Sesquicentennial: 150 Books to Celebrate the 150th Anniversary of Colorado's Statehood

Memoir and Non-Fiction Books

Begin Where You Are: The Colorado Poets Laureate Anthology is a book of firsts. It is the first ever US state poet laureate anthology. It is the first poetry collection featuring all ten Colorado poets laureate (the second oldest state poet laureateship, established in 1919). And it is the first place readers can discover unpublished poems by Andrea Gibson-bestselling author and one of the most influential spoken word artists of our generation. This book contains celebrated works from Thomas Hornsby Ferril and others, alongside never-before-published pieces from Bobby LeFebre, Joseph Hutchison, David Mason, and Mary Crow. Contemporary poets offer perspectives on how serving as Colorado poet laureate shaped their writing and words.

The Colorado Book contains a broad sample of material about Colorado selected by three long-time residents of the state who have included works of fiction, nonfiction, science, exploration, history, biography, poetry, essays and other stories. The editors include a New York Times best selling author; a noted Colorado historian and prolific writer of Colorado history; and a progressive and innovative librarian who was a past president of the American Library Assn., and Colorado Librarian of the Year.

5280, Denver's award-winning city magazine, celebrates its 25th anniversary with a collection of its best longform writing in Mile High Stories. From the haunting tale of a detective searching for a lost girl, to a profile of an eccentric billionaire, to an investigation that was instrumental in helping a man get released from prison, these artfully-crafted narratives paint a vivid picture of life in Denver and Colorado over the past quarter-century.

In this inaugural anthology, CALMA--the Colorado Alliance of Latino Mentors and Authors--presents an illuminating collection of poems, short fiction, and essays, offering a compelling slice of Chicano history, one part of our contribution to literatura latina. Twenty-four contributors share evocative impressions encompassing the breadth of universal themes: romantic love; the importance of family; duty; frustration and triumph; the search for self; and the never-ending struggle for justice.

The transition from the relatively flat Great Plains to the craggy peaks of Colorado's Front Range is one of North America's most abrupt topographical contrasts. The epic, 1,800-million-year geologic story behind this amazing landscape is even more awe inspiring. In Geology Underfoot along Colorado's Front Range, authors (and geoscientists) Lon Abbott and Terri Cook narrate the Front Range's tale, from its humble beginnings as a flat, nondescript seafloor through several ghostly incarnations as a towering mountain range.

Reading Colorado, a high-octane road trip through the diverse literary landscapes of the Centennial State, gathers narratives of exploration, stories from the mining and agricultural frontiers, urban tales reflecting the emergence and growth of Denver and the Front Range, and a diverse range of contemporary voices, from the Plains to the Peaks, who invite readers into their home territory. The travel guide format is perfect for exploring Colorado in a hammock strung between some aspens, on the couch with your feet kicked up by the fire, or by hitting the road with your favorite traveling companion. This guide includes many writers not yet anthologized as well as others who have become household names and its place-based focus makes it easy to zoom in on literature that features your favorite locations. It will deepen the map, enhancing road trips for residents, visitors, and armchair travelers alike.

The poetry collection Is(ness) captures the essence of moments and places, likening them to photographs or art. Each poem delves into specific experiences, identities, dreams, and states of being that were significant to the author, making the poems worth sharing. The complexity of these experiences is best conveyed through the expressiveness of poetry.

Chronicles the campaigns for and against holding the 1976 Olympic Games at Denver, which became the first city to reject having the event, opposition having arisen among wealthier residents looking to protect their communities' natural beauty, young activists hoping to expand civic participation in the name of liberal causes, and Denver's excluded minority communities.

In Playing to the End, Steve Bialostok immerses readers in the vibrant world of the card room at Denver's Hiawatha Davis Jr. Recreation Center, where a group of older Black men gather to play dominoes, exchange playful banter known as "talking shit," and cultivate a space of belonging. More than just a game, their gatherings are acts of Black placemaking-resisting cultural erasure, gentrification, and societal marginalization while fostering joy, resilience, and community. Through five years of ethnographic study, Bialostok reveals how these men transform the card room into a sanctuary of identity and defiance, where humor and camaraderie become tools of self-determination. As they navigate the pressures of a changing neighborhood, their interactions affirm the power of play, talk, and collective memory in sustaining Black spaces. Playing to the End is a compelling testament to the significance of these gatherings and the ongoing struggle for autonomy, cultural affirmation, and social connection in an inequitable world.

Biography of Jane Street, who attempted to organize Denver housemaids from Capitol Hill into an Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union in 1916, and how her successful but short-lived efforts were undermined by male chauvinism within the IWW.

In the late twentieth century United States, nothing united union members, Chicanos, gay men and lesbians, feminists, black activists, and progressive college students quite so well as Coors beer. Members of these communities came together not in praise of the ice cold beverage but, rather, to unite against a common enemy: the Colorado-based Coors Brewing Company. Wielding the consumer boycott as their weapon of choice, activists targeted Coors for allegations of antiunionism, discrimination, and ties to prominent political conservatives. Over multiple decades of organizing and coalition-building, anti-Coors activists molded the boycott tool into a means of political protest. In Brewing a Boycott, Allyson P. Brantley details the history of this boycott movement - one of the longest such campaigns in U.S. history - for the first time. Drawing from an array of archival collections, as well as oral history interviews with long-time boycotters, Brantley offers a compelling, grassroots view of boycotting, anti-corporate organizing, and the unlikely coalitions that formed in opposition to the iconic Rocky Mountain brew. The story of this boycott, as told here, highlights the vibrancy of activism in the final decades of the twentieth century and the enduring legacy of that organizing for communities, consumer activists, and corporations today.

In 1906, Denver's Pietro Satriano and his 25-piece brass band became the first musical act to perform at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, then christened the Garden of the Titans. Over a century later, Denver is a must-stop for every nationally touring act, and Red Rocks, set deep into the towering red rocks of Morrison, Colorado, is heralded as America's most important outdoor music venue. From the Grateful Dead to Willie Nelson, every star in the musical galaxy has aspired to play on this special and magical stage. Red Rocks: The Concert Years presents a comprehensive history of what came to be considered one of the Natural Wonders of the World, thanks to the combination of natural aesthetics and acoustics, as impressive to the eyes as to the ears. Colorado Music Experience director and author G. Brown presents over 200 interviews with an array of performers, from the late Jerry Garcia and Dave Matthews to Bono and Paul McCartney, as well as the most detailed accounts to date of the legendary Beatles show in 1964, Bruce Springsteen's first outdoor concert ever in 1978, and U2's career-making 1983 video shoot. Richly illustrated, this well-crafted coffee-table book includes hundreds of images from leading photographers in the area, supplemented by historical photos from the libraries of the major daily newspapers, historical societies, and private collections. Foreword by Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Carlos Santana. Proceeds from book sales benefit the Colorado Music Experience, a nonprofit organization that educates the public on everything that's great about the state's music.

Charlie Burrell was the first Black person to break the color barrier in classical music. In 1949 he was the first black person under contract with the Denver Symphony Orchestra. In 1959 he became the first black person to play in the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and the San Francisco Opera. In addition to being a classical music pioneer, he was a jazz musician as well, playing alongside many world-renowned jazz artists. The Life of Charlie Burrell is no simple story of the triumph of will over oppression, or of an angel who always did the right thing in the face of unending adversity and evil. Burrell's stories weave a more complex tale of inner strength borne in the crucible of an amazing family, fired by intense ambition and hard work, and catalyzed by a series of mentors--both Black and white--from whom Charlie learns important lessons, both intended and unintended.

Unsentimental, unexpectedly funny, and incredibly honest, Tragedy Plus Time is a love letter to every family that has ever felt messy, complicated, or (even momentarily) magnificent. Meet the Magnificent Cayton-Hollands, a trio of brilliant, acerbic teenagers from Denver, Colorado, who were going to change the world. Anna, Adam, and Lydia were taught by their father, a civil rights lawyer, and mother, an investigative journalist, to recognize injustice and have their hearts open to the universe—the good, the bad, the heartbreaking (and, inadvertently, the anxiety-inducing and the obsessive-compulsive disorder-fueling).

A night sky is not an absence of light; it is the presence of the universe. In The Wild Dark, master storyteller Craig Childs embarks on a quest to bike from the blinding lights of the Las Vegas Strip to one of the darkest spots in North America. Childs is a fearless explorer of both the natural world and the human imagination, making him the perfect guide to help us rediscover the heavens and to ask: "What does it do to us to not see the night sky?" In a book that is at once an adventure story, a field guide, and a celebration of wonder, Childs invites us to look up and to look inward, eyes wide and sparkling with stars.

From Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Ted Conover, a fascinating portrait of a group of Americans living off-grid.

Lavishly illustrated with maps, drawings, and historic photographs, People of the Red Earth is the most complete historical guide to Colorado's Indians and a comprehensive guidebook to archeological sites, museums, cultural centers, and other sources of information.

What really happened on April 20, 1999? The horror of the Columbine school shooting left an indelible stamp on the American psyche. In remembrance of the 25th anniversary comes a new edition of this journalistic masterpiece: the definitive account of the Columbine massacre, its aftermath, and its significance, from the acclaimed journalist who followed the story from the outset. Columbine has become the template for nearly two decades of "spectacle murders." But it is a false script, seized upon by a generation of new killers. In the wake of New- town, Parkland, and Pulse, the imperative to understand the crime that sparked this plague grows more urgent every year. Dave Cullen was one of the first reporters on the scene, and he spent ten years on this book. With a keen investigative eye and psychological acumen, he draws on mountains of evidence, insight from the world's leading forensic psychologists, and the killers' own words and drawings--several of which are reproduced in the appendix. Cullen paints raw portraits of two polar-opposite killers, which contrast starkly with the flashes of resilience and redemption among the survivors.

Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominantly white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013 with her husband and daughter, the community held restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens. In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it.

Survive anything nature throws your way with these survival tips and wilderness philosophy from renowned outdoorsman and now beloved TikTok star Donny Dust. Donny Dust is a US Marine Corps veteran who now owns and operates Colorado's premier survival and wilderness self-reliance school. He's amassed two decades worth of primitive living skills everywhere from the jungles of Asia to the mountains of North America. He's appeared on reality TV series like History Channel's Alone and hosted USA Channel's Mud, Sweat & Beards. Now, Donny brings all he's learned to Wild Wisdom. He teaches you how to be more observant to help avoid danger, problem-solve, prioritize finding shelter, and to be flexible and creative when you need the right supplies for a task. He also focuses on essential gear, sheltering, building fire, staying hydrated, food, foraging, and trapping. Beautiful and instructive illustrations throughout make this is must-carry for anyone venturing into nature.

This collection brings you 100 exclusive recipes from Colorado's most renowned bars.

Veterinarian, comedian, and devoted conservationist, Kevin Fitzgerald, has written a moving memoir about a life well-lived. His has been a very full life with an almost Forrest Gump-like quality for "being there at the right time." Join him as he describes being a child of the 50's, doing security for rock bands, and practicing small animal veterinary medicine in a major American city for over 40 years.

This book uses the author's hike on the Colorado Trail to frame a conservation-themed and scientific synthesis work about the sweeping transformation of Colorado's mountain ecosystems and associated wilderness impacted by climate change.

In 2013, the Colorado Avalanche announced that Joe Sakic, a franchise legend and Hall of Fame center, would be promoted to become the new executive VP of hockey operations. Soon, Sakic was instrumental in the hiring of Patrick Roy, the greatest goaltender in NHL history, a man crucial to the Avalanche’s Stanley Cup victories in 1996 and 2001, as Colorado’s new coach. This book, a collaborative effort between seasoned sportswriters and authors Terry Frei and Adrian Dater, is an opinionated, interpretive, and in-depth look at Patrick Roy’s first season as a National Hockey League coach, and the Avalanche’s surprising 2013–14 season.

A queer, political, and feminist collection guided by self-reflection. The poems range from close examination of the deeply personal to the vastness of the world, exploring the expansiveness of the human experience from love to illness, from space to climate change, and so much more in between. One of the most celebrated poets and performers of the last two decades, Andrea Gibson's trademark honesty and vulnerability are on full display in You Better Be Lightning, welcoming and inviting readers to be just as they are.

Dr. Temple Grandin draws on her own experience to deliver an essential resource for guiding and nurturing autistic children with sensory and behavior challenges. As always, she gets to the REAL issues of autism--the ones parents, teachers, and those on the spectrum face every day. Most autistic individuals deal with a variety of sensory differences, and in this book Dr. Grandin sheds light on the best ways for them to adapt and thrive. In these helpful pages, Dr. Grandin offers do's and don'ts, practical strategies, and try-it-now tips, all based on her insider perspective and extensive research.

Throughout its history, America has often been guilty of inflicting the very injustices it has tried to exterminate. One such period came in the first stages of the second world war when Americans, seized by the fear that they might become victims of fifth-column activities in the first stages of World War II, Americans began to see neighbors of different ethnic backgrounds as enemies. Within months of the attack on Pearl Harbor, citizens sought ways to rid themselves of potential threats in the easiest and most convenient method possible--concentration camps. In this second edition of Amache: The Story of Japanese Internment in Colorado During World War II, Robert Harvey outlines one of the darkest chapters in Colorado's history. Amache is a comprehensive must-read that will forever preserve the voices and stories of those who endured this dark period of our nation's past.

Looks at developments in science fiction and pop music in the 1970s, delving into the ways that the work of many influential performers of the time was heavily informed by science fiction and space exploration.

No Longer at This Address explores place and the psychology of leaving through the inflammatory lens of the American West. The collection uses the lyric-narrative mode to complicate notions of rootedness and address the ephemerality of where one's from. The poems visit bison ranches in the Rocky Mountains, converse with a collapsed satellite, and find complicated joy among wildfire ash and lost dogs. No Longer at This Address is a catalog of various departures and arrivals and ultimately paints a portrait of one man's attempt to make a new home with his loved ones in a volatile and uncertain future.

The author draws on her travels and homestead life in the Colorado Rockies in an essay collection on her ties to nature that explores the symbiotic relationship between humans and the earth.

Full Body Burden is a haunting work of narrative nonfiction about a young woman, Kristen Iversen, growing up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated "the most contaminated site in America." It's the story of a childhood and adolescence in the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once startlingly beautiful and—unknown to those who lived there—tainted with invisible yet deadly particles of plutonium.

A phantastastical history of the state as seen through the legacies of influential Coloradans. There Quirky biographies will have you thwacking your head, asking "How have I never heard about this before?" You'll meet Two Aspen ladies who created an international sensation when they eloped to marry each other- in 1889. A developer who wanted to populate Red Rocks Park with life-sized dinosaur carvings. A Hippie pastor and 19 disabled people who shut down Colfax and Broadway in 1978. The circus star who made Colorado a ski state. And more...

The story of the monumental find of high-elevation Ice Age fossils during excavation for a reservoir and how the Denver Museum of Nature & Science headed-up the expedited excavation to retrieve as many fossils as possible before the reservoir's completion.

Birding Colorado is a guide to the best bird watching sites in Colorado, from national parks and wildlife refuges to marshes, mountains, and canyons. Organized by region, each site description informs readers on habitats, visiting information, and birds you'll encounter. What sets this book apart is the extra information on bird status and bird habitat that has made it more than a mere site guide and earned a place in the Denver Audubon's curriculum.

A celebration of the Fort restaurant in Morrison, CO, and many favorite recipes developed throughout its 56-year history.

Peyton Manning won the Super Bowl, hosted Saturday Night Live and threw 399 touchdown passes during 14 amazing years as an NFL quarterback. Then he got fired. Indianapolis no longer valued Manning, a four-time winner of the league's Most Valuable Player award. Get this: The Colts cut the most-liked athlete in America. "And I'm glad they did," Denver Broncos executive John Elway said. The Broncos made the most buzz-worthy signing in the history of NFL free agency during March of 2012. Despite missing a season with a neck injury that threatened to end his brilliant career, Manning was acquired to lead the Broncos back to Super Bowl glory. "We don't have a Plan B," Elway declared, as he presented Manning with an orange No. 18 jersey. "We're going [with] Plan A!" Even for a quarterback as decorated as Manning, his task in Denver was daunting. At age 36, Manning had to relearn to throw the football with a right arm that had suffered extensive nerve damage. The new quarterback in town had to convert devout fans of Tim Tebow, who won games in the name of Jesus. A brutal early season schedule left the Broncos with a 2-3 record, as whispers grew the old Pro Bowler had lost his touch. What happened next is one of those great comeback stories that make us fall in love with sports. Manning went from washed up to nearly unbeatable. He led Denver to 11 consecutive victories to close the regular season. More important, Manning lifted the Broncos back to the elite status that had been slip-sliding away since Elway retired as quarterback in 1999. How did Manning do it? On the practice field, he can be a perfectionist who is a pain in the ass. On the team plane, he can be a comedian who has teammates rolling in the aisles. To get inside football's most beautiful mind, award-winning journalist Mark Kiszla takes readers from raucous locker rooms to quiet film rooms for a behind-the-scenes look at Manning's remarkable revival. Football is a violent game. Life can be a contact sport. Before moving to Denver, Manning was sacked 231 times by NFL defenders, but never harder than the 232nd, when Colts owner Jim Irsay hit him with a shot that shook the veteran QB to his core. So the toughest question for Manning was the same as the uncertainty facing any proud worker who has been slapped with a termination note: How does a man respond after he gets knocked on his butt? Manning is the master of the no-huddle offense. But, with his physical ability fading and anything less than a championship considered failure, Manning has never had to beat the clock with such urgency. There's no time to waste. No excuses. No looking back. No Plan B.

A narrative history of the events leading up to the Sand Creek Massacre and its aftermath, drawing on the words and actions of those who participated in the events.

Part memoir and part literary true crime, Tell Me Everything is the mesmerizing story of a landmark sexual assault investigation and the female private investigator who helped crack it open. Erika Krouse has one of those faces. "I don't know why I'm telling you this," people say, spilling confessions. In fall 2002, Erika accepts a new contract job investigating lawsuits as a private investigator. The role seems perfect for her, but she quickly realizes she has no idea what she's doing. Then a lawyer named Grayson assigns her to investigate a sexual assault, a college student who was attacked by football players and recruits at a party a year earlier. Erika knows she should turn the assignment down. Her own history with sexual violence makes it all too personal. But she takes the job anyway, inspired by Grayson's conviction that he could help change things forever. And maybe she could, too. Over the next five years, Erika learns everything she can about P. I. technique, tracking down witnesses and investigating a culture of sexual assault and harassment ingrained in the university's football program. But as the investigation grows into a national scandal and a historic civil rights case, Erika finds herself increasingly consumed. When the case and her life both implode at the same time, Erika must figure out how to help win the case without losing herself.

Nettle Power is a fascinating exploration of the many uses of nettle for food, medicine, and fiber. Colorful illustrations, recipes, and curious facts and lore make this a highly browsable and useful handbook for foraging, herb, and natural health enthusiasts.

Beginning with the franchise’s origins as a charter member of the American Football League in 1960, Andrew Mason takes the reader on a journey that includes a decade of Bronco futility, the AFL-NFL merger, and the team’s first-ever playoff appearance in 1977, when they went all the way to the Super Bowl. Since then, the Denver Broncos have become one of the NFL’s most consistent and successful franchises, with just six losing seasons in the last thirty-five years.

Award winning author Adrian Miller vividly tells the stories of the African Americans who worked in the presidential food service as chefs, personal cooks, butlers, stewards, and servers for every First Family since George and Martha Washington. Miller brings together the names and words of more than 150 black men and women who played remarkable roles in unforgettable events in the nation's history.

Ghost Of elegizes a brother lost via suicide, is a mourning song for the idea of family, a family haunted by ghosts of war, trauma, and history. Nguyen’s debut is not an exorcism or un-haunting of that which haunts, but attuned attention, unidirectional reaching across time, space, and distance to reach loved ones, ancestors, and strangers. By working with, in, and around the photographs that her brother left behind (from which he cut himself out before his death), Nguyen wrestles with what remains: remnants of memory, physical voids, and her family captured around an empty space. Through lyric meditation, Nguyen seeks to bridge the realms of the living with the dead, the past with the present. These poems are checkpoints at the border of a mind, with arms outstretched in bold tenderness.

A history of Colorado through the lens of its uniquely mythic economy, from boom to boom and into the future.

Patients and doctors alike are keenly aware that the medical world is in the midst of great change. We live in an era of continuous healthcare reforms, many of which focus on high volume, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. This ... book is the response of a practicing physician who [feels that] population-based reforms have diminished the relationship between doctors and patients, to the detriment of both.

Fat, forty-four, father of three sons, and facing a vasectomy, Mark Obmascik would never have guessed that his next move would be up a 14,000-foot mountain. But when his twelve-year-old son gets bitten by the climbing bug at summer camp, Obmascik can't resist the opportunity for some high-altitude father-son bonding by hiking a peak together. After their first joint climb, addled by the thin air, Obmascik decides to keep his head in the clouds and try scaling all 54 of Colorado's 14,000-foot mountains, known as the Fourteeners -- and to do them in less than one year.

A harrowing, never-before-told story of life and death in the Colorado mountains-thirty hours that changed lives forever and forced a reckoning about the cost of adventure. 'You wanna ski a lap?' Fifteen-year-old Cole Walters-Schaler couldn't resist. This was why they'd come to the backcountry, after all -- three fathers and four teenage children together for a bonding alpine getaway outside Salida, Colorado, in January 2017. Within minutes, Cole and Brett Beasley, a longtime Forest Service ranger and expert outdoorsman in his mid-forties, had pushed off from their cabin, expecting to be gone for a half hour or so. But an unforgiving blizzard transformed their quick jaunt into a thirty-hour ordeal that would end in tragedy, as the community raced to find them. The Way Out is the story of those ensuing hours and their aftermath -- an almost unbelievable event that shook a tight-knit mountain community and raised difficult questions about life and death, guilt and redemption, and the pursuit of adventure. Why, when we know that the wilderness can kill, can't we stay away? When the unthinkable happens, how does a community forgive the survivors? And how do the survivors forgive themselves? Drawing on firsthand interviews with those closest to the tragedy, including the key eyewitness, and written with the gripping intensity of classics such as Into Thin Air and Touching the Void, O'Neil recreates that fateful day. The Way Out is a thoughtful investigation of the allure of the mountains and the aftermath of trauma, and an unforgettable look at life at its very edge.

A Dream of justice is a firsthand account of the fight to desegregate Denver's public schools. Drawing on oral histories and interviews with members of the school board, legal community, parents, and students, as well as extensive institutional records, Pascoe offers a social history of Keyes v. Denver Public Schools.

The Legal and Political History of Colorado Tribes TREC Report explores the historical, legal, and political landscape of American Indian tribes in Colorado, focusing on treaty lands established after 1851. Authored by the Truth, Restoration, and Education Commission (TREC), it examines the legal battles, policies, and impacts of colonization that have shaped the lives of Colorado's American Indian nations. The report highlights tribes with treaty lands, including Ute, Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Kiowa, and explores the lasting effects of these treaties on land rights and sovereignty. Through rigorous research, the report advocates for restorative justice and meaningful reforms to address the needs of Colorado's American Indian communities, both those currently residing in the state and those who ancestral homelands lie within its borders.

An award-winning journalist presents the story of Philip Van Cise, a rookie District Attorney who fought the KKK, organized crime, and government corruption in Denver in the 1920s and how his experiences still resonate one century later.

When the Titanic sank in 1912, J.J. Brown was a continent away and ignored by reporters more eager to tell the tale of his heroic wife, Margaret "Molly" Brown. Twenty years prior, he and Eben Smith made news when they struck gold in Leadville, Colorado's Little Jonny mine. In the early years, J.J. and Margaret were a team. He, a hard-working mine manager, and she, a mother devoted to their children Lawrence and Helen. Having risen from poverty, J.J. and Margaret were unprepared for newspaper notoriety when they moved to Denver, Colorado. Then came lavish trips to Europe, private schools, and second homes. For a time, their marriage worked until his penchant for secrecy and fear of death clashed with his wife's desire to whirl and twirl through adventures, continents, and charities. And when the children were eager to exit the limelight, escaping the shadow of their millionaire father and socialite mother, a ship sank, thrusting Margaret into the national spotlight as 'unsinkable.' The Browns were a family whose heart was omitted from the story crafted as The Unsinkable Molly Brown for Broadway and Hollywood. Writers left out the children, generosity, pride, unmet expectations, respect, and loyalty. Gold-Fated Family tells the true and human story of the legendary Browns.

CONDUIT, Khadijah Queen's debut collection, is itself a current that runs through a historical and mythical past, continuing through our troubled present. These stunning meditations...are called up out of the soil and already belong to us before we come to them.

Ed Quillen entertained Denver Post readers with his weekly columns for 26 years. Deeper into the Heart of the Rockies compiles the best from the height of his career on topics ranging from Colorado to small town life to national politics.

A history of the Denver neighborhood known as the Holly and the controversial anti-gang activist Terrance Roberts.

Sagás examines the multi-faceted historical experience of Latinxs in Colorado from the 19th century to the present and their fight for social and legal equality, shedding light on a historically marginalized community and advancing the understanding of radicalized dynamics in Colorado.

The Western Horse celebrates more than four centuries of history and culture of the western horse, its ability to capture the popular imagination, and the means by which it has come to symbolize the American West.

A revealing, intimate biography of basketball savant and enigmatic NBA superstar Nikola Jokic, filled with news-breaking interviews and deep reporting from Mike Singer, the Nuggets' former beat writer for the Denver Post.

New York Times-bestselling author Stephen Singular has often examined violence in America in his critically-acclaimed books. Here he has teamed with his wife Joyce for their most important work yet-- one that investigates why America keeps producing twenty-something mass killers. Their reporting has produced the most comprehensive look at the Aurora shooting yet and draws upon the one group left out of the discussion of violence in America: the twenty-somethings themselves.

A collection of essays on the power of walking to connect with ourselves, each other, and nature for new avenues of renewal and change.

The true story of Detective Ron Stallworth, the first black detective in the Colorado Springs Police Department, who in 1978 went undercover to investigate the KKK.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever undertaken.

Traces the lives of twenty-two immigrant teens throughout the course of a year at Denver's South High School who attended a specially created English Language Acquisition class and who were helped to adapt through strategic introductions to American culture.

Experience Colorado with this new, enlarged edition of A COLORADO HISTORY. For fifty years, the authors of this preeminent resource have led readers on an extraordinary exploration of how the state has changed--and how it has stayed the same. From the arrival of Paleo-Indians in the Mesa Verde region to the fast pace of the twenty-first century, A COLORADO HISTORY covers the political, economic, cultural, and environmental issues, along with the fascinating events and characters, that have shaped this dynamic state. In print for fifty years, this distinctive examination of the Centennial State is a must-read for history buffs, students, researchers--or anyone--interested in the remarkable place called Colorado.

A lighthearted and surprisingly informative read, featuring on-the-ground stories from scores of participants in Colorado's historic transformation into a cannabis-friendly state. The book doubles as a reference guide, listing Colorado dispensaries, marijuana stocks and more.

In the 1970s, a new wave of feminism was sweeping America. But in the boys' club of banking and finance, women were still infantilized--no credit without a male cosigner, and their income was dismissed as unreliable. If bankers weren't going to accommodate women, then women had to take control of their own futures. In 1978 in Denver, Colorado, the opening of the Women's Bank changed everything. It was helmed by bank officer B. LaRae Orullian and the brainchild of whip-smart entrepreneur Carol Green, who forged a groundbreaking path with their headstrong colleagues, among them: Judi Foster, investment research whiz; Edna Mosley, unyielding civil rights advocate with the NAACP; Mary Roebling, renowned financial executive; Betty Freedman, a socialite and fundraiser; and Gail Schoettler, a formidable Denver mover and shaker for social justice. Coming together and facing their own unique road to revolution, they built the most successful female-run bank in the nation. It wasn't easy. Give Her Credit follows the challenges, uphill battles, and achievements of some of the enterprising women of Denver who broke boundaries, inspired millions, and afforded opportunities for every marginalized citizen in the country. It's about time their untold story was told.

Jane Withers is one of Colorado's most colorful entrepreneurs to ever grace the Front Range. Multiple addictions to amphetamines, alcohol and cigarettes--oral comforts that basked her brain with endorphins--were finally put to rest after many years of multiple cessation attempts, as she chugged into Denver with a born-again hillbilly companion in a dusty U-Haul towing her broken truck stuffed with 600 dirty, mismatched hub caps. As the tumultuous years rolled by, her hub cap store became the largest of its kind in the country, having grown from $8,000 starting capital and despite her zero business acumen.

Beginning with the discovery of gold near present-day Denver in 1858, Colorado's placers and mines promised vast riches of gold, silver, and other precious minerals. That promise lured throngs of treasure seekers, including more than a few strong, savvy women. In Women of the Colorado Mines, author Linda Wommack digs deep into their tribulations and triumphs to reveal the true lives of women prospectors, mine owners, labor advocates, and a handful of mining heiresses who found fabulous wealth in them thar hills.

This stunning collection of images celebrates the remarkable career of Burnis 'Mac' McCloud, Denver's premiere Black photographer between 1950 and 1980. His remarkable photographs, focused on Denver's Five Points community, captured the ordinary lives of African Americans during a period that witnessed the end of Jim Crow segregation and the beginning of the Civil Rights era. Assembled from more than one hundred thousand negatives that McCloud left behind, this collection introduces his creative work to the world beyond the Mile High City. Author William Wyckoff also tells McCloud's life story, revealing the challenges to and vitality of Denver's Black community. At a time when much of what McCloud photographed is being swept away by gentrification and urban change, this collection of images preserves a time and place important not only for Denver but for all of Black America.

Nature writer and zoologist Mary Taylor Young tells the story of the growing effects of climate change on her land in the pine-covered foothills of southern Colorado. Climate change wasn't yet on the public radar when Young and her husband bought their piece of the wild in 1995. They built a cabin and set up a trail of bluebird nest boxes, and Mary began a nature journal of her observations, delighting in the ceaseless dramas, joys, and tragedies that are the fabric of life in the wild. But changes greater than the seasonal cycles of nature became evident over time: increasing drought, trees killed by plagues of beetles, wildfires, catastrophic weather, bears entering hibernation later and thinner, the decline of some familiar birds, and the appearance of new species. Their journal of sightings over twenty-five bluebird seasons, she realized, was a record of climate change happening, not in an Indonesian rainforest or on an Antarctic ice sheet but in their own natural neighborhood. Using the journal as a chronicle of change, Young tells a story echoed in everyone's lives and backyards. But it's not time to despair, she writes. It's time to act. Young sees hope in the human ability to overcome great obstacles, in the energy and determination of young people, and in nature's resilience, which the bluebirds show season after season.

Fiction Books

Felix Gomez went to Iraq a soldier. He came back a vampire. Now he finds himself pulled into a web of intrigue when an old friend prompts him to investigate an outbreak of nymphomania at the secret government facilities in Rocky Flats. He'll find out the cause of all these horny women or die trying! But first he must contend with shadowy government agents, Eastern European vampire hunters, and women who just want his body . . . Skewering sexual myths, conspiracy fables, and government bureaucracy, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats reveals the bizarre world of the undead with a humorous slant and a fresh twist.

At the bright-eyed age of eighteen, witch Harlow "Harry" Pierce attended her first Fates Festival Finding Ceremony certain the Blue Willow Wisp would lead her to her Fated match, her cougar shifter boyfriend, Jaxon Atwood. But Fate had other plans, guiding her best friend to him instead. With a broken heart, all her belongings, and a vow to never return, Harry did the only thing a heartsick witch could do. Run. Thirteen years later, she returns to her magical hometown - with her half-human, half-shifter goddaughter in tow - hoping that not only would the town work its magic on the troubled teenager, but that the local Alpha of the Rocky Mountain Pack could help Grace identify - and control - her fiery abilities. Jaxon Atwood was a shifter of few words and even less patience... until his mother retired as Alpha of the Rocky Mountain Pack and left the running of things to him. It's a headache he didn't need, and one that brought the witch who'd ripped his heart from his chest knocking on his door. Ever since the disappearance of the town's Fate Witch over a decade ago, Fates Haven's magic has been slowly going haywire. There hasn't been a Fated Match made in thirteen years, putting the town in serious jeopardy of losing its title of Highest Fated Mates Percentage in the World. But now, something is stirring in Fates Haven, Colorado, and it smells like the past, tastes like change, and looks like A SIMPLE TWIST OF FATE.

Image you've been paralyzed for 5 years, all because of a betrayal by those you trusted. Then, one day, you suddenly have a healthy body, and can pursue your would-be murderers. Of course, none of you are human, and you were sent to this world for a reason. What would you do?

There is no problem that a library card can't solve. The Andreas family is one of readers. Their father, a renowned Shakespeare professor who speaks almost entirely in verse, has named his three daughters after famous Shakespearean women. When the sisters return to their childhood home, ostensibly to care for their ailing mother, but really to lick their wounds and bury their secrets, they are horrified to find the others there. See, we love each other. We just don't happen to like each other very much. But the sisters soon discover that everything they've been running from-one another, their small hometown, and themselves-might offer more than they ever expected.

A tale of justice, love, brutality, and mysticism set in the turbulent 1960s.

New York City, 1879. Eileen Maguire is a factory lacemaker limited by her humble circumstances and dreaming of a better life. Lawrence Barnard is the sole heir of one of Manhattan's wealthiest families, but his means keep him confined by the expectations of society. When their paths cross one fateful winter night, Eileen and Lawrence become caught under the spell of the charismatic and enterprising Stanley Jones, who extolls the boundless opportunities awaiting in the West. The millinery shop Eileen dreams of owning with her sister is possible, as is the freedom to make his own choices that Lawrence so craves. What begins as an idealistic journey westward quickly becomes something unexpected and sinister once the group lands in Leadville, Colorado, a wild silver mining boomtown high in the Rocky Mountains. A love triangle emerges, pitting promises and passion against betrayals and lies. With their starry-eyed intentions gone terribly awry and forbidden desires threatening to undo them, it will take heartbreak and a shocking secret to shake Eileen and Lawrence out of their blinded stupors and remind them that their fortunes are entirely in their own hands. Set against the backdrop of the Gilded Age, this is a dark tale of dangerous, suspenseful seduction.

The first act of a new reality-shattering adventure! Imagine everything you thought was fantasy...was real. And now join us, in a world where reality is dead..and anything is possible. After THE EVENT alters the world as we know it, Ellie, Otto, and Ava embark on a four-color odyssey, through magical Colorado. Mysterious (and familiar?) superheroes join our intrepid team of heroes searching for a way to shatter the dome and expose the truth!

Conflating her own childhood experiences with those of a celebrated Wagnerian soprano of her day, Willa Cather here introduces Thea Kronborg, a Scandinavian-American singer who rises from a one-story town in Colorado to the Metropolitan Opera House. Along the way she learns her own capacity for the rigorous demands of artistic excellence, and how few of her colleagues are willing to sacrifice ordinary vanities for exacting professional standards. Exhausted and depressed by the mediocrity around her, she seeks respite in the southwestern desert, where she has the epiphany that will transform her vision and her art. Characteristically, Cather uses the western landscape in The Song of the Lark both to reflect her heroine's inner life and to fire her imagination.

Shaw Landon loved Rule Archer from the moment she laid eyes on him. Rule is everything a straight--A pre-med student like Shaw shouldn't want--and the only person she's never tried to please. She isn't afraid of his scary piercings and tattoos or his wild attitude. Though she knows that Rule is wrong for her, her heart just won't listen.

On orders from the Pentagon, marine explorer Dirk Pitt must salvage crucial material from the world's most famous maritime disaster.

Nobody was more surprised than Mattie herself when Luke Spenser, considered the great catch of their small Iowa town, asked her to marry him. Less than a month later, they are wed and setting off in a covered wagon to build a home on the Colorado frontier. Mattie's only company, aside from a taciturn and slightly mysterious new husband, is her private journal, where she records the joys and frustrations not just of frontier life, but also of marriage to a handsome but distant stranger.

By the 1920s, Denver had outgrown its frontier-town beginnings. But for some, life was still as perilous as the surrounding terrain. The insidious influence of the Ku Klux Klan was reaching its peak, and those who stood in its path feared for their safety. Denver is the saga of a family caught in this tempestuous time.

In the sleepy New Mexico backwater of Plata, Deputy Sheriff Ogden Walker spends his time humoring his portly boss, chasing vandals, and fly-fishing. But when a woman is murdered under strange circumstances, his life takes a turn for the worse. Over three disturbing cases, Walker scours the seedy underbelly of Denver, a ragtag hippie commune, and a fish hatchery. He is on the search for solutions to the questions he is foolish enough to ask. The answers, when they do come, are not the ones anyone expected.

1890: When Desiderya Lopez, The Sleepy Prophet, finds an abandoned infant on the banks of an arroyo, she recognizes something in his spirit and brings him home. Pidre will go on to become a famous showman in the Anglo West whose main act, Simodecea, is Pidre's fearless, sharpshooting wife, who wrangles bears as part of his show. 1935: Luz "Little Light" Lopez and her brother Diego work the carnival circuit in downtown Denver. Luz, is a tea leaf reader, and Diego is a snake charmer. One day, a pale-faced woman in white fur asks Luz for a reading, calling her by a name that only her brother knows. Later that night at a party downtown, Luz sees Diego dancing with this pale-faced woman, which results in a brawl with the local white supremacist group. Diego leaves town for cover and Luz is left trying to get justice for her brother and family. Merging two multi-generational storylines in Colorado, this is a novel of family love, secrets, and survival. With Fajardo-Anstine's immense capacity to render characters and paint vivid life, set against the Sange de Cristo mountians, Woman of Light is full of the weight, richness, and complexities of mixed blood and mica clay. It delights like an Old Western, and inspires the hope embedded in histories yet-told.

In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A teenage girl - her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house - is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known.

Wynn and Jack have been best friends since freshman orientation, bonded by their shared love of mountains, books, and fishing. Wynn is a gentle giant, a Vermont kid never happier than when his feet are in the water. Jack is more rugged, raised on a ranch in Colorado where sleeping under the stars and cooking on a fire came as naturally to him as breathing. When they decide to canoe the Maskwa River in northern Canada, they anticipate long days of leisurely paddles and picking blueberries and nights of stargazing and reading paperback Westerns. But a wildfire making its way across the forest adds unexpected urgency to the journey. One night, with the fire advancing, they hear a man and a woman arguing on the fog-shrouded riverbank; the next day, a man appears on the river, paddling alone. Is this the same man they heard? And if he is, where is the woman?

A collection of four chilling novels, ingeniously wrought gems of terror from the brilliantly imaginative, Joe Hill

The town got its unusual name when a pair of brokedown prospectors accidentally dropped a stick of dynamite in the Rockies -- and unwittingly unearthed a massive vein of silver. One of the two men dropped dead from excitement. The other one named the place "Dead Broke" in honor of his dead broke companion and declared himself mayor of a brand-new mining town. Mayor Allane Auchenleck -- better known as Nugget -- put Dead Broke on the map. But when the silver market takes an unexpected nosedive, the bustling boomtown goes bust... And all hell breaks loose. Almost overnight, Dead Broke turns into a lawless hotbed of angry out-of-work miners and out-for-blood merchants. In desperation, Mayor Nugget considers a few hairbrained schemes like bringing in mail-order brides, building ice castles to attract tourists, even planting other minerals in the mines to fool investors. But Dead Broke needs law and order, so Nugget sends for top gun Mick MacMicking. Of course, a notorious gambler named Connor Boyle has other plans -- and with his band of hired guns he plans to blow Dead Broke off the map to get what he wants. For this town to survive, Nugget, Mick, a drunken lawman, and a woman gambler will have to put the dead back in Dead Broke... and some cool-hand killers in the ground.

Peter Straub's Ghost Story meets Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies in this American Indian horror story of revenge on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Four American Indian men from the Blackfeet Nation, who were childhood friends, find themselves in a desperate struggle for their lives, against an entity that wants to exact revenge upon them for what they did during an elk hunt ten years earlier by killing them, their families, and friends.

Presents the previously unpublished original scroll edition of Jack Kerouac's novel "On the Road" which Kerouac wrote over a three-week period in 1951 on eight sheets of tracing paper that he taped together to form a 120-foot scroll. Includes the real names of the friends that inspired the book's storyline.

Girls from immigrant communities have been disappearing for months in the Colorado town of Blackwater Falls, but the local sheriff is slow to act and the fates of the missing girls largely ignored. At last, the calls for justice become too loud to ignore when the body of a star student and refugee--the Syrian teenager Razan Elkader--is positioned deliberately in a mosque. Detective Inaya Rahman and Lieutenant Waqas Seif of the Denver Police are recruited to solve Razan's murder, and quickly uncover a link to other missing and murdered girls. But as Inaya gets closer to the truth, Seif finds ways to obstruct the investigation.

During a Pride celebration, Wendy notices the beginning of an infection that seems to be turning people into zombies. She and others from the local queer community must team up (despite interpersonal tension) to try and stop the outbreak, discover its source, and survive.

Jack Torrance's new job at the Overlook Hotel is the perfect chance for a fresh start. As the off-season caretaker at the atmospheric old hotel, he'll have plenty of time to spend reconnecting with his family and working on his writing. But as the harsh winter weather sets in, the idyllic location feels ever more remote... and more sinister. And the only one to notice the strange and terrible forces gathering around the Overlook is Danny Torrance, a uniquely gifted five-year-old.

Summer, 1986. The Creel sisters, Georgie Ayyar and Agatha Krishna, welcome their aunt, uncle, and young cousin--newly arrived from India--into their house in rural Wyoming where they'll all live together. Because this is what families do. That is, until the sisters decide that it's time for their uncle to die. According to Georgie, the British are to blame. And to understand why, you need to hear her story. She details the violence hiding in their house and history, her once-unshakeable bond with Agatha Krishna, and her understanding of herself as an Indian-American in the heart of the West. Her account is, at every turn, cheeky, unflinching, and infectiously inflected with the trappings of teendom, including the magazine quizzes that help her make sense of her life.

Written to commemorate the Bicentennial in 1976, James A. Michener’s magnificent saga of the West is an enthralling celebration of the frontier. Brimming with the glory of America’s past, the story of Colorado—the Centennial State—is manifested through its people: Lame Beaver, the Arapaho chieftain and warrior, and his Comanche and Pawnee enemies; Levi Zendt, fleeing with his child bride from the Amish country; the cowboy, Jim Lloyd, who falls in love with a wealthy and cultured Englishwoman, Charlotte Seccombe. In Centennial, trappers, traders, homesteaders, gold seekers, ranchers, and hunters are brought together in the dramatic conflicts that shape the destiny of the legendary West—and the entire country.

Newlyweds Mattie and Cole Walker are teaching Cole's daughters how to snowshoe in a remote canyon when a shattering scream pierces the air. They know that somewhere ahead, someone has been injured or worse. Cole takes the girls while Mattie and Robo go deeper into the canyon to search for the source of the scream. From a distance, Mattie and Robo see a shadowy figure at the base of a cliff, but a rockslide buries the person under layers of stone and shale before they can provide help. Desperate to uncover the individual in case they're still alive under the rock, their efforts are in vain. The victim is already dead. When they investigate the canyon rim from which the person fell, they discover evidence that indicates the fall was no accident. To make matters worse, the victim was one of Cole's friends. The Timber Creek County investigative team springs into action, uncovering a trail of greed that leads to a killer who threatens Mattie's cherished new family and tests her with the most difficult task she's faced in her duty as a K-9 handler.

A bed-and-breakfast for the brokenhearted might hold the key to another chance at love in this achingly bighearted romance. Louisa Walsh emerged from a tumultuous childhood with a degree in counseling, a wealthy boyfriend, and her sunny outlook on life mostly intact. But that optimism is tested when she's dumped and left unable to afford rent on their gorgeous house in the mountains of Colorado. Even with her life in disarray, Lou knows losing the one stable place she's ever called home is not an option. Her plan: ask her reclusive landlord, Henry Rhodes, to let her stay for free in exchange for renting out the house's many rooms as a bed-and-breakfast. She's shocked when he agrees to her terms, and even more surprised to discover Henry is a handsome thirtysomething veterinarian with silver at his temples and sadness in his eyes. One who does not take it well when Lou starts marketing her B and B as a retreat for the recently heartbroken. But as the Comeback Inn opens its doors to its weary, hopeful guests, Lou and Henry find themselves dancing around both their undeniable connection and the closely held secrets that threaten to topple this fragile new start. A chance at love, here, could be too close to home...or it could be exactly where their hearts finally heal.

Atlas 'Max' Maxheimer did not sign up for this. One minute, he's anxiously trying to keep his family's Christmas tree farm from imploding. The next? He's passed out in the snow after getting clocked by a suspiciously strong bottle of soda. Enter Betty: new in town, full of holiday cheer, and helping her uncle open a rival tree farm next door. Max is convinced she's out to destroy everything Evergreen Farm stands for. Betty thinks Max might be one sleigh short of a winter parade. Cue the holiday chaos. Between blizzards, blown reputations, wildly misguided romantic plots, and one stolen ornament with a seriously tragic backstory, this small-town war turns into something far messier--and much more delicious--than either of them expected.

A variety of characters--writers, attorneys, Vietnam vets, cops, soldiers--populate these stories in which situations frequently aren't what they seem. An old man knows more about the disappearance of a neighbor than he lets on. A barber is involved in something that brings a ski-mask wearing, gun-toting hoodlum into his shop. And a cop accused of using excessive force hasn't told his family the whole truth. Many of these gripping stories feature Mexican Americans struggling with their circumstances as an ethnic minority in the United States. Others cover historical events, from the Mexican Revolution to an encounter with Jack Kerouac.

On a lovely June night in 1924, amateur detective Annalee Spain is mingling bravely at a high-class political fundraiser in the lush backyard garden of famed political fixer Cooper Coates, one of the wealthiest men in Denver's Black neighborhood of Five Points. When Coates's young daughter discovers a pretty stranger dead in her father's garden shed, Annalee is thrust onto the baffling new case just as she's reeling from another recent discovery--a handwritten letter, found buried in her own garden, that reveals the identity of her mother. Not ready to face the truth about her hidden past, Annalee throws herself into solving the mystery of the young woman's demise. With the help of her pastor boyfriend Jack Blake, her orphaned buddy Eddie, and her trustworthy church friends, Annalee follows the clues to three seemingly disconnected settings.

Returning to the small Illinois town of his childhood to pick up the pieces of his shattered life, Dale Stewart leases an empty farmhouse of a long-dead friend, who had been murdered in the summer of 1960, and finds that the house is haunted.

Adam Binder hasn’t spoken to his brother in years, not since Bobby had him committed to a psych ward for hearing voices. When a murderous spirit possesses Bobby’s wife and disrupts the perfect life he’s built away from Oklahoma, he’s forced to ask for his little brother’s help. Adam is happy to escape the trailer park and get the chance to say I told you so, but he arrives in Denver to find the local magicians dead. It isn’t long before Adam is the spirit’s next target. To survive the confrontation, he’ll have to risk bargaining with powers he’d rather avoid, including his first love, the elf who broke his heart. The Binder brothers don’t realize that they’re unwitting pawns in a game played by immortals. Death herself wants the spirit’s head, and she’s willing to destroy their family to reap it.

Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is the story of four generations in the life of an American family. A wheelchair-bound retired historian embarks on a monumental quest: to come to know his grandparents, now long dead. The unfolding drama of the story of the American West sets the tone for Stegner's masterpiece.

A chewed-up corpse high in the Flat Tops Wilderness Area leaves Colorado hunting guide Allison Coil mystified. Obvious signs suggest the dead man is the victim of a mountain lion attack, but Allison's instincts scream otherwise.

When a bookshop patron commits suicide, his favorite store clerk must unravel the puzzle he left behind.

A provocative and hauntingly powerful debut novel that will keep you turning pages into the early hours, The Bookseller follows a woman in the 1960s who wrestles to reconcile her daily life as a single bookstore owner with the alternate reality she suddenly begins to dream about each night, in which she is a happily-married wife and mother.

The residents of Clayton, Colorado, must learn to live with what has burned and what threatens to ignite. In Defensible Spaces, a bus driver confronts a rush of memories when an old flame climbs aboard; a trailer park resident attempts to save her home; a reclusive fire mitigation worker fuels public outrage. Throughout ten linked short stories, townspeople work through relationships with alcoholism, history, and each other, negotiating where and when to create their own defensible spaces that might, but will not always, keep them protected.

In this magical tale of self-discovery from New York Times bestselling author Carrie Vaughn, a young widow taps into the power that will change the world--if the man's world she lives in doesn't destroy her and her newfound friends first.

Virgil Wounded Horse is the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. When justice is denied by the American legal system or the tribal council, Virgil is hired to deliver his own punishment, the kind that's hard to forget. But when heroin makes its way into the reservation and finds Virgil's nephew, his vigilantism suddenly becomes personal. He enlists the help of his ex-girlfriend and sets out to learn where the drugs are coming from, and how to make them stop. They follow a lead to Denver and find that drug cartels are rapidly expanding and forming new and terrifying alliances. And back on the reservation, a new tribal council initiative raises uncomfortable questions about money and power. As Virgil starts to link the pieces together, he must face his own demons and reclaim his Native identity. He realizes that being a Native American in the twenty-first century comes at an incredible cost.

In the 1870s, Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek "an original relation to nature," drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher's Crossing, a small Kansas town full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. One of these men regales Will with tales of the immense buffalo herds hidden away in the Colorado Rockies and convinces him to join an expedition to track them down. At the end of a grueling journey, the men reach a place of paradisal richness, where they abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter. So caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time, the men are overtaken by winter and snowed in. In the spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher's Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.

Connie Willis draws upon her understanding of the universalities of human nature to explore the ageless issues of evil, suffering, and the indomitable will of the human spirit. For Kivrin, preparing to travel back in time to study one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century, and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received. But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin--barely of age herself--finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history's darkest hours.

A tale reminiscent of "Hamlet" that also celebrates the alliance between humans and dogs follows speech-disabled Wisconsin youth Edgar, who bonds with three yearling canines and struggles to prove that his sinister uncle is responsible for his father's death.

White Horse is a gritty, vibrant debut from Erika T. Wurth about an Indigenous woman who must face her past when she discovers a bracelet haunted by her mother's spirit. Some people are haunted in more ways than one. Old denim jackets, ripped jeans, Stephen King novels, and the occasional beer at the White Horse Lounge have defined urban Indian Kari James's life so far. But when her cousin Debby finds an old family bracelet that once belonged to Kari's mother, it inadvertently calls up both her mother's ghost and a monstrous entity, and her willful ignorance about her past is no longer sustainable... Haunted by visions of her mother and hunted by this mysterious creature, Kari must search for what happened to her mother all those years ago. Her father, permanently disabled from a car crash, can't help her. Her Auntie Squeaker seems to know something, but isn't eager to give it all up at once. Debby's anxious to help, but her controlling husband keeps getting in the way. Kari's journey towards a truth long-denied by both her family and law enforcement forces her to confront her dysfunctional relationships, her spiritual beliefs, and her desire for the one thing she's always wanted but could never have.

Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general--also known as her tough-as-talons mother--has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders. But when you're smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away...because dragons don't bond to "fragile" humans. They incinerate them. With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother's daughter--like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wingleader in the Riders Quadrant. She'll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise.

Teen Books

Eighteen-year-old Grace spends her summer transcribing cassette tapes for the historical society in an attempt to escape her grief, but when she realizes she can communicate with Jake Underwood, the boy who recorded them in 1992, through the tapes, she becomes drawn into a mystery involving a hurricane and a tragic death.

Jaime goes to live with his paternal grandmother and uncle the summer his father is killed in Vietnam. The family ranch and New Mexico's endless landscape are a completely new experience for the middle schooler raised in New York City, and he is shocked when his mother announces she must go back to the city--without him! They are both worried about his brother, who stayed behind and is insistent on joining the Marines. Neither can stand the idea of losing him to war, too. As the days stretch out before him, Jaime learns the ways of the Cieza men who have lived in the Southwest for generations, including how to care for the chickens, ride his father's horse, Shadow Walker, and shoot a rifle. A budding love interest, the granddaughter of a neighboring rancher, brightens his summer. And when he and his Tío Julio see Graybeard, an old wolf that hasn't been in the area for years, the boy's uncle shares the legend of the wolf pack descended from indigenous peoples and teaches him how to track the beast. Could the old wolf be his father, trying to communicate with him? Will they really kill him as their neighbor insists they must to protect the livestock? In this novel for young adults, a boy on the cusp of manhood observes the importance of family, respect for the natural world and the impact of war as he considers who he will become. Young readers, especially boys, will be drawn to this coming-of-age story that explores masculinity and men's roles.

When a violent, decades-long feud between two powerful men comes to a head in the small settlement of Bladestay, Colorado, cunning resident Theo Creed must use her wits to stay alive. Disguising herself as a young boy, seventeen-year-old Theo bluffs her way into the inner circle of August Gaines, the magnetic leader of the ruthless gang that has descended on her town. But the deeper Theo gets into the con, the more she starts to question her loyalties. Complicating her subterfuge is a mysterious outlaw whose small moments of kindness contradict the blood he has on his hands, making Theo wonder who, exactly, is conning who. To save her town, Theo must parse façade from reality and choose between the barefaced malevolence she's infiltrated and an evil she didn't know lurked at home.

Mars has always been the lesser twin, the shadow to his sister Caroline's radiance. But when Caroline dies under horrific circumstances, Mars is propelled to learn all he can about his once-inseparable sister who'd grown tragically distant. Mars's genderfluidity means he's often excluded from the traditions--and expectations--of his politically-connected family. This includes attendance at the prestigious Aspen Conservancy Summer Academy where his sister poured so much of her time. But with his grief still fresh, he insists on attending in her place. What Mars finds is a bucolic fairytale not meant for him. Folksy charm and sun-drenched festivities camouflage old-fashioned gender roles and a toxic preparatory rigor. Mars seeks out his sister's old friends: a group of girls dubbed the Honeys, named for the beehives they maintain behind their cabin. They are beautiful and terrifying--and Mars is certain they're connected to Caroline's death. But the longer he stays at Aspen, the more the sweet mountain breezes give way to hints of decay. Mars's memories begin to falter, bleached beneath the relentless summer sun. Something is hunting him in broad daylight, toying with his mind. If Mars can't find it soon, it will eat him alive.

When Dimple Shah and Rishi Patel meet at a Stanford University summer program, Dimple is avoiding her parents' obsession with "marriage prospects" but Rishi hopes to woo her into accepting arranged marriage with him.

Told through intertwining points of view and timelines, five teens each protect their secrets and truths about the night a fire destroyed their high school, and a classmate died.

Ro Devereux's senior project, an app that can predict your future, has taken off and gone viral. Will Ro pursue her dreams or preserve her relationships?

When her reclusive family relocates to climate-ravaged Colorado, sixteen-year-old Thea, who is hard of hearing, finds community and potential love with Ray, a Deaf boy.

While mourning her best friend, Natalie--an aspiring teen paranormal investigator--stays at the purportedly haunted Harlow Hotel, where she find more than she expected.

Who's positively magical and ready for sunshine, giggles, and sliding down rainbows? Not Stabby! Meet the world's surliest unicorn. This stab-happy unicorn is a fan-favorite character from "Mother Goth Rhymes" and now he's getting his own book! If UR Stabby follows Stabby as he deals with life's challenges the only way he knows how, horn first.

Kid Books

A sharp and heartfelt picture book about a young soccer-loving girl who's an interpreter for her Spanish-speaking parents.

In 1925, fourteen-year-old Ida Bidson secretly takes over as the teacher when the one-room schoolhouse in her remote Colorado area closes unexpectedly.

In 1893, there's one road in Gatchett's Gluch,--population forty-five--a silver mining town in the high Colorado desert. That means there's only one way in and one way out. Fourteen-year-old Ollie feels trapped and restless, desperate to find his own lode of silver so he can gain riches and get his family out of the town. As the man of the house, he feels that's his job, just as his younger brother Gus's job is to ask question after question. Though Ollie is unwilling to admit it, he doesn't have all the answers. He can't even read, unlike Alys, the only girl and only friend he has outside of Gus. Meanwhile, a man who calls himself a geologist has arrived in town. Not only can he read books, he can read rocks, the first person that Ollie has ever seen who looks at rocks with fascination, not desperation. Most important, he knows how to stake a silver claim. So when Ollie, Gus, and Alys stumble upon a cave rich with silver and form a friendship with that geologist, the future suddenly looks good. The problem: Elijah Gatchett runs the Gulch and claims all its silver.

Just after twelve-year-old Emily and her family move to San Francisco, she teams up with new friend James to follow clues in an odd book they find, hoping to figure out its secrets before the men who attacked Emily's hero, publisher Garrison Griswold, solve the mystery or come after the friends.

Set in 1910s Colorado, Stanislava, a first-generation American from a Slovene immigrant family, struggles between her traditional Slovene community and her desire to pursue a new life as she navigates self-determination, family duty, and the search for belonging.

From Antarctica's biting katabatic gusts to Hawai'i's sweet-smelling moani, discover fourteen winds of the world through poetry, scientific facts, and transporting illustrations.

A thirteen-year-old girl living in an 1880 Colorado gold-mining town witnesses the hardships of her community as she assists her father, the town doctor.

Perfect for fans of Hatchet and the I Survived series, this harrowing middle grade debut novel-in-verse from a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet tells the story of a young girl who wakes up one day to find herself utterly alone in her small Colorado town. When twelve-year-old Maddie hatches a scheme for a secret sleepover with her two best friends, she ends up waking up to a nightmare. She's alone--left behind in a town that has been mysteriously evacuated and abandoned. With no one to rely on, no power, and no working phone lines or internet access, Maddie slowly learns to survive on her own. Her only companions are a Rottweiler named George and all the books she can read. After a rough start, Maddie learns to trust her own ingenuity and invents clever ways to survive in a place that has been deserted and forgotten. As months pass, she escapes natural disasters, looters, and wild animals. But Maddie's most formidable enemy is the crushing loneliness she faces every day. Can Maddie's stubborn will to survive carry her through the most frightening experience of her life?

Albert Einstein. Steve Jobs. Maya Lin. These geniuses are all visual thinkers. Are you? Do you like puzzles, coding, and taking things apart? Do you write stories, act in plays, slay at Wordle? The things you are good at are clues to how your brain works. Are you good at math? Working with your hands? Are you a neat freak or a big mess? With her knack for making science easy to understand, Temple Grandin explains different types of thinkers: verbal thinkers who are good with language, and visual thinkers who think in pictures and patterns. You will discover all kinds of minds and how we need to work together to create solutions to help solve real-world problems.

The candles are lit, the food is prepared, and the sweet smell of copal floats in the air on Día de Muertos. Built with love and dedication, the family ofrenda stands with pride. As everyone gathers to share in this ritual, each element added to the ofrenda is infused with significance-from the sugar skulls placed with care on top of the embroidered cloth to the golden petals that guide the way. Told after the style of the English nursery rhyme "The House That Jack Built," The Ofrenda That We Built invites readers to learn about and celebrate the Day of the Dead by joining in the building of a family ofrenda. With warmth and brightness, this gorgeously illustrated book is a joyful ode to family traditions, bonds that transcend time, and the memory of loved ones who have passed but who we continue to remember.

A boy explores the layered history of his neighborhood, from present day all the way back to the dinosaurs.

Before leaving on a two-month summer vacation, Jake Evans finds a gift from his deceased grandfather that will lead him on a scavenger hunt through ten of America's most rugged, wild, and beautiful parks.

Kathleen Karr's classic American story of grit, friendship, and turkeys finally reimagined as a sensational graphic novel. Missouri 1860: Simon Green is a bad student. His mother is dead and his father has disappeared. But he's daring, and so when he hears that turkeys fetch a higher price in Denver, he borrows his teacher's life savings and buys a herd of a thousand birds. Then he sets off on the thousand-mile trek with his dog and a pair of mules. To survive the odyssey that follows, Simon will need grit, luck, and smarts--and a colorful cast of friends.

Inspired by her popular Wild Thing podcast, journalist Laura Krantz incorporates the scientific method and her journalistic skills to determine if aliens might exist.

He wanted to be treated like a man, not a child. Every summer the men of the Chavez family go on a long and difficult sheep drive to the mountains. All the men, that is, except for Miguel. All year long, twelve-year-old Miguel tries to prove that he, too, is up to the challenge--that he, too is ready to take the sheep into his beloved Sangre de Cristo Mountains. When his deeds go unnoticed, he prays to San Ysidro, the saint for farmers everywhere. And his prayer is answered . . . but with devastating consequences. When you act like an adult but get treated like a child, what else can you do but keep your wishes secret and pray that they'll come true.

Black and white photos and a poem, both centering the margins of our communities. This board book aims to recall wisdom from our past to help guide our future, and inspire action. Words by Bobby LeFebre. Photos by Juan Fuentes. Produced by Evan Weissman and Warm Cookies of the Revolution.

Two people, aspiring filmmaker Elijah and thirteen-year-old tutor Suzy, are invited to a largely deserted hotel in Estes Park, Colorado to make a film about reclusive horror author Jack Axford, and tutor his son, Danny; but the situation is not as expected: Jack is suffering from early onset dementia, and convinced that his books have released evil, is trying to buy up and destroy them as well as the hotel he lives in-- but nobody is quite what they seem, and soon the whole project starts to resemble one of Jack's horror novels.

Twelve-year-old Anna must dig deep into her Hawaiian roots in order to save her best friend and her island from an angry fire goddess.

Colorado started as a territory and made statehood 100 years after the United States gained independence.

An A-Z book designed with a geocaching-inspired feature. Every letter has a GPS code to encourage people to visit each letter in person. Most of the letters are between the Denver Art Museum and Coors Field, with a few that are a little further away.

Mela ends up in trouble when her little boat is swept into the dense jungle. She offers each animal she meets a prize for helping her find her way home, but the animals take their rewards without helping--then an elephant shows Mela that kindness is its own reward.

Malcolm Montgomery is the new kid at Shirley Chisholm Charter Middle School. In no time at all, he's been slapped with the weird kid label. Is it because he's a foster kid who's been in nine homes? Or maybe because he burps when he gets nervous...which is often? Malcolm has a plan to finally get adopted by a forever family before it's too late. But then on Visiting Professionals' Day, his school invites Dr. Alphonse Hatch, president of Hatch-ED -- one of the fastest-growing artificial intelligence companies in the state -- to give a presentation. Dr. Hatch brings his AI-powered robot, and events get set in motion that create...THE INCIDENT.

Stay alert! Ghosts lurk around every corner. Did you know that in an old courthouse, a ghostly little boy loves to leave handprints -- on the ceiling? Or that the old mining tunnels beneath many towns are haunted? Can you believe that two disembodied heads float through the Capitol building in Denver? Pulled right from history, these ghostly tales will change the way you see Colorado's Front Range, and have you sleeping with the light on!

A picture book about the real-life experience of a Japanese American boy incarcerated with his family during World War II.

Adela loves everything about her family's mariachi band, and wants to be in it--but when she tries the different instruments nothing seems right, so she has to find a different way to become part of the band. Includes notes on mariachi music and bands.

Embarrassed about gathering watercress from a roadside ditch, a girl learns to appreciate her Chinese heritage after learning why the plant is so important to her parents.

A worm and a caterpillar are best friends and when one of them is about to go through a big change, they both learn what is inside is what counts.

When a group of children prepares for and experiences the first day of kindergarten, the parents are the ones who have trouble adjusting.