This month we’re featuring books by the writers who will be
participating in the library’s Colorado Local Authors Open House on
Sunday, Oct. 8, 3-6 pm. The event will be facilitated by local author Tracy Ross (The Source of All Things: A Memoir) and will feature panel discussions, live music, light refreshments, and wine tastings.
We’ll catch up on the library’s newest titles next month.

By Jenny Shank

In “Casa del Rey,” a cautious pregnant woman must contend with her out-of-control and intrusive neighbor. In “Hurts,” a girls’ basketball team at a majority Black Denver high school clashes with a white mountain team. In “La Sexycana,” a bottom-feeding journalist ventures to a dance club to confront the young Latina woman she mentored as a teenager who then cut off all contact with her. “Lightest Lights Against Darkest Darks” follows a white middle schooler bused to a majority Black school who falls under the spell of her magnetic and racially ambiguous art teacher. In “Signing for Linemen,” a graduate student in medieval literature takes a job as a summer tutor for a college football team and ends up learning more than she expected about athletes, American Sign Language, and herself. In “Local Honey,” middle-aged white parents bring their adopted Black teenage son to a Wu-Tang Clan concert in an attempt to bond with him.
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By Erika Krouse

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. 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. 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.
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By John Mattson

A thrilling memoir that portrays the adventurous life of a poor farmboy who has a strong love for the environment and believes in following his dreams. These dreams have taken him on a lifelong journey of adventure and exploration that covers six continents and five extreme sports. Twenty-six thrilling stories include kayaking many of the world’s deepest canyons, climbing some classic desert spires, freestyle ski jumping, downhill ski racing, and western rodeo. The stories are written in a style that is entertaining and humorous as well as inspirational.
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By Brook Eddy

Isolated, broke, and restless in a drafty mountain A-frame with colicky twins, Brook Eddy needed a path out. This is the story of how Brook built a socially conscious multimillion-dollar tea company with a fierce devotion to sustainability. Part business memoir, part India travelogue, STEEPED is brimming with provocative prose, transcendent images of travel throughout India, and advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, idealists, and travelers. From forearms slashed with scalding burns to the unseen sting of stress, depression, and near-bankruptcy, Brook's story is one of love, loss, and unrelenting resilience. STEEPED is a testament that while you don't need an MBA, a trust fund, a husband, or a business plan to bring an idea to market, you do need to withstand hot water, which, like tea, will make you stronger.
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By Katie Ives

Using an infamous deception about a fake mountain range in British Columbia as her jumping-off point, Katie Ives examines the lure of blank spaces on the map and the value of the imagination. Imaginary Peaks details the mystery of the Riesenstein Hoax within the larger context of cartography, exploration, and climbing history.
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By Kay Turnbaugh

Goldie Griffith was one of our country's first professional female athletes, and she not only boxed and wrestled and rode bucking broncos, she also ranched, trained war dogs, owned boarding houses and restaurants in Nederland, and was an actor and stunt rider for the brand-new Western movies that were taking the country by storm. She traveled the country with several Wild West companies, part of a small group of professional cowgirls, and in 1913 Buffalo Bill himself gave her away at her wedding. She was married during one of the famous showman's Wild West shows at Madison Square Garden before a crowd of 8,000. A few years later, she discovered that not only was her cowboy husband wanted for murder in Texas, but he was already married when they wed. Furious, she pulled out her gun, aimed it at him, and pulled the trigger.
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By Karen Auvinen

A memoir by an award-winning poet describes her retreats to a wilderness cabin to write in solitude and find answers to life's big questions, describing how a catastrophic fire forced her to reconcile her conflicting needs for isolation and community.
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By Alison Turner

The residents of Clayton, Colorado, must learn to live with what has burned and what threatens to ignite; 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.
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By Alexander Shalom Joseph

One Wednesday evening, the governments of the world send out a mass text message announcing that the world will end in one month. In the thirty days leading up to the last day of the world, our protagonist, a young man in his late twenties, has watched the love of his life leave, has lost his job and friends and sense of meaning, and has moved back home to spend his final weeks with his survivalist father, Jewish studies/author mother, and Yiddish-speaking grandfather.  As everything draws to a close, the young man tries to make sense of faith, family, and how to live a worthy life even though it will be cut short.

Available from Orison Books

By Michelle Theall

Sky Fielder is a typical college student, except that she is a product of the foster care system, lives in a halfway house, and meets with her caseworker on a weekly basis. While failing to balance her grades and erratic social life, she receives a call from a hospital, asking her to make medical decisions for her brother Ben who died more than a decade before. The call must be a scam, and besides, Sky has a new life now. None of her classmates know about her desperate and feral childhood in West Texas, where her brother kept her mind off hunger with adventures along the riverbeds and cliffs surrounding their trailer, or about the rash decision that cost him his life and almost ended hers. As Sky unravels the mysteries surrounding the man in the hospital, she remembers the risks it takes to love and be loved. When the past and the present collide and long-kept secrets are revealed, Sky must decide how far she's willing to go to have a home and family again.
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