet is apparently only slightly easier than finding them when you’re dead. Lighthouse Writers Workshop, a local independent writing school, aims to improve those odds when its new Writer’s Studio Series debuts this week…

When The International Experimental (TIE) Cinema Exposition, a worldwide Colorado-based collective of contemporary avant-garde filmmakers, started in 1999, it was for a four-day festival set in the rarefied reaches of Telluride. That was fine and dandy, says TIE executive director Chris May, except for one ironic detail: “When we were…

Like many circus performers, Gregory Popovich was born into the life: A member of a Russian circus family, the renowned juggler and clown starred in the Moscow Circus and worked with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey before turning to his current shtick, Gregory Popovich’s Comedy and Pet Theatre. His…

Forgive me if my age is showing, but I was just out walking when from out of the pawnshop down the street came blaring Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” the song that changed hundreds of rebellious lives back in the moldy ’60s. And it sounded so fresh, Dylan’s urgent…

Two days, sixty bands: The Ultimate Music Xperience is a little bit of everything — talent search, sneak preview, audience-participation event and free-entertainment spectacle. But when the annual Capitol Hill People’s Fair music tryouts are over, musical careers will be cinched — or crushed — as the stage is set…

Sandy Skoglund’s installation “Breathing Glass” is a thing of shimmering beauty. Its meticulously hung yet precarious blue-glass panels quiver in a sixteen-square-foot space, embedded with a grid of hundreds of glass dragonflies intermingled with mini-marshmallows that fall like snowflakes amid the sparkling insects. An intricate glass mosaic glitters on the…

Bill Nye the Science Guy’s motto is, “Leave the world better than you found it.” He owns approximately six dozen bow ties, and he advises kids interested in science to “try things, then clean up after yourself.” Nye had a mechanical-engineering degree from Cornell University and a long career in…

Hearts were broken when retailer Carolyn Fineran closed her Cherry Creek North store Tapestry three years ago: A sumptuous trove of unique women’s clothing and jewelry handcrafted in a folkloric, gypsy spirit, there’s never been anything quite like it in town before or since. But Fineran didn’t want to be…

Has this buttoned-down new millennium got you down? Need a jolt of that good, old refreshing Front Range bohemian culture? You’ll find it at Wine, Art and Revoluciones, a multimedia evening hosted monthly by Revoluciones Collective Art Space, (719 West Eighth Avenue), a hole-in-the-wall along the Santa Fe Drive corridor…

Thanks to Henry Thoreau, the name “Walden” evokes the ultimate in natural tranquility. Of peace and quiet. Of simpler times. But the new, highly touted Walden Family Playhouse — a professional children’s theater the likes of which we haven’t seen in these parts — is anything but tranquil. The Walden’s…

Because contemporary mural painting has roots in Mexico, where Diego Rivera, José Orozco and David Siqueiros pioneered the medium early in the twentieth century, it’s been a natural carryover in heavily Hispanic Colorado. Big, in-your-face narrative public art has long been making statements in communities across our state. In celebration…

Thursday, February 27 In this corner, wearing red-white-and-blue trunks, Mr. Thomas Jefferson! And over here, in black stripes, his opponent, Alexander Hamilton! Now gents, a clean fight! Expect words — but not fists — to fly when the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities American Spirit Series hosts a live Chautauqua…

Not unlike many Holocaust survivors, onetime World War II Japanese internment-camp detainees just don’t want to talk about it, so they bury their anger and sadness. But in the current political climate — one in which North Carolina congressman Howard Coble can condone the camps by noting that they were…

Elvis Cole used to be a wiseass, a Los Angeleno P.I. with a classic chip on his shoulder and an inspiration-giving statue of Jiminy Cricket overlooking his cheesy gumshoe office. What happened? The invention of popular mystery writer Robert Crais, Cole has gotten noticeably deeper as his series of adventures…

Denver’s Industrial Arts Theatre Company has been alive and kicking for over fifteen years. The resilient troupe has called more than one inner-city venue home during that time, and the recent demise of the Denver Civic Theatre — its most recent roost — isn’t going to change things. The folks…

Opera and crime fighting are more alike than you’d think. Both brim with the stuff of life: drama, angst, raw humanity, intense emotions, murder and mayhem. You name it, they’ve both got it. Just ask renowned tenor and former Miami-Dade police officer Jorge Antonio Pita, who’s lived in both worlds…

We all have skeletons in our closets, but Bobby Bridger’s is particularly fascinating: The great-grandnephew of renowned mountain man Jim Bridger, Bobby was so drawn in by the rustic romance of his ancestor’s Old West milieu that he eventually dedicated his life to remembering it. He does so largely in…

Buildings and history go hand in hand, but these days they seem to fall hand in hand, as well: One man’s castle is another man’s future condo; if it ain’t modern, out it goes. Before you begin any painful pondering over what might happen to today’s equivalents of the Acropolis,…

According to novelist Ron Hansen, what the world needs now is a little screwball comedy. That’s just what he’s delivered, too: Hansen’s new sliver of a book, Isn’t It Romantic? An Entertainment, is intended as a sweet tribute to screwball auteur Preston Sturges, but it’s also pure Hansen. The tome…

Conductor Marin Alsop and the Colorado Symphony Orchestra will gather some of contemporary music’s biggest guns this weekend for American Mavericks, a modern-music festival that will feature composers John Adams, John Corigliano and Christopher Rouse in the flesh. But some untraditional CSO listeners may show up on Friday night for…