John Wenzel Email & Phone Number

Denver, Co, Us

Denver, Colorado

Award-winning A&E journalist and critic covering music, comedy, film, TV, books, Broadway, cannabis culture, and gaming. Past positions: co-edited Post's music site Reverb and Features/A&E blogs. Fellow recipient of 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News awarded to Denver Post staff for Aurora theater shooting coverage. Writer on Heartland Emmy-winning "Colorado Variety Show" project.

Denver, Colorado

Author of the nonfiction book "Mock Stars: Indie Comedy and the Dangerously Funny" (Fulcrum/Speck, 2008) about the marriage of indie/alt rock and comedy. Interviews with David Cross, Maria Bamford, Bob Odenkirk, Tig Notaro, Patton Oswalt, Tim & Eric, Aimee Mann, Fred Armisen, Jon Wurster, Bob Mould, Zach Galifianakis, Aziz Ansari, Eugene Mirman and others.Major contributor to Chunklet's "Indie Cred Test" satire (Penguin, 2012) and the first comedy criticism anthology from The Spit Take (Paradisiac, 2013). Essays in Marc Woodworth's 33 1/3 Series book on Guided by Voices' "Bee Thousand" (Continuum, 2006) and The Horror Writers Association's StokerCon anthology ("Nuance in an Extreme State," Hex, 2021).

Freelance features/reviews for Esquire, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Vulture, The Guardian, Vice, Spin, Splitsider, The Spit Take, SXSWorld, Budget Travel, RTE Radio 1 (Ireland), Cinespect, Ghettoblaster, Aversion, Shredding Paper, Rockpile, Erasing Clouds, The Dayton Daily News, The Dayton Voice, University of Denver Magazine and others.

Dayton, Ohio

Quarterly print and online indie-rock zine I co-founded in college with photographer Rob Heater, covering the Ohio (and particularly Dayton) music scene with interviews, reviews and features. We released an exclusive 7-inch record with Nightwalker (Guided by Voices/Robert Pollard side project), Swearing at Motorists, The Figgs and Stupid Club, and digital mixtapes with unreleased songs from Spoon and others, along with original collages from Pollard.During that period, I also contributed hundreds of song titles to Pollard, more than a dozen of which were used on GBV and Pollard solo albums such as "Do the Collapse," "Kid Marine" and "Daredevil Stamp Collector." (See respective liner notes)

Dayton, Ohio

Summers-between-college job where I latched onto programs I'd use at my college newspaper (The BG News, reporter/editor) and independent publishing experiments.