Editor’s note: This is part of The Know’s series, Staff Favorites. Each week, we give our opinions on the best that Colorado has to offer for dining, shopping, entertainment, outdoor activities and more. (We’ll also let you in on some hidden gems.)
The fastest way to a writer’s heart is often through his brain, however cobwebby and ink-stained it may be.
That’s how hooked me when it launched in June 2024, boasting it was “the first magazine with an AI-free guarantee.” The promise that humans created all words and images runs counter to the bro-tech culture of artificial intelligence that has infected and degraded Hollywood and social media like brain-eating amoebae.
The Denver Post and other publications are currently suing generative AI companies OpenAI and Microsoft for stealing copyrighted work for their plagiarism machines, so you can imagine why Denverse’s message appealed to me. Fortunately, the magazine has fulfilled its promise with quarterly, jam-packed print issues that contain savvy, original writing and illustrations you can’t find anywhere else.
It’s ad- and subscription-based, and offers perks such as exclusive live shows and citywide discounts to supporters, along with a year-old podcast called . It’s also widely distributed around town, and the newsletter is free. The magazine deserves every member of its fast-growing audience, particularly as news media retreats from arts and culture journalism, and working artists and creatives are increasingly priced out of every aspect of their practice.
With a tone at once sophisticated and impish, Denverse already belongs up there with the city’s historically great, independent magazines that sport national-quality writing and art, ranging from to and , .
Denverse is leading the charge, and the staff and contributors have asserted themselves as essential voices in Denver’s creative scene. A look at any 70-page, full-color issue includes acclaimed and award-winning writers, poets, musicians, comedians, painters, cartoonists, chefs, podcasters and teachers.
Some are established names that have appeared in local and national media (see cartoonist Karl Christian Krumpholz) while others, such as Team Nonexistent singer-guitarist (who reviewed local records for the Winter 2026 issue), represent Denver’s young vanguard. As the leader of a ferocious queer punk band, LaBelle-Plott brings much-needed perspective to a music scene that can easily default to dude-ly, folk-rock orthodoxy and misogyny.
It’s all just meaty and long-form enough to stand out, but it ain’t academia. Inviting features on Robert Redford and Sundance, pickup basketball, Denver’s Sapphic renaissance, Colfax Avenue, and noise rock grace the newest issue, among many others. With its wry cartoons, poetry and art, it comes off like a Colorado version of The New Yorker.
Denver has lately been enjoying a grassroots explosion of fiction, poetry, music and other art forms that speak directly to our times with diverse and badly needed new voices. Denverse gives you a front-row seat for all of it.
Learn more at .
