The Denver Public Library recommends these library resources to enhance your theater experience of Furlough's Paradise from Curious Theatre, showing this spring in May 2026.
Sade and Mina grew up more like sisters than cousins—bound by blood, secrets, and the complicated love of a shared childhood. Now adults on vastly different journeys, they reunite under the weight of loss: the death of the woman who was both Sade’s mother and Mina’s aunt. Sade has been granted a brief furlough from prison to attend the funeral. Mina, untethered from her fast-paced life in California, is taking a pause she didn’t know she needed.
As the two women navigate the charged terrain of grief, family history, and long-buried trauma, their reunion becomes a reckoning. Memory, guilt, and resilience intertwine in a landscape shaped as much by what’s been said as what hasn’t. Told through richly poetic language and layered storytelling, Furlough’s Paradise is a poignant, powerful exploration of kinship, forgiveness, and the fragile path toward healing.
What to Read
Our reading recommendation: Ashley C. Ford shares her experience of growing up in what she describes as a “complex and isolating childhood.” Just as Sade and Mina talk through various stages of grief and family trauma, Ford opens up about her relationships with her incarcerated father, absentee mother, and tough love grandmother. With a sharp, yet non-judgmental, voice Ford weaves a story of identity made up of: who you are, familial ties, and what is found along the way.
About the book: One of the most prominent voices of her generation debuts with a powerful memoir: the story of a childhood defined by the ever looming absence of her incarcerated father and the path we must take to both honor and overcome our origins.
What to Watch
Our watching recommendation: Alike is a 17-year-old Black girl, living in Brooklyn, discovering her sexuality, and learning how to cope with her family’s—and society’s—expectations of what her life should be. This coming-out/coming-of-age film earned multiple awards, including a Sundance Film Festival Cinematography Award, and it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".
About the movie: The revelatory and assured feature debut by Dee Rees is a coming-of-age tale of a queer Black woman navigating the expression of her gender and sexual identities, built around a beautifully layered performance from Adepero Oduye.
What to Listen
Our listening recommendation: Like Furlough’s Paradise, Another Brooklyn explores Black identity, family, and grief. August, like Mina, is a high achiever who returns to her old neighborhood for a funeral–in this case her father’s–and reconnects with people she was close to growing up. Robin Miles narrates the audiobook in a rich, evocative performance that brings to life the story’s nostalgia and won audio awards.
About the book: Running into a long-ago friend sets a memory from the 1970s in motion for August, transporting her to a time and a place where friendship was everything, until it wasn't. For August and her girls, sharing confidences as they ambled through neighborhood streets, Brooklyn was a place where they believed that they were beautiful, talented, and brilliant. But beneath the hopeful veneer, there was another Brooklyn, a dangerous place where grown men reached for innocent girls in dark hallways, where ghosts haunted the night, where mothers disappeared. A world where madness was just a sunset away and fathers found hope in religion.
What to Download
Our download recommendation: The authors of this collection's seventeen essays examine how race and gender identity have shaped who they are today, and how their wisdom can shape a future of collective liberation.
About the book: From Denne Michele Norris and Electric Literature, a vital anthology of essays by trans and gender-nonconforming writers of color, sharing stories of joy, heartbreak, rage, and self-discovery.