Sarah Slater

Sarah Slater, founder of the Titwrench music festival, is a 2011 MasterMind award winner -- and it looks like smarts run in the family. Because tonight, Sarah and her sister, Julie Slater, will host a special edition of Gorinto to celebrate Julie's acceptance to college in Berlin, where she plans to go for her masters' degree this fall. "Julie has been admitted to a unique program that she chose because it fosters a staunchly feminist, anti-racist perspective that will foster her goals to create a masters' thesis analyzing global breast cancer politics in order to redefine 'prevention' and 'treatment' outside of corporate philanthropy and interests," says Sarah.

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The beef started on Facebook. Creeped out by last week's TIME cover story about attachment parenting -- you know, the weird one with the preschool-age kid standing on a stool and suckling his mom's tit -- I penned an essay for the Village Voice about how much attachment parenting sucks and posted it to my wall. As it happens, my arch-nemesis, the nefarious local comic and 2012 Westword MasterMind Andrew Orvedahl, is himself an attachment parent who, naturally, has penned his own essay on how much non-attachment parenting sucks, which he then posted to my wall. At that point, it was clear that there was only one way to settle our differences: the old-fashioned way. With a wrestling match.

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Meet the MasterMinds!

Eight years ago, Westword started the MasterMind Awards, a program that honors this city's most creative class. Over $100,000 years in grants later, the MasterMinds are still going strong.

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Poet/mentor Ken Arkind and Minor Disturbance.

Denver's earned its rep as a slam-poet factory: The city not only supports two competitive adult teams, each of which has taken a national title in the last decade, but it also has a strong youth wing, Minor Disturbance, one of this year's Westword MasterMind Award-winners. And tonight is when they really get to shine, at the seventh annual Minor Disturbance Grand Slam, where Denver's top teen slam poets, culled from a series of slam-offs throughout the year, will compete to represent the state this summer at the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Festival in San Francisco. These seasoned performers are anything but amateur in delivery, so come prepared for some fierce verbal expression.

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Westword MasterMind (class of 2010) and Project Runway alumnus Fallene Wells has a dream -- to produce a vintage-inspired line of clothing and start CoSewn, a local apparel manufacturing company. She's been inching ever closer to that lofty aspiration since she launched a $20,000 Kickstarter campaign in January. But it's a lot of money, and she needs to raise it in five days...or lose nearly $8,000 that's already been pledged.

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Emily Driskill

In this week's cover story, "Slam, Bam, Thank You, Ma'am," we profiled Suzi Q. Smith, one of Denver's strongest voices and the number three female slam artist in the world. Smith spends 30 percent of her year traveling to teach and promote poetry outside of Colorado, but she spends 100 percent of her time brainstorming, collecting and writing new poems. Throughout the story, Westword introduced you to one of her most recent pieces, "When I Am Quiet," but Smith's back catalog numbers in the hundreds.

Click through to read "When I Am Quiet" and six of Smith's other poems, and stay tuned for videos of her performances. It is one thing to read her poetry; it is quite another thing to see it.

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Slam Nuba is still on a roll: After winning one of Westword's coveted MasterMind awards last year and sending a team to the nationals last summer that snagged first place, the spoken-word collective (which will also perform February 18 at Artopia ) is hard at work finding fresh ways to forge ahead.

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Poem on the range: Slam Nuba, a 2011 MasterMind winner

Recognizing that the local arts scene needed a little fertilizer to really get going, and growing, eight years ago Westword created a program to honor the visionaries -- artists and organizations alike -- who are changing the cultural landscape of metro Denver.

And we decided to not just honor these creative geniuses, but to give them each substantial cash awards to use as they see fit: the MasterMind Awards.

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Brandi Shigley could be our Westword MasterMind poster girl: Civic-minded and an ever-positive dynamo on the local style scene, the Fashion Denver founder lives up to the very definition of a MasterMind in a way that truly befits a member of the inaugural 2005 creative class. Back then, she was making the transition from handbag designer to playing a bigger entrepreneurial role in the fashion arena -- namely, as the honcho of Fashion Denver, which grew from modest roots to a grand trifecta of consulting, event planning and retailing, all in the name of promoting local designers.

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Here's the perfect way to end your First Friday festivities: Open Media Foundation will celebrate the fifth anniversary of Denver Open Media at its annual fundraiser. Doors open at 7:30 p.m. tonight at 700 Kalamath Street, and the event includes performances by Total Ghost (as seen at the Westword web awards), awards for the top vote-getters on Denver Open Media over the past five years, and a silent auction.

You can already bid on auction items here, and if you can't make the party, it will be aired live on DOM, Comcast channels 56 and 57, and live-streamed on denveropenmedia.org/livestream.

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