Boulder is one of six finalists to host the Sundance Film Festival beginning in 2027. 

After asking potential host cities to submit proposals, the Sundance Institute on Friday announced six potential new locations for the 10-day festival, which has been held in Park City, Utah, since it was created in 1985 by Robert Redford as a venue for up-and-coming filmmakers. 

In a statement, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Boulder resident, said he was “so excited” that Boulder made the cut for final review. 

“With the beautiful backdrop of the Flatirons, Boulder’s historical ties to the Redford family, and the capacity to support a growing, inclusive festival, we are confident that Boulder, Colorado, is the right home for the Sundance Film Festival,” Polis said. “I am thrilled the Sundance Institute recognizes the potential in relocating to my hometown and look forward to the many benefits this would bring to the entire state, as well as to the festival.”

Boulder is competing against bids from Atlanta, Cincinnati, Louisville, Kentucky, and Santa Fe, and a combined proposal from Park City and Salt Lake City. 

Ebs Burnough, the chair of the Sundance Institute board, and Amanda Kelso, the acting CEO of the institute, issued a statement saying the six finalists offer a sustainable future for the festival and “build upon its legacy while continuing to support the next generation of storytellers and highlight bold new works of art.”

“For over 40 years, Sundance has supported, sustained, and helped shine an essential spotlight on independent filmmakers and their work,” reads the joint statement, which noted that Sundance organizers would soon visit each of the cities. 

The Colorado Economic Development Commission last month gave Boulder organizers a $1.5 million grant to help lure the Sundance Festival for 10 years beginning in 2027. The Boulder coalition includes Visit Boulder, city officials, the Boulder Chamber, the University of Colorado and the yet-to-be-built Stanley Film Center at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park. 

Last year, state economic boosters put up $300,000 to help the hotel and Estes Park land the Sundance Institute Directors Lab for the next two years.

Last month, Polis said “the evolution from Park City to Boulder is a logical one” for the film festival, noting that Redford attended CU Boulder. 

Film industry champions in Colorado say the Sundance Film Festival could bring 40,000 to 50,000 visitors to Boulder and Denver in the middle of the typically slow season of late January and early February. The event could generate $5 million in annual tax revenue for Boulder with economic impacts reaching $50 million a year as attendees explore Colorado’s winter landscapes beyond the festival.

The Office of Economic Development and International Trade said that number could be closer to $100 million, based on economic reports from Park City. 

This is a breaking news story that will be updated.

A one-time grant of $1.5 million was delivered to a coalition in Boulder working to bring the Sundance Film Festival to the city for 10 years beginning in 2027.

Sundance Film Festival has been hosted in Park City, Utah, since 1985, but in recent years locals and festival goers alike have been grumbling about the cost and accessibility of visiting a high-end mountain town in the middle of winter. 

In April, the Sundance Institute began considering a new home for the world renown festival beginning in 2027. Boulder responded to a request for information in May and was invited to submit a host-city proposal.

The city submitted its proposal on Thursday, on behalf of the Boulder Convention and Visitors Bureau (Visit Boulder) and a regional coalition of partners, including the City of Boulder, the Boulder Chamber, the University of Colorado Boulder and the Stanley Film Center.

Late last year, Colorado put up $300,000 to lure the Sundance Institute Directors Lab to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park for two years, with $200,000 from the state Strategic Fund, $50,000 from the Colorado Tourism Office and $50,000 from the state’s film office.

At the time, the Colorado film office declined to comment on whether this move was part of a broader strategy to lure Sundance to Colorado, but the potential impact of hosting the festival was not lost on the state or its film champions. The film office noted that they hope the lab’s successful first year in Colorado will also act as an incentive for the Institute to continue its relationship with the state.

The request submitted Thursday included a one-time, $1.5 million grant from the Colorado Economic Development Commission that will come from the Strategic Fund Reserve.

The Economic Development Commission receives an annual $5 million allocation to their strategic fund from the state’s general fund. Within the strategic fund, the commission has built up a strategic reserve, which enables them to quickly tap into big sums of money for “transformative” projects like bringing Sundance to Colorado, according to Eve Lieberman, executive director of the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade. The fund was last tapped in 2021 to help CDOT secure the Burnham Yard property.

An additional $250,000 will be contributed by the Colorado Office of Film, TV and media over five years, and one-time contributions of $50,000 from the Colorado Tourism Office and $25,000 from Colorado Creative Industries were also added to Boulder’s proposal. 

The money is part of the incentive package to convince Sundance to move to Colorado. In comparison, Utah allocates somewhere between $1.3 million and $2 million per year to keep the festival in Park City. Lieberman said they do not know how many cities Boulder is competing with for the festival. “What we’re really stressing is a strong cultural fit between mountain destinations. The evolution from Park City to Boulder is a logical one,” Gov. Jared Polis said in an interview. “We have greater capacity in Boulder with the beautiful backdrop of the Flatirons, we have historical ties with the Redford family — Robert Redford attended CU — and we have a partnership with the University of Colorado.”

Commissioners at the meeting were assured that matching funds are also available from “an ever-growing list of philanthropic contributions, as well as substantial in-kind commitments from a number of different entities.” However, details about the matching funds were not disclosed.

At an Economic Development Commission meeting Thursday morning, Donald Zuckerman, head of the Colorado film office, noted that they expect $5 million in annual net sales tax revenue should the festival land in Boulder. It is also projected to bring around 40,000 to 50,000 visitors to the Front Range in the middle of January, a time of relatively low occupancy and visitorship, according to the Colorado Tourism Office. 

CTO estimated spillover benefits of $30 million to $50 million annually, as festival goers extend their trips to visit the mountains, Colorado Springs, Loveland and Estes Park. The Office of Economic Development and International Trade said that number is closer to $100 million, based on Utah’s economic activity.

The bid for a bigger film industry

Recently the state has been pushing to attract more movie-industry activity. In May, Polis signed a tax incentive credit for film and TV productions. House Bill 1358 lengthened the amount of time that an existing $5 million annual tax credit is available to four years from one, with the hope of securing more episodic series and bigger movies, and building a stable film infrastructure in the state. 

It also got rid of a stipulation that made the money contingent on a $50 million state budget surplus. The bill was a follow-up to a $5 million tax credit offered in 2023, a meager chunk of what was recommended by the 2022 Film Incentive Task Force of $15 million for five years.

Colorado doesn’t offer anything close to New Mexico’s $110 million in tax incentive payouts, but the expansion makes the state competitive with other neighboring states, including Wyoming and Utah. It’s worth noting that all four states currently host some part of the Sundance Institute’s expansive programming — with the Directors Lab in Estes Park, the Native Lab in New Mexico, the Producers Lab in Wyoming and, of course, the festival in Park City.

The state is also deeply involved in a new nonprofit film center housed at The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park. In 2015 the center was awarded $46 million in sales tax rebate incentives for 30 years through the Regional Tourism Act. 

In January, Polis and his film office announced that Blumhouse, the producer of horror movies like “Halloween,” “Paranormal Activity” and “Get Out,” will curate 10,000 feet of exhibit space at the new center.

Originally the Stanley Film Center was part of a complex deal between the Grand Heritage Hotel Group, which bought the Stanley out of bankruptcy in the 1990s and operates the hotel, the Arizona-based Community Finance Corp., and the Colorado Educational and Cultural Facilities Authority. When the deal with the Arizona group did not materialize, CECFA stepped in with the plan to acquire the hotel, which required legislation to adjust its mission and allow the purchase and management of a property. In May the governor signed the legislation that makes it easier for the CECFA to own and manage the film center and hotel.

Today’s What’s Working starts with a dive into incentives and the filmmaking industry in Colorado by Sun arts and culture reporter Parker Yamasaki.

Sheila Traister got her start acting in commercials in the late 1980s when, she said, Colorado was in the middle of a filmmaking boom. But by the late 1990s the local work started to dry up, and Traister started traveling more.

“For somebody like me, the majority of my work takes place out of state now,” Traister said. “So I will spend anywhere from 20% to 40% of what I make on a job to do the job.”

Last week Gov. Jared Polis signed House Bill 1358, which expands a tax incentive credit for film, TV and commercial productions that want to shoot in Colorado. The bill allocates $5 million per year over the next four years to spend on refundable tax credits for productions filming in Colorado.

A 2022 legislative task force study reported that since Colorado began offering film incentives in 2012 (which, before last year, were distributed as cash rebates), the state spent $30 million over the decade, or roughly $3 million annually. The Colorado Office of Film, TV and Media reported $182.8 million in actual and predicted production spending and 6,023 cast and crew hires during that time.

The assumption of the incentive is that film productions can be a huge financial boon for local businesses.

In 2022, New Mexico reported a 660% increase in direct spending from the film and television industry in their rural regions — up to nearly $50 million from $6.5 million in 2021. The state has since increased its tax incentive bump to 10% from 5% for productions that film outside of the Santa Fe-Albuquerque corridor.

Colorado is hoping to see similar gains, with additional incentives for productions that use local infrastructure, and film in rural regions or marginalized urban areas.

But bringing in more film productions can also benefit Colorado in a qualitative way, by creating clearer professional pathways for creatives who live, and hope to work, in the state.

“It’s harder to gain experience when you don’t have opportunities to mingle with people at a higher level than you are professionally, or be on their crew or shadow them,” said Micah Baird, an independent filmmaker based in Fort Collins.

“It’s the same thing even for people a level or two above me,” he said. “Like, there’s not a lot of people who start excelling here —they move to California or are constantly traveling to where there is another level of opportunity, and where the whole infrastructure is there already.”

So what does House Bill 1358 do?

In short, the bill lengthens the amount of time that refundable tax credits will be available — to four years from one — and removes a condition that states the credit was only available when state revenues exceed state spending by at least $50 million.

The extension of the credit helps in three major ways. First, it allows film production companies to plan out projects years in advance, which is common practice for bigger productions.

“We can’t just say here’s a ‘maybe’ for projects that want to come here. Productions shy away from Colorado because of that reason,” said Bryant Preston, president of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Local 7.

The multi-year guarantee will also help lure in episodic productions like TV shows, which distribute economic impact over multiple years, and won’t gobble up the $5 million credit in one fell swoop.

Finally, it creates a runway to build up Colorado’s film industry infrastructure. Some of that infrastructure is physical, like sound stages. But some of it is professional, like internships and shadowing opportunities.

“All the money and resources invested into state education, just to have those students graduate and leave the state. Or they leave right after high school because they know there are no internships of real consequence to be had in Colorado,” said Traister, who created an acting department at the Colorado Film School 25 years ago.

Baird, the filmmaker in Fort Collins, feels rooted in Colorado. “I think we just need infrastructure in general, like a path for people, and students, that gives them the opportunity to stay and work.”

38 states have incentives

The way that film locations are chosen has changed drastically over the past two decades.

“It used to be that if they needed the mountains like we have, films came here. If they needed the beach, they went to Florida or California. If they needed skyscrapers, they’d go to New York City. If they wanted plains and plateaus, they’d go to the Midwest,” Traister said.

But since roughly 2002, when Louisiana became the first state to aggressively ramp up its film tax incentive program, locations have been almost entirely incentive-driven. For example, as the New York Times quipped, when Michigan unwound its once-robust film incentives, it lost out on the filming of “Detroit,” which ended up being filmed in Boston.

Thirty-eight states now have allocated tax incentives for film productions; five states introduced those incentives in the past two years, and two states —Michigan and Wisconsin — are working to reinstate their abandoned programs.

The sign read “Welcome to Roswell, New Mexico.” But the real location was Las Vegas, N.M., where a film crew in the Spring of 2021 had turned the plaza neighborhood into the alien-spotting city featured in the Roswell TV series. Production crews paid attention to every detail, including fictional newspapers with a story of destroyed beehives. (Tamara Chuang, The Colorado Sun)

Georgia’s $5 billion in incentives

And then there’s Georgia.

Since Georgia started its film tax incentive program in 2005, the state has doled out nearly $5 billion in incentives. Those investments have proven fruitful, but they’ve also put a target on Atlanta’s back.

“I kept seeing films that said they were based in Colorado that weren’t. They had our mountain ranges wrong, and at the end of it, was that damn Georgia peach,” said Rep. Leslie Herod, one of the bill’s sponsors, at the bill’s signing event. “And if you guys have heard me speak about film, you know how much I can’t stand that peach. Because quite frankly it should be our beautiful Rockies.”

For what it’s worth, the Georgia film commission offers an additional 10% credit on the 20% base tax credit if films embed that ubiquitous peach logo in their end credits.

But Georgia’s program, successful as it has been, might be a little too pie-in-the-sky for Colorado’s current film industry. Even our neighbor New Mexico’s incentives, which will increase from $110 million in payouts to $160 million over the next four years, are hard to compete with at this time.

Preston said Colorado should be competing with our other neighbors —Utah, Wyoming and Oklahoma. (Two sources brought up the fact that the hit show “Yellowstone,” supposedly based on a ranch in Montana, was shot in Utah.)

Incentives success and skepticism

To be clear, film tax incentives have not proven to be cure-alls for ailing economies. Some states, like California, Pennsylvania and Virginia, have reported that their programs either didn’t make a huge difference for productions’ decisions to shoot there (California) or had a negligible impact compared to other industry-specific incentives.

But those states have kept their film tax incentives propped up one way or another, acknowledging that even if the return on investment wasn’t quite as stunning as they’d hoped — Pennsylvania reported a 13.1 cent return for each tax credit dollar spent —they all still created a net positive.

A 2023 audit of Georgia’s film tax credit addressed skepticism about whether the state was really seeing a substantial return on investment when comparing tax dollars in versus tax dollars out, but did conclude that the tax credit “induces substantial economic activity.”

“When you incentivize the film industry, that impact reaches just about every business you could possibly think of,” Traister said. “If you’ve got a three-week film shoot or a six-month TV series, those people are living here. They’re going to our theaters now, our museums, our restaurants, our zoos, our city parks. They’re gonna go to Garden of the Gods and Aspen and Snowmass, and it just goes on and on and on.”

Section by Parker Yamasaki | Reporter

Got an arts or culture-related story tip for Parker? Email her at parker@coloradosun.com

Gov. Polis, the entrepreneur

Long before Jared Polis became Colorado’s governor, he was an entrepreneur, having founded an online greeting card site, an ecommerce florist and other ventures in the 1990s. He also was a cofounder of Techstars, the business accelerator for tech startups that launched in Boulder more than 17 years ago and ended its era in the city Thursday.

Polis, who’s had a very busy few weeks signing and vetoing bills from the recent legislative session, still made time to speak at the last Techstars Boulder Demo Day. And while he was at it, he gave several nods to entrepreneurship in Colorado, like this:

“There’s so much more support for starting a company and getting the help and support you need here today in Colorado,” he said. “And we also are relatively unique in the country. I will be governor for two more years and when I’m done being governor, Colorado will have had 16 years of an entrepreneur as our chief executive officer.”

He was talking about himself has his two-term predecessor, Sen. John Hickenlooper. Hickenlooper, before he became Denver’s mayor and then governor, opened Denver’s first craft brewery, the Wynkoop, which helped revitalize the city’s Lower Downtown neighborhood.

During his 5-minute speech to the Techstars audience, Polis pointed to one particular law he helped pass. Senate Bill 134 prohibits home owner associations from banning home-based businesses. While this hasn’t been a big issue, companies skirting HOA rules could be out of compliance with one’s bank and insurance. The new law protects those home-based startups running “reasonable” businesses. In other words, no running a retail store with cars pulling up.

“That’s one less legal threat hanging over the heads of entrepreneurs,” Polis said.

Section by Tamara Chuang | Business/Technology Reporter

➔ Techstars Denver hosting workforce accelerator. Techstars still has a presence in Colorado. On Monday, the company said its new hybrid Workforce Development Accelerator will be based out of the Denver office. The startups have been chosen and the program begins June 10. The goal? Develop tech that helps companies attract and retain talent and create a pipeline of future employees. >> Check out the 12 startups

➔ Tax credits for employee-owned businesses. Polis also signed House Bill 1157 into law this week to provide a refundable income tax credit for tax years 2025 to 2029. The credit is up to 50% of costs incurred by new employee-owned businesses and not to exceed $50,000. Such companies must have been owned by employees for seven or fewer years. This also creates a new Employee Ownership Office within the state’s economic development department. >> Read law

Sun economy stories you may have missed

➔ Outside Festival deemed a success with 18,000 attendees helping forge a model for a new national outdoor recreation gathering. With business, concerts, films, panels and outdoor gear brands, organizers hope the inaugural Outside Festival becomes a must-attend event for the outdoor recreation industry >> Read story

➔ Estes Park has growing pains this summer. From construction to elk, here’s how to manage it. Understanding the downtown road re-construction mess, a still-shuttered national park campground and elk attacks are a few of the keys to the area >> Read story

➔ Colorado’s growing approach to solving chronic homelessness: Permanent housing with few rules. Jefferson Center and WellPower of Denver are building permanent supportive housing complexes modeled after a 2017 Denver building that still has a waitlist >> Read story

➔ Hope Springs in Greeley, the largest Habitat neighborhood in the West, gets a 3D twist and $100M to build 491 homes. As median home prices edge beyond $500,000 in Weld County, there’s new hope with this community of affordable housing options >> Read story

➔ Eldora Mountain Resort withdraws objections to ski patroller union vote. Eldora managers say the move is to promote “good faith” negotiations while patrollers suspect the decision was based on the legal cost “to argue challenges that were shaky at best” >> Read story

➔ A Colorado Supreme Court ruling poked a hole in ski resorts’ liability protections. What’s next? Ski resorts, summer camps and rafting companies warned prior to the ruling that it may force companies to get rid of many recreation options for kids >> Read story

Other working bits

➔ Colorado’s CLIMBER small business loans extended. Most of the $250 million Colorado set aside for small business loans is still untapped so the CLIMBER program was extended with House Bill 1453, which Polis signed this week. Short for Colorado Loans to Increase Mainstreet Business Economic Resiliency, CLIMBER loans were offered “as federal pandemic funds have dried up for small businesses,” said Sam Taylor, program director. But as of the end of March, just $24.5 million has been loaned out to 198 small businesses in Colorado. These working capital loans of $10,000 to $500,000 for up to 10 years are available to companies with up to 99 employees. >> More at climber-colorado.com

➔ The 4th annual hunt for tech to help Colorado communities begins. The Colorado Smart Cities Alliance just announced its fourth-annual C² Challenge, a competition to find technology that addresses this year’s priorities of affordable housing for the missing middle, crime prevention, infrastructure management and utilization of park space. Winners get to work with a local city to test out their tech on a larger scale. An information session is June 18 (register here). Submissions are due July 26. >> Submit

Got some economic news or business bits Coloradans should know? Tell us: cosun.co/heyww

Thanks for sticking with me for this week’s report. Remember to check out The Sun’s daily coverage online. As always, share your 2 cents on how the economy is keeping you down or helping you up at cosun.co/heyww. ~ tamara

Miss a column? Catch up:

• New broadband laws to help Colorado streamline distribution of $800+ million
• Nearly 55,000 Coloradans now have a retirement account after law went into effect
• Colorado added a mere 300 jobs in April
• Growing older in Colorado? You’ll be interested in these new laws
• Big economic development wins but sluggish job market? What’s going on in Colorado Springs
• Food is money for Colorado farmers and ranchers. Here’s how the ag census report says they’re doing 
• More than 50% of Colorado’s businesses employ workers outside the state

What’s Working is a Colorado Sun column about surviving in today’s economy. Email tamara@coloradosun.com with stories, tips or questions. Read the archive, ask a question at cosun.co/heyww and don’t miss the next one by signing up at coloradosun.com/getww.

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Corrections & Clarifications

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By Heather Hollingsworth, The Associated Press

Two young brothers and their cousin were wandering through a fossil-rich stretch of the North Dakota badlands when they made a discovery that left them “completely speechless”: a T. rex bone poking out of the ground.

The trio announced their discovery publicly Monday at a Zoom news conference as workers at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science prepare to begin chipping the fossil out of its rock cast at a special exhibit called Discovering Teen Rex. The exhibit’s opening on June 21 will coincide with the debut of the film “T.REX,” about the July 2022 find.

It all started when Kaiden Madsen, then 9, joined his cousins, Liam and Jessin Fisher, then 7 and 10, on a hike through a stretch of land owned by the Bureau of Land Management around Marmarth, North Dakota. Hiking is a favorite pastime of the brothers’ father, Sam Fisher.

“You just never know what you are going to find out there. You see all kinds of cool rocks and plants and wildlife,” he said.

Liam Fisher recalled that he and his dad, who accompanied the trio, first spotted the bone of the young carnivore. After its death around 67 million years ago, it was entombed in the Hell Creek Formation, a popular paleontology playground that spans Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas. The formation has yielded some of the most well-preserved T. rex fossils ever. Among them is Sue, a popular attraction at the Field Museum in Chicago, and Wyrex, a star at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

But none of them knew that then. Liam said he thought the bone sticking out of the rock was something he described as “chunk-osaurus” — a made-up name for fragments of fossil too small to be identifiable.

Still, Sam Fisher snapped a picture and shared it with a family friend, Tyler Lyson, the associate curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

Initially, Lyson suspected it was a relatively common duckbill dinosaur. But he organized an excavation that began last summer, adding the boys and a sister, Emalynn Fisher, now 14, to the team.

It didn’t take long to determine they had found something more special. Lyson recalled that he started digging with Jessin where he thought he might find a neck bone.

“Instead of finding a cervical vertebrae, we found the lower jaw with several teeth sticking out of it,” Lyson said. “And it doesn’t get any more diagnostic than that, seeing these giant tyrannosaurus teeth starring back at you.”

A documentary crew with Giant Screen Films was there to capture the discovery.

“It was electric. You got goosebumps,” recalled Dave Clark, who was part of the crew filming the documentary that later was narrated by Jurassic Park actor Sir Sam Neill.

Liam said his friends were dubious. “They did not believe me at all,” he said.

He, Jessin and Kaiden — who the brothers consider to be another sibling — affectionately dubbed the fossil “The Brothers.”

Based on the size of the tibia, experts estimate the dino was 13 to 15 years old when it died and likely weighed around 3,500 pounds (1,587.57 kilograms) — about two-thirds of the size of a full-grown adult.

Ultimately, a Black Hawk helicopter airlifted the plaster-clad mass to a waiting truck to drive it to the Denver museum.

Lyson said more than 100 individual T. rex fossils have been unearthed, but many are fragmentary. It is unclear yet how complete this fossil is. So far, they know they have found a leg, hip, pelvis, a couple of tailbones and a good chunk of the skull, Lyson said.

The public will get to watch crews chip away the rock, which the museum estimates will take about a year.

“We wanted to share the preparation of this fossil with the public because it is a remarkable feeling,” Lyson said.

Jessin, a fan of the Jurassic Park movies and an aspiring paleontologist, has continued looking for fossils, finding a turtle shell just a couple days ago.

For other kids, he had this advice: “Just to put down their electronics and go out hiking.”

Story first appeared in:

It’s almost summertime, when the livin’ — and readin’ — are easy. We’ve tried to make it even a little bit easier by offering 20 thoughtful suggestions across many genres, thanks to a collection of Colorado authors who share at least one thing in common: All have earned recognition this year as finalists for the Colorado Book Awards (with winners to be announced June 21).

These writers graciously took the time to consider other offerings in the category for which they became CBA finalists and narrowed their favorites down to two. Then they shared their thoughts on why these selections might appeal to engaged fans of the genre.

They were not bound by any considerations beyond a broad definition of their specific category, so you’ll see recent releases mixed among titles that you may have missed when they were first published. Of course, we also linked to these authors’ own creations that put them in such select company.

Some of the authors already have had their finalists excerpted in SunLit, the Sun’s weekly literary spotlight. All of them eventually will be featured in the weeks ahead, so there’s still an opportunity to be introduced to this collection of Colorado talent and sample portions of their most recently honored work.

So whether you’re looking for a fun beach read or something that dives deep into the issues of our complex world, there’s something with your name on it among this collection. So as we head into summer, enjoy this menu of informative and entertaining literature.

Creative Nonfiction

Camille Dungy, an award-winning author and poet who is a university distinguished professor at Colorado State University, was honored as a CBA finalist for her 2023 book “Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden.” She offers her thoughts and recommendations on two more Creative Nonfiction titles.

“The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year”

By Margaret Renkl (2023)

In this lovely book, written in short sections, Renkl shares botanical, animal, political and personal views from her garden. If you’re a fan of Renkl’s New York Times column, or if you just like the idea of watching a year progress in a highly observant person’s garden, this book is full of rich and thoughtful moments to savor.

“Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto”

By Tricia Hersey (2022)

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed with all the plates I find myself juggling, and I wonder what would happen if I put some of them down. I don’t often think about the intersection of overwork and our nation’s complicated human history, and perhaps I’m encouraged not to think about this question by design. In this brilliant and timely book, Hersey, the founder of The Nap Ministry taps into the power of rest to disrupt the corrupting power of capitalism and white supremacy. One of my favorite writers, Lucille Clifton, used to say that she wrote “to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comforted,” and Hersey’s wise and helpful book aims to do both.

Thriller

Caleb Stephens, a CPA who also found writing success with his CBA finalist, the “The Girls in the Cabin,”  specializes in the psychological thriller. He has a couple more suggestions from the Thriller genre for you to consider.

“BETA”

By Sammy Scott (2023)

This is an incredible thriller with a “Black Mirror” vibe about a state-of-the-art AI home designed to meet your every need. I’ll admit that I’m a bit of a prose snob, and Sammy Scott is no slouch. His writing is top-notch, which is what initially drew me in, but what kept me reading was the complex and multilayered plot threaded with heart-rending pathos. And I should probably mention “BETA” is full of twists you won’t see coming. It’s fantastic — a story that feels like it could actually happen in real life.

“Whalefall”

By Daniel Kraus (2023)

This book is both tense and tender — a coming-of-age tale about a son growing up beneath a father with tremendous expectations. An exploration of grief and survival … while trapped inside the belly of a sperm whale. Jay Gardiner is a scuba diver who has an hour to escape before his oxygen runs out and his demons claim him. Trust me, this one will leave you breathless.

Historical Fiction

Buzzy Jackson has a Ph.D. in history and three nonfiction titles to her credit. Now she has added a CBA finalist honor for her novel, “To Die Beautiful,” and suggests two other Historical Fiction titles — both long and short — for lovers of the genre.

“Wolf Hall” (trilogy)

By Hilary Mantel (2020)

The first time I tried to read “Wolf Hall,” the first book in Hilary Mantel’s brilliant and moving trilogy of the life of Thomas Cromwell and his boss, Henry VIII, I put it down after only a few pages. I was overwhelmed. Then I tried again, and quit again. Finally, I watched the entire BBC miniseries version of “Wolf Hall,” straightened out who all the Thomases and Henrys and Catherines and Annes were, and tried reading it again, and it finally took. I read all three books and then read them again. At this point I’ve read them all several times over! An absolute tour de force of narrative voice, deep humanity, and ideas about how to live in this strange and wondrous world. It’s a life’s achievement (Mantel’s writing, not my labored reading).

“The Buddha in the Attic”

By Julie Otsuka (2012)

As brief as “Wolf Hall” is long, this beautiful little novel (145 pages) does something very unusual, telling the story of an entire generation of women — young mail-order brides from Japan around 1900 — in the collective first person. “On the boat we carried our husbands’ pictures in tiny oval lockets that hung on long chains from our necks,” Otsuka writes. “We carried them in the sleeves of our kimonos, which we touched often, just to make sure they were still there.” It is a heartbreaking and gorgeous novel about courage, endurance, and facing the unknown. It’s a window into the human experience that will stay with me forever. 

Literary Fiction

Ramona Ausubel includes the prestigious PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction among her honors in addition to her CBA finalist, “The Last Animal.” She also has published two short story collections. These recommendations focus on Literary Fiction.

“State of Paradise”

By Laura van den Berg (2024) 

This is a tropical storm of a novel. The real world our main character finds herself in is strange — it won’t stop raining, things and people disappear, and she’s filled with memories of being in a mental hospital when she was younger. It’s all haunted. Still, the novel made me feel strangely joyful. Maybe it’s van den Berg’s incredible clarity of observation and image, or the emotional power of a woman and her family holding tight to what matters, even as the forces around them shift. 

“Beautyland”

By Marie-Helene Bertino (2024)

An alien uses a fax machine to send amazing, spot-on observations about Earth to her home planet. But the alien is also a human girl named Adina, living in Philadelphia. But the girl is an alien in her home, in her life. All of those sentences are true, even though they seem to contradict each other. This funny, huge-hearted novel is about the truth of belonging and dis-belonging, and the idea that only from the outside can we see ourselves and our home clearly. I have never felt so human than reading Adina’s alien observations, and I have never identified more with alienation. Brilliant!

Romance

Lou Dean has won several awards for her inspirational stories, and now adds CBA finalist for her novel “Autumn of the Big Snow,” a Western romance whose setting reflects the Oklahoma native’s love for her adopted home in northwest Colorado. She has two more suggestions for Romance fans.

“Chasing The Horizon”

By Mary Connealy (2024)

This is an action-packed story with a determined main character. Beth will capture your attention on page one and you will find yourself drawn into her fight for survival, then take pleasure in watching her faith and hard work lead to love, when least expected. This is an inspirational novel published by Bethany House in 2024.

“The Mermaid Chair”

By Sue Monk Kidd (2005)

This novel is a love story of many depths. This author is a master at probing the human spirit and defining all that a lesser author could not reveal. If you enjoy love, loss and self-discovery, this book will not disappoint. Published by Penguin Books in 2005, this was Kidd’s second novel. Her first, “The Secret Life of Bees,” was a New York Times Bestseller and became a film.

General Nonfiction

Chip Colwell is an archeologist, digital magazine editor and former senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. He’s a CBA finalist for “So Much Stuff,” which explores the history and reasons behind why humans tend to collect, well, so much stuff. He has some ideas for other great General Nonfiction reads.

“The Bear”

By Andrew Krivak (2020)

How has humanity lost its way with nature? And how can we find our way back? This book joins the apocalypse genre, yet is like no other I know. OK, this is fiction, but it reveals so many deeper truths, I can’t help but recommend it here. The novella is a concise epic, unpretentious yet ponderous, about a father and daughter, who are the last people on Earth. Through their journey, they reclaim through lyrical tenderness our interconnectedness to the natural world, at last, in our species’ final moments.

“Soldiers and Kings”

By Jason De León (2024)

Much of the experience of Central American migrants crossing from Mexico into the United States remains veiled. Jason De León is an anthropologist who spent years studying the hidden lives and labor of coyotes, the guides who take migrants along this journey. Obliterating stereotypes and easy assumptions, De León masterfully crafts a readable, gripping popular ethnography. It will haunt you with its tragic stories of how failing politicians have forced so many people into the desperation of migrating north — and created the very conditions for the clandestine smuggling they condemn.

Biography

Steve Friesen spent 22 years running the Buffalo Bill Museum on Lookout Mountain and wrote three books on the icon of the American West. His CBA finalist  “Galloping Gourmet: Eating and Drinking with Buffalo Bill” took him in an entirely new direction with what he calls a “culinary biography.” Here are his picks for two more Biography selections, both with a western flavor.

“The Earth is All that Lasts”

By Mark Lee Gardner (2022)

Gardner weaves together a tale about two of the most fascinating individuals in American history: Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Using newly uncovered information, this well-documented book is both scholarly and very readable. From the book’s opening chapter to Sitting Bull’s death at the end, it grabbed my attention and would not let go. Gardner is a master storyteller.

 “Cast Out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness”

By Robert Aquinas McNally (2024)

John Muir is regarded as one of the saviors of the American wilderness. Yet his efforts came at a price for the tribal peoples who occupied that wilderness. McNally shines a new light on a man who we can still regard as heroic but also had his darker sides. The book demonstrates that, despite our efforts to simplify them as either heroes or villains, the people who occupy our past were no less complicated than we are.  

Sci-fi and Fantasy

Ann Claycomb made a splash with her CBA finalist “Silenced” in the Sci-fi/Fantasy category, a book that some critics have described as a modern feminist fairy tale. She offers two titles (that are both part of extended series) that lean more toward fantasy than sci-fi.

“Penric’s Demon”

By Lois McMaster Bujold (2015)

Don’t be deceived by this slender volume: This the first of 12 books and counting featuring a warmly compassionate young man (Penric) who is accidentally possessed by/of a snarky, brilliant demon (Desdemona), an incident that sets them on a years-long path of helping others, often in extremely unexpected ways. Moreover, this book is just one of many ways into the extraordinary catalog of sci-fi and fantasy luminary Lois McMaster Bujold, who did a lot of her writing (like I have done) in the midst of finding Band-Aids, making meals, doing laundry and generally keeping a household going.  Her world-building is wildly inventive, but it’s her utterly appealing, deeply human characters who will stay with you.

“Rivers of London”

By Ben Aaronovitch (2011)

Another gift for anyone who reads a much as I do and who has perhaps been known to panic when they finish a book and realize they don’t have another one queued up: “Rivers of London” is the first of a nine-book (and counting) series about British police officer Peter Grant, who discovers on one of his first nights on the job that he might be, well, a wizard. From there, Peter’s wry, self-aware first-person voice carries us into every corner of his beloved London in the company of his mysterious mentor, an even more mysterious housekeeper, a best friend who may not be, and a fat little dog named Toby. The magic in these books isn’t a metaphor for anything else; it’s magic — wild, unpredictable, fantastical, and often deadly — and that’s absolutely as it should be.​

History

Patricia B. Martinez and Herman A. Martinez earned CBA finalist honors for “Hilos Culturales: Cultural Threads of the San Luis Valley,” their collection of cultural vignettes from the region. They suggest two other volumes that delve into the region’s rich history.

“Trail of the Espinosa Outlaws”

By Michael A. Espinosa (2023)

Originally titled “The Other Side of the Peso,” Espinosa’s book tells his father’s story, documented from verbal accounts by his grandfather around 1857, on their ranch in western Texas. It concludes in El Valle de San Luis in southern Colorado. Based on true incidents, Espinosa brings his father’s and grandfather’s words to life in an exciting novel of revenge that reflects the “human side of violence.” 

“Memorias De Mi Familia” (“Memories Of My Family”)

By Michael R. García (2022)

A historical and biographical account by the author who through a labor of love, chronicles his family’s beginnings in New Mexico and southern Colorado. García highlights generations of his ancestors through family records, their contributions and inherited family photographs. He also identifies his great-great grandfather José María Jáquez as a co-founder of the town of Conejos. The author discovered García-Trujillo family lines dated to Abiquiú, New Mexico, in 1735 and recognizes members of his family who represented the new Colorado Territorial Legislature, representing Conejos.

Mystery

Ausma Zehanat Khan continues her rise in the world of crime fiction with the CBA finalist “Blood Betrayal,” the second installment of her Blackwater Falls crime series. She has thoughts on a couple other mysteries that fans of the genre might find entertaining and interesting.

“Guns and Almond Milk”

By Mustafa Marwan (2024)

An astonishingly well-written thriller about the travails of a disconsolate humanitarian aid worker in Yemen and the woman — and crime — he left behind in England. Luke Archer is a British-Egyptian physician who mediates a standoff between opposing forces when a despised general is brought to his field hospital for treatment. Wrestling with questions of love and belonging, Luke must also face the consequences of a heist gone wrong in his past. “Guns and Almond Milk” is a surprising inside look at the wartime destruction of Yemen and the costs imposed by running from the truth.

“The Satapur Moonstone”

By Sujata Massey (2020)

This elegant and compelling mystery set in 1920s India features Perveen Mistry as a rare female detective who is summoned to advise the Maharanis of the princely state of Satapur. The Maharanis observe a state of seclusion from men, thus trust only Perveen to guide them on the future of the royal heir, whose status is in jeopardy. With great attention to the historical period that never feels heavy or irrelevant, the novel is not only superbly plotted, but is also a fascinating window into the social mores and cultural customs of the time.

This story first appeared in Colorado Sunday, a premium magazine newsletter for members.

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In early March, Indigenous artist Danielle SeeWalker posted a new painting to her Instagram: A woman in profile, her face grayed out except one eye staring directly at the viewer — a signature of SeeWalker’s painted works. The woman is wearing a keffiyeh, the black-and-white scarf worn to signal support of Palestine, with a feather by her ear and a bright red braid.

Reactions to the painting were overwhelmingly positive, “I’m so grateful to know you and your work,” one person wrote. Hands clapping and watermelon emojis, a symbol of Palestinian support, dotted the comment section. She later created 60 prints of the painting, titled “G is for Genocide,” and sold them to raise money for the UN Crisis Relief Fund. 

But in early May, that same painting stripped her opportunity to spend part of her summer as Vail’s artist in residence. 

Vail has been inching toward an artist in residence program for over two decades, and finally took a major stride last year bringing Washington-based artist Squire Broel to the town for a pilot program. In January, the town contacted SeeWalker, a Denver-based Lakota artist whose work across mediums reflects her experiences as an Indigenous woman in contemporary America. They wanted her as their second artist in residence. 

“They had a robust program with a stipend, studio, community engagement opportunities,” SeeWalker said. “I was really excited about it. I was really excited, as a person of color, to bring my art to a place that is … ” she paused. “Not really known for its diversity.”

And Vail was excited too. “We had a sincere interest in her art and her passion around Native Americans,” Vail town manager Russell Forrest said Thursday in an interview. In February, SeeWalker opened an exhibition with History Colorado that pairs historic Native American artifacts with contemporary artworks.   

SeeWalker worked with Vail’s Art in Public Places program to develop a residency that would include a mural at the Vail Village parking structure, a photography exhibit from her Red Road Project and a moderated discussion at the Vail Symposium, a nonprofit independent of the town that provides educational programming. 

The city posted an announcement about her residency on May 6, a month before she was scheduled to move in. Then the town started to receive emails. 

“We started getting messages from individuals looking closely at her social media posts,” Forrest said. “The concern was around the very polarizing issue in Israel and Gaza right now. We didn’t want public funds connected to a project about a polarizing geopolitical issue that is still playing out.”’

Discourse around Palestine since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, has become increasingly fraught. Political conflict has erupted in the statehouse, city council chambers and college campuses.

SeeWalker hadn’t submitted a proposal for her project. The town had no way of knowing what the mural would be. But Art in Public Places wasn’t willing to wait and see.

“The messaging had already occurred. The post and the reaction had occurred,” Forrest said.

Three days after the news release hit the town’s website, it was removed and replaced with a statement, emphasizing the fact that her art had turned from focusing on Native Americans to the crisis in Gaza. 

“I tried to explain my position, tried to understand more about the community’s concerns, but they just talked over me and ended the call,” SeeWalker said. The call lasted “a minute and a half, tops. And that was probably the most disappointing part of the whole thing,” she said. “The disrespect.”

SeeWalker said she painted “G is for Genocide” in recognition of the parallels between the plight of Native Americans in the U.S. and the crisis in Gaza. 

“It’s about erasing a culture, about taking land. Me as an Indigenous person, this is what happened to my ancestors,” SeeWalker said. “The piece is not about taking sides, it’s about humanity, it’s about not destroying a culture and letting people live.”

But she never had a chance to explain that, nor will she. The whole experience has soured her to the residency in Vail. “I was just blindsided. No chance to understand or explain. After that, even if they wanted to offer me a residency, I wouldn’t take it.”

There aren’t many trades that require quitting a job in order to start a career, but being a visual artist is one of them. 

Guadalupe Hernandez worked as a high school teacher for six years while pursuing art after hours and during summers. He started taking art more seriously in 2020 and as a result, his work started winning awards and getting selected for shows, especially around Texas where he’s from. The momentum built and by the start of the summer term in 2022, Hernandez had decided he wouldn’t return to teaching in the fall. 

“There was a lot of work that I needed to produce, and I just knew that if I went back to teaching, (my life) would become teaching. Like you might have some energy at the end of the day, here or there, but especially during those first couple of months teaching is all you do,” said Hernandez, whose art focuses on the experiences of Mexican immigrants like his family, and which he saw a growing urgency for during Donald Trump’s presidency. 

Before Hernandez quit teaching he lined up a few stepping stones to guide himself into the world of a full-time artist: a three-month stint at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, a site-specific sculpture project, a few workshops and some one-off jobs packing and moving artwork.

Then he was accepted as the Visiting Artist of Color at the Art Students League of Denver, an eight-month residency that is nearing its end.

Art Students League started the residency in 2021 in recognition of the fact that artists of color have been historically excluded from formal art spaces, including residencies. The six- to nine-month program provides a selected artist with a dedicated studio, a $2,000 per month living stipend, $1,900 per month toward rent and $6,000 for materials. 

In exchange the artist is expected to host public workshops, arrange studio visits and create a body of work to display at the end of their residency. Hernandez’s exhibition, “Not the Best, But Either Way, The Work Needs To Be Done,” opens April 26 and will remain up until June 1. 

“We have a pretty firm stake in the ground about always paying artists across the board with all of our programming,” said Tessa Crisman, director of communications at the Art Students League. She shook her head at the idea of being paid in “exposure,” something that artists regularly encounter when they’re first starting out.

Work in progress

Hernandez’s Denver studio is covered in imagery from the life he temporarily left behind. Photos of Mexican markets are taped near the windows, large-scale portraits of his brothers lean against the walls and his work tables are covered in ornate papel picado, the colorful, decorative tissue paper flags hung at celebrations in Mexico. 

He said that he’s created about “two years’ worth” of work during his eight months in Denver — work that he wouldn’t have been able to produce if not for the stipends, which freed him to spend full days in his studio.

The Art Students League is an anomaly in terms of what it is able to provide to its artists. Many residencies in Colorado offer more qualitative amenities, like studio space, access to alumni networks and community engagement opportunities. These things are extremely valuable resources for artists, especially during the early stages of their careers. But studio space doesn’t buy groceries, and community engagement opportunities won’t pay a utility bill. 

Two of the more widely known residencies in Colorado, Anderson Ranch and the RedLine Contemporary Art Center, don’t offer financial support to their resident artists, but emphasize building the artist’s network. Anderson Ranch in Snowmass Village hosts critics and curators during the residents’ stay that can tether the artists to the art world at large. RedLine in Denver has an “open door” policy, meaning that residents work with their studio doors — quite literally — open to the community and fellow residents. 

Other residencies do offer financial incentives, but are more geographically isolated, like the Green Box Artist Residency in Green Mountain Falls, west of Colorado Springs, which provides a $9,000 stipend, housing and a studio for one month. 

“It is a risk, like self-employment is f-ing hard —  it ebbs and flows, and projects ebb and flow,” said Sarah Darlene, a Denver-based artist and former RedLine resident. “But all these other things are opening up for me because of (my time at) RedLine. So there is a risk, yes. You have to really carve out time to make it work, and do unpaid work in a lot of ways during these residencies. But if you take advantage of it, I think it can really build a lifetime’s worth of support for you after.”

During her residency, Darlene developed the concept for her “Flow State” meditative painting classes, which she now teaches regularly at the Denver Art Museum. She has also been tweaking the classes for new settings, like businesses and health care.

Hernandez was offered a massive public art commission in Houston during his Denver residency. He was able to complete it alongside his personal work because of the time and space the residency granted him. That piece will set him up financially for at least the next year, and, he hopes, anchor future proposals in the realm of public art. 

He was also recently asked to interview for a teaching job at a private school in Houston. With the public art commission in place, he doesn’t need the position for the moment. But he still might want it.

 “If I get that job, I’m definitely gonna consider it,” he said. “It’s nice to have that security.”

Fifty employees representing about 18% of the workforce at Meow Wolf’s Denver location were laid off on Wednesday. Meow Wolf CEO Jose Tolosa sent a memo to staff Monday announcing the upcoming layoffs as part of a companywide effort to cut expenses by 10% and reduce the workforce in order to “right-size the business.”   

On Thursday morning, Tolosa shared more details, including that 159 positions were cut in the four states Meow Wolf operates in. The company originally reported cutting 165 positions. In addition, the company plans to reduce the executive team’s compensation by 10%, close its corporate New York City office, scrap plans to open a Los Angeles office, and reduce funding for the Meow Wolf Foundation, a nonprofit arm that issues grants to creative organizations. 

“When we opened our first exhibitions, there were no comparables for what we wanted to do. We were inventing an operating model from scratch,” Tolosa wrote in the memo. He went on to say that the past three years have taught the company about market demand and visitation patterns, and that they “overestimated the staffing in a number of functions.”

Invention and experimentation have always been at the core of Meow Wolf’s business, creating widespread success and intense growing pains. 

The immersive art company was founded in New Mexico in 2008 by a group of artists — and self-described “technologists, writers, fabricators, painters, sculptors, musicians, rat gang leaders, and shoplifters” — with a shared interest in public art experiences. They built a local reputation on chaotic, anti-art-world antics and shows. Then, in 2015, Meow Wolf landed a $2.7 million donation from “Game of Thrones” creator George R. R. Martin to fund its first brick-and-mortar exhibit, a renovated bowling alley in Santa Fe that became “The House of Eternal Return.” 

“You have to go with your gut,” Martin told the Los Angeles Times in an interview about his donation. 

Since then, the company has expanded its maximalist, sci-fi-infused exhibitions to Las Vegas, Denver and Grapevine, Texas, with plans to open a Houston location later this year. They have grown from a few local founders to over 1,000 employees; from an art collective with a bent toward anarchy to a multimillion-dollar company with job titles that start with “chief executive.”

Growing pains

Meow Wolf opened both its Denver location, “Convergence Station,” and Las Vegas location, “Omega Mart,” in 2021. The company’s employee count more than doubled that year, from around 400 to nearly 1,000. Opening the new locations also meant major investments in local artist collaborations, including nearly $2.5 million spent decking out the Denver location.

Over the past three years, the company has opened a fourth location, planned a fifth, was recertified as a B Corp and launched the Meow Wolf Foundation.

But the company has also admitted to pursuing growth faster than its finances could keep up with, and those moves haven’t always gone over well with employees. 

In 2020, with the Santa Fe location closed indefinitely due to the pandemic, and half of the company’s full-time workforce laid off, the remaining employees launched a union drive. They were voluntarily recognized soon after, but it took almost two years to secure a collective bargaining agreement. During that time, employees filed four unfair labor practice cases with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging the company was unfairly retaliating and refusing to bargain in good faith. 

In 2022, one year after opening, employees at the Denver location launched their own union drive. Denver employees secured a collective bargaining agreement just seven months after their recognition, an anomaly amid a wave of labor organizing that tends to stall out during contract negotiations. 

Among the union contract’s layoff provisions are two weeks of severance pay for every year that an employee has worked with Meow Wolf, payment of any unused time off and three months of COBRA benefits. Meow Wolf did not say how many employees laid off at the Denver location are represented by the union.

Employees at Meow Wolf in Las Vegas received union recognition in September of last year and are still working toward their first contract. Internal communications state that the company will lay off 54 employees represented by the union from that location. The company says it is “actively negotiating with the union” in Las Vegas, despite having no collective bargaining agreement in place. Employees at the Grapevine, Texas, location announced their intent to join the union in December 2023 but have not been formally recognized by the company yet.

When Denver writer-rapper-cartoonist-speaker-podcaster-professor R. Alan Brooks — a man rapidly running out of hyphens — recently began to conceptualize his first children’s book, he rode a cresting wave of artistic momentum. 

Over the past several years, Brooks, 48, published his first graphic novel, landed a gig teaching that art form at a local university, hosted multiple podcasts, delivered a popular TED Talk, established a weekly comic strip for The Colorado Sun, published a second graphic novel, appeared in a short-story anthology and had his visual arts featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Denver Art Museum — twice.

Lots of other projects, from screenwriting to educational cartoons, filled in any gaps. Those surges of creativity — and income — allowed Brooks to step away from a day job selling insurance to focus full-time on his varied creative pursuits. And yet, to realize this children’s book, a relatively modest passion project inspired in large part by his bond with his young niece, he instinctively turned to crowdfunding. 

That his Kickstarter campaign surpassed its $8,400 goal in just five days tells the story of an artist who, having little luck with traditional avenues for monetizing his skills, instead has found financial footing by cultivating an organically grown audience who appreciates his work. And that audience has continued to expand as his artistic range has attracted more and more public recognition. 

And though appreciation may have been long in coming for the Ithaca, N.Y., native who grew up in Atlanta before venturing to Denver more than 20 years ago, Brooks has turned hard lessons and timely advice to his advantage.

“The beauty of living in this age that we live in is that I don’t have to depend on a publisher to tell me I’m a writer,” Brooks says. “The beauty of Kickstarter is if I can create something that engages enough people, they will help me create it. And if I don’t engage them, then they don’t have to help me create it — but I’m not waiting on a gatekeeper.”

His experience in pulling together funding in 2017 for his first graphic novel, “The Burning Metronome,” became a foundational lesson in how to approach the business side of his craft that sustains his artistic instincts. Although he hadn’t had much luck previously with crowdfunding, this time his Kickstarter request found its way into a college alumni group. 

Some people from his alma mater — he entered Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, at 16 and graduated three years later — posted it on Facebook. Suddenly, names that he hadn’t heard for maybe 25 years started popping up as donors. Before long, he had just about doubled his original goal.

By concentrating on the audience that I know that I can have direct connection to, and building out from there, I can have my needs met while I’m expanding, so that I’m not reaching for deals out of desperation.

— R. Alan Brooks, writer and artist

When his TED Talk hit a million views (it’s now approaching 3 million), he reasoned that at least a million people knew about “The Burning Metronome.” Still, no traditional publishing offers materialized. He tried to leverage the TED success to generate speaking engagements, but potential agents mostly told him to come back when he had a major publishing deal. The traditional mechanisms for career advancement weren’t working for him.

“Basically, I’ve made a living in spite of those institutions,” Brooks says.

He began adjusting his thinking about the business side of his art after hearing some wisdom from Melanie Gilman, a comics creator who advised concentrating efforts on the smaller pool of already dedicated fans instead of aiming to mushroom his following.

“If you have a dedicated 1,000 that will buy three things from you a year, you can make a living,” Brooks says, recounting the advice. “And it sustained me. By concentrating on the audience that I know that I can have direct connection to, and building out from there, I can have my needs met while I’m expanding, so that I’m not reaching for deals out of desperation.”

Also, his life partner, Juan-Nean Young, became his business partner. She felt her background as a life coach with business and negotiation skills might make a difference and capitalize on the TED Talk. Brooks agreed — and soon Young was landing him paying gigs.

“I think he needed someone to be able to really accentuate all of his accomplishments, without it seeming self-centered, so that people can really understand his value,” Young says. “So I’m able to just put it in a different frame, that’s all. His mission, to creatively change the world through writing and art, is something that inspires me to speak on his behalf.”

Young says one facet of Brooks’ talent that may still be underappreciated is his music — both as a rapper and a songwriter.

“A lot of people don’t know how musically inclined Alan is when it comes to rapping,” she says. “He’s really good because he’s a wordsmith. He’s so good at being able to decode messages and to translate those messages in ways that people can understand.”

Seizing opportunities

In 2018, The Colorado Sun approached Brooks about creating a multipanel comic strip that would be a vehicle to address issues important to Coloradans. Brooks responded with a proposal for “What’d I Miss?”, a strip built on the friendship of a young Black man and a middle-aged white woman recently emerged from a 30-year coma. He enlisted local artist Cori Redford to draw and color the strip while he handles the writing and storylines. 

It’s now approaching its 300th episode.

Around the same time, Regis University invited Brooks to speak to students about writing graphic novels (a genre of novels written in comic-book format) along with a couple of other writers. Brooks’ presentation stood out, and the university hired him as an adjunct professor of graphic narrative, says Andrea Rexilius, program director for the school’s Mile High MFA in Creative Writing.

She says Brooks melds pragmatic writing advice with motivational topics such as managing impediments like procrastination or personal fears that may get in the way of self-expression.

“What I love about him as a teacher is that he’s just incredibly practical at the same time that he’s visionary and inspiring,” Rexilius says. “He knows how to get the work done. He knows how to keep at it, even when there are obstacles. And that kind of tenacity, I think, is one of the most important things for grad students, or just students in general, to keep in mind.”

Landing two regular gigs in succession reinforced his tenacity to continue following his artistic muse. In 2019, he launched another collaboration — this time with artists Kevin Caron, Dailen Ogden and Sarah Menzel Trapl — with his second graphic novel, “Anguish Garden,” an allegory about white supremacy.

What I love about him as a teacher is that he’s just incredibly practical at the same time that he’s visionary and inspiring.

— Andrea Rexilius, program director for Regis University’s Mile High MFA in Creative Writing

“It was really incredible that this happened,” Brooks says of his turn of fortune. “Because I’ve lived my entire life as a person who was creating art but nobody’s ever wanted to buy it. I never had a lot of support with any of it.”

Eventually, Brooks also started teaching at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, which in turn led to writer and editor Cynthia Swanson offering him an opportunity to contribute to the 2022 anthology “Denver Noir,” a collection of short stories in which his comics-style entry — the only such piece in the local version of the popular Noir Series, and only the third overall — shared pages with a host of established authors including Peter Heller and Manuel Ramos. (He also earned recognition alongside those two writers and others in Westword as a “must-read” Colorado author.)

The project carried prestige, but didn’t come with enough money for Brooks to follow his preferred route of hiring an artist to flesh out his storyline. So he drew it himself, an exercise he says contributed to “finding my feet as far as being able to draw my own stories.”

That process had already begun as he took on some high-profile projects.

Connections on the dance floor

The first museum break came through a Denver dance club.

Brooks and a couple of acquaintances started showing up at Beauty Bar (since closed) on Motown Thursdays, an event thrown by DJ Miggy Camacho. One of Brooks’ friends, who happened to be a fan of comic books, wound up dating a woman who worked at the Denver Art Museum, and introduced her to Brooks at the club. 

Later, when the subject of finding a graphic novelist to produce work to complement the museum’s renovated Western galleries came up, she mentioned Brooks. Networking paid off.

“I guess the dance floor is like my version of golf,” Brooks says.

To that point, he hadn’t often drawn his own comics. But he’d also found that collaborating artists sometimes have difficulty keeping on schedule and finishing projects. The son of financial journalist Rodney Brooks (they share the same first name, so Alan goes by their shared middle name, minus the Jr.), Brooks has a healthy respect for deadlines and didn’t want to risk sharing the workload. So he decided to dust off his drawing skills and take on the challenge — he was to create a comic about the legendary Black cowboy Nat Love — entirely on his own. 

The permanent exhibit, a web-based creation viewed on a touchscreen in the gallery, drew positive notices from museum visitors, but Brooks looks at it now and sees it as one step in his broader development.

“It’s all right. It’s cool,” he says. “I don’t have impostor syndrome or anything like that. But the places where I was growing as an artist are immediately apparent to me when I look at that.” 

His success earned him another project with the museum — a comic book treatment of Balthazar, one of the storied “Three Wise Men,” to provide a bridge from historic artists to the present in the exhibit “Saints, Sinners, Lovers, and Fools: 300 Years of Flemish Masterworks.” Museum director Christoph Heinrich jokingly noted that Brooks was the only living artist in the exhibit.

Lauren Thompson, a senior interpretive specialist at the Denver Art Museum who worked with Brooks, notes that in addition to Brooks’ artistic eye and imagination, his openness to experimentation proved a big plus. She also praises his adaptability to what can be an almost open-ended creative journey for which neither the artist nor museum staff can predict the end result. 

“It’s a creative process that we’re in together,” Thompson explains, “and he’s a wonderful partner to do that with. Not everyone can do it well, even if they’re extremely talented in their media. It’s just a different skill set. And he’s got that.”

Last year, Brooks also was commissioned to contribute a piece to the Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibit “Cowboy,” for which he created a comic book treatment about the town of Dearfield, the largest Black homesteading settlement in Colorado (a topic he also addressed in “What’d I Miss?”). It still seems strange to him that his work has now appeared in museums, given his childhood experience of hearing teachers talk condescendingly about comic books.

“I would get in trouble for reading them,” he recalls. “Everybody talked about them like they were nothing. They weren’t in libraries. I couldn’t find them anywhere except for comic book specialty shops. So if you would have told 10-year-old me that comic books would take me into newspapers, museums and universities, I never would have believed that.”

Taking advice to heart

When Brooks decided to be a full-time writer, he started listening to writing and business podcasts — shows like “How I Built This” on NPR — and took some basic tenets to heart, such as “don’t spend more than you make.” Close attention to his bottom line meant embracing the tools of the do-it-yourselfer.

For instance, he drew the pieces for his museum exhibits in a program called GIMP, an open-source image editor similar to the popular but costly Photoshop. He asked himself: Is my drawing earning enough to justify paying a monthly subscription fee? The answer was no, so he taught himself the free alternative. 

Decisions like that have guided him through times when he acknowledges that leaving the insurance business to make comic books “didn’t sound like the wisest move.” He points to landing the Regis University job and then being recognized for his Sun cartoon with an award from the Society of Professional Journalists — coincidentally, the same year that his father won a journalism award — as turning points that cemented the idea with his family and within himself that his commitment to the arts was really happening.

“Thankful to say that I haven’t had a year where I’ve lost money as a business,” Brooks says, reflecting on his artistic rise over the last few years. “But it still feels gradual to me and I think it’s largely because I don’t make any money unless I generate activity. So it’s always like a hustle.”  

He’s drawn inspiration from the late Melvin Van Peebles, the Chicago-born actor, filmmaker and writer who once said that he realized he could either do what he wants or have what he wants — and he chose the former.

“I think there’s something to be said about the sacrifice to make things that are good for your soul. It’s a choice,” Brooks says. “And it’s not that I want to live in poverty, but it is a choice to choose what’s important and see how I can expand from there.”

And that brings him back to his latest expansion — a children’s book.

This venture began when the same people who initially connected Brooks with the Denver Art Museum suggested that a comics-style piece might help kids connect with an exhibit of African art. That idea struck a chord with him and rekindled a desire to write for a younger audience — a notion that had gained momentum with weekly Zoom calls he made to his then-5-year-old niece during the pandemic shutdown.

“I was like, OK, how can I make this a piece that means something to me, and allows me to do something meaningful for my niece and children her age?” he says. 

The result was “The Masks In Your Dreams,” a 40-page story of how children on a school field trip to an African art exhibit “learn a lesson about how to love themselves, and how to unleash their dreams.” He included English and Spanish versions of the story.

While he was creating the book, he says, some medical emergencies among museum staff put the project on hold. In the meantime, he moved forward on his own, completing the book with the help of fellow cartoonist Lonnie MF Allen, who provided coloring expertise, and launching the Kickstarter campaign to finance the publishing.

Around the Christmas holiday, when Brooks was visiting his family in Maryland, he pulled out his laptop and showed the complete narrative to his now 8-year-old niece, who goes by Dylan G. and served as a model for a character in the story.

“She’s reading it to my mother,” he recounts, “and it was just like this really beautiful, beautiful moment. It was something I created, that had my niece in it, and she could see herself. And she’s reading it to my mother who raised me. It was just … all kinds of feelings.

“Business-wise, it’s just adding another dimension to what I’m able to give to people,” Brooks adds. “So much of it, for me, has been about creating a thing and then just seeing what activities come to me. And when they come, I’m sure going to be ready.”

COLORADO SPRINGS — Standing upright, Sofia Hernandez Crade’s puppet would reach 24 feet tall. 

But it has a journey to make. And to get to downtown Manitou Springs in one piece for this weekend’s Carnivale parade, it must steer clear of power lines and street signs as it travels on the back of a trailer for seven miles from the Colorado Springs artist’s home. 

So in a seated position, the larger-than-life homage to Manitou Springs artist Charles H. Rockey will greet paradegoers at a less-imposing height of 17 feet. Still, the tribute to the man, credited for his whimsical arts portraying the mountain town, is likely one of the tallest entries in the parade’s 31-year history. 

Layers of peach-colored paint over the deep folds around the puppet’s face make the papier-mache sculpture come to life. Wispy eyebrows made of horsehair poke out above its gentle blue eyes. Its long raggedy beard, made of eight gray wigs, dangles below. 

The head alone weighs about 120 pounds and is the size of a washing machine. Each gnarled hand is larger than a human torso. 

Going big was the whole point.

Sofia Hernandez Crade used horse hair for her puppet’s eyebrows and eyelashes. She worked with Dan Crossey to carry the head of the 24-foot-tall puppet outside. (Mark Reis, Special to The Colorado Sun)

“This has really made me feel that kind of big, bold, empowered side of myself that I feel like I’ve lost a little bit in the last few years of hardship,” multimedia artist and sculptor Hernandez Crade said from her home this week, three days before the debut of her homage to her artistic inspiration. 

“This opportunity of just doing something that I’m passionate about feels really good, even if I am sleep deprived.”

Since Hernandez Crade began sculpting Jan. 20, boxes of plaster, tubes of paint and unfinished puppet pieces have taken over her home. A massive shoe covers her dining room table, next to an artist’s palette and two large hands made of papier-mache, plaster and wood. 

In the past month, she’s spent hundreds of hours imagining, painting and hot gluing pieces of the puppet together inside her home. Unlike her smaller paintings on canvas, her puppet has required meticulous measurements and ingenious engineering.

It took a team of four friends and family members to carry the massive head out her back door (with only millimeters to spare) before it was lowered down onto the wooden frame via forklift. The puppet’s head, which was sculpted around an industrial barrel, sits on a lazy Susan so it can swivel side to side as it strolls down the parade route. 

Dan Crossey and Sofia Hernandez Crade carry the head of the puppet outside. Alberto Hernandez Lemus steadies the head on a forklift. Hernandez Crade hugs Crossey after he helped place the head onto a frame he helped build. (Mark Reis, Special to The Colorado Sun)

It’s her first big project since the death of her 19-year-old brother, Demitri Crockett, who was fatally shot  in October 2022 in Colorado Springs. After her monthslong hiatus, the puppet has inspired her to pick up her paintbrush and start creating again. 

The puppet is also like a “love letter” to an artist who helped shape her own work, said Hernandez Crade, 34.

When artists start talking about forklifts, brace yourself. This is going to be something else.

— Laura Ettinger-Harwell, a co-chair of the city’s “ManiKrewe” committee

Rockey was 87 years old when he died in 2019. She remembers peering through Rockey’s studio windows when she was a child, admiring his impressionistic paintings of the small, quirky mountain town. 

“For me, I feel like you can’t really think of one without the other,” Hernandez Crade said. “He just really captured the spirit and I think helped to foster that spirit and that energy that I think you don’t really find in most places.”

“I think he’s probably an artist that could have made a name anywhere, but he chose Manitou.” 

The puppet will be pushed by a forklift Saturday, alongside a crew of people dressed as fairies, elves and woodland creatures that were often depicted in Rockey’s art and holding his framed pieces. 

“Imagine if you were just surrounded by your works, but they were animated, almost like a dream or a vision come to life,” Hernandez Crade said. Her 90-year-old grandma will be part of the crew, along with her Cavalier King Charles spaniel named Malala, dressed as a snail.

Three decades of puppets

Puppets have been an integral part of Manitou’s Mardi Gras parade since it started, said Laura Ettinger-Harwell, a co-chair of the city’s “ManiKrewe” committee overseeing the weekend’s events. 

The city’s growing collection of papier-mache puppets — some as old as three decades —  are meant to be worn and involve the community, she said this week during a “puppet TLC session” to patch up puppet noses and do other repairs.

This year’s theme of “ARTopia” is meant to honor the city that’s known for being a colony for artists, and Hernandez Crade’s puppet fits perfectly, she said. 

“When artists start talking about forklifts, brace yourself. This is going to be something else,” Ettinger-Harwell said. “We’re excited to see it.” 

Sofia Hernandez Crade brushes out wig hair used for the beard. (Mark Reis, Special to The Colorado Sun)

In the meantime, Hernandez Crade’s Rockey puppet will receive many finishing touches. 

On Wednesday morning, she glued a chunk of gray hair behind the puppet’s ear to fill in a bald spot and rubbed white paint through the strands of its unkempt beard to add dimension.

After the parade, the puppet will be looking for a new home in a place where he can continue to be admired.

“If not, I’m probably just gonna have to rent a storage unit eventually, but it’d be cool if there could be an art space in Colorado Springs and then it comes out on tour ever so often,” Hernandez Crade said. 

“Art is to be seen.” 

Before the parade starts at 1 p.m. Saturday in downtown Manitou Springs, there will be a “Mumbo Jumbo Gumbo cookoff” to sample gumbo from amateur and professional chefs. Each tasting costs 75 cents. The parade and cookoff were initially scheduled for February but postponed due to weather.