Every week, writers for Phoenix New Times and our parent company, Village Voice Media, produce elegant magazine-style feature writing -- a gritty portion of which comes in the form of true-crime stories.

VVM has collected some of its best recent true-crime yarns into an ebook: Seven Sins: A True Crime Anthology from Village Voice Media.

Available on Amazon and iTunes, the book features seven stories, including the incredible tale of a young American Muslim woman "honor-killed" by her own father; the odd story of a young San Francisco woman so enamored with serial killers that she became known as America's most prominent "murder groupie"; and a historic murder case in Colorado, in which the golden age of tabloid journalism collided with Erle Stanley Gardner, the larger-than-life creator of the Perry Mason mysteries.

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Tye Rabens

Copies of China Airborne by James Fallows for sale after his talk at SMoCA Lounge last Friday.

Many writers claim to hit on "the biggest story of our era," as Atlantic correspondent James Fallows said at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art last Friday night. And with China Airborne, the National Magazine Award-winning journalist's tenth book, the claim might be true.

"Will China Dominate the Skies?", a discussion co-presented by Arizona State University and Zócalo Public Square, revolved around the book's central theme that China's aviation industry (read: public planes, private jets, engineers and airspace) can be a window into understanding the country as a whole.

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A few visiting authors expected at this year's Phoenix Comicon

There's a huge lineup of geeky cool writing workshops at this year's Phoenix Comicon, where you can try your hand at writing dystopian fantasy, paranormal fiction, steampunk fiction, faerie lore, zombie erotica (to name a few).More >>

Tarcher Books

The celebrity of tatted-up rockstar-style cat behaviorist Jackson Galaxy, who hosts Animal Planet's My Cat from Hell (with new episodes premièring June 30), has helped make it possible to be perceived as a hipster and a crazy cat person, and for that, the rest of us crazy cat people are oh, so grateful. (The Valley's Kate Benjamin of ModernCat.net is a big help on the accessories side, as well.)

Galaxy is touring with his lovely new book, Cat Daddy: What the World's Most Incorrigible Cat Taught Me About Life, Love, and Coming Clean, and he visited Changing Hands Bookstore last night for a jam-packed chat, mini-reading, Q&A, and signing.

I'm pretty sure most people would have needed a Benadryl just to walk through the room, which was cat-free but not cat-hair-free, if you get my drift.

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Jackson Galaxy

Since when did owning a cat become the social equivalent of wearing a fanny pack? It's seems that cats, and especially cat owners, have gotten bad rap for years.

If you're a guy with a cat, people tend to question your masculinity. If you're a woman with a cat, you sure as Hell better have a boyfriend, less you be labeled an eternal spinster and otherwise known, "cat-lady."

Perhaps we needs to take a closer look at the whole cat conundrum, and there's no better resource than Jackson Galaxy, a.k.a. Cat Daddy, the host of the hit show My Cat from Hell on Animal Planet.

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Gregory Sale

Gregory Sale, who won the Mid-Career Artist Award at last year's Phoenix Art Museum Contemporary Forum, passed the baton at the 2012 awards ceremony last week with an art opening in the museum's main hall.

He describes the work as a proposal for an outreach effort aimed toward at-risk youth at Tumbleweed Center for Youth Development, helping them obtain their own court records and create poems with the documents by subtracting out the parts they don't want to define their life stories.

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Tye Rabens

Front room of Phoenix Youth Hostel, site of the first Vital Voices event

Zora Neale Hurston, author of Barracoon, Mules and Men, and How It Feels to Be Colored Me, is the subject of the first installment of Vital Voices, a monthly event series that organizers hope will gather an audience from different communities to celebrate iconic literary figures. 

Vital Voices is a joint effort by Arizona State University's Project Humanities and Mary Stephens, community organizer and owner of Phoenix Youth Hostel, where the event will be held starting this Thursday night. 

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Good mothers are hard to find, but if you're looking for an auditorium-full (and want to impress your own, very good mother for Mother's Day weekend) you won't need to travel beyond Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts. 

Tomorrow, current and past participants of "Mothers Who Write," a workshop led by New Times' managing editor Amy Silverman and contributor Deborah Sussman, will share their own poetry and prose for a public audience. 

Included in the lineup are local writers (and mothers) Kim Porter, Sativa Peterson, and Cynthia Clark Harvey, to name a few.

Peterson, who also contributes to New Times, says she'll be reading from a piece she wrote about her own mother. She shares an excerpt below:  

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Where the Wild Things Are

Maurice Sendak was a giant in the children's literature world whose titles include Seven Little Monsters, Fantasy Sketches, Outside Over There and Where the Wild Things Are.

He said his love for books developed when he was young and had health complications that confined him to his bed. And for more than 50 years of penning and illustrating some of the most popular hardbacks and paperbacks around, he inspired the humor and imaginations (dark and light) and shaped the worlds of children's literature.

Sendak died this morning from complications from a stroke. He was 83.

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http://www.jennmckinlay.com/

On Saturday, May 5, The The Poisoned Pen Bookstore  and the Phoenix Public Library are teaming up to present CozyCon, a mystery-writing conference with a dozen favorite mystery authors. 

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