The 5 Best Book Publishing Companies in Denver

Professional Book Publishers in Denver, Colorado

The city’s most famous literary appearance is one it did not ask for. Neal Cassady grew up on Larimer Street when it was skid row, and when Jack Kerouac came to visit him in 1947 the trip became the Denver chapters of On the Road. The Denver of that book is a city of pool halls, boarding houses and all night cafes, most of which were demolished in the urban renewal of the 1960s, so the novel is now one of the better records of a downtown that no longer exists.

Katherine Anne Porter came to Denver in 1918 to work at the Rocky Mountain News and nearly died in the influenza epidemic that autumn. She turned that experience into Pale Horse, Pale Rider, one of the few works of American fiction to take the 1918 pandemic seriously as a subject. Mary Coyle Chase was a Denver reporter too, and wrote Harvey, the play about a man and his invisible rabbit, which took the 1945 Pulitzer for Drama and has hardly left the stage since. Thomas Hornsby Ferril was the state’s poet laureate for a quarter of a century, and his house on Downing Street is now preserved as a literary landmark.

The modern city has built on that. The Tattered Cover, under Joyce Meskis, became a national reference point for what an independent bookshop could be and fought a landmark case in 2002 to keep customer purchase records out of police hands. The Lighthouse Writers Workshop, founded in 1997, now runs a year round programme of classes, a summer festival and a literary residency. Counterpath Press publishes experimental work from the city. Denver is, quietly, a good place to be a writer, and a better one to launch a book than the number of publishers would suggest.

Getting Published in Denver: Who Reads Directly, Prizes, and Where Books Launch

A Denver launch means the Tattered Cover, which has been the city’s literary centre since 1971 and hosts events across its locations most nights of the week. Kilgore Books, Capitol Hill Books and West Side Books serve the neighbourhoods, Second Star to the Right is the childrens shop, and all of them order through wholesalers on trade terms. The Lighthouse Writers Workshop runs Lit Fest every June, a two week programme of classes, readings and agent meetings that is the single most useful fortnight in the Colorado literary calendar, and its Book Project takes a small cohort of writers through a full manuscript over a year. The Colorado Book Awards ceremony is held in the city each spring.

For research, the Denver Public Library’s Western History and Genealogy department on the fifth floor of the Central Library holds the photographs, manuscripts and newspapers that most Colorado history is written from, and the History Colorado Center on Broadway holds the state’s museum collections and archives. Denver Quarterly has published from the University of Denver since 1966 and remains a serious literary journal. Counterpath runs a press and a gallery in Park Hill. University Press of Colorado, Fulcrum and Colorado Mountain Club Press all read proposals directly, which means a Denver author with a regional subject can reach an acquiring editor without an agent, a rarity in a city this size.