Helen Thorpe
Wife of Honorable John W. Hickenlooper, the forty-third Mayor of Denver.
Her Story
Helen Thorpe was born in London to Irish parents, and grew up in the United States, becoming a naturalized citizen at 21. She became a journalist and an author who has written four books of narrative nonfiction. She
was married to John Hickenlooper throughout his tenure as Mayor of Denver from 2003 until 2011,
though they divorced amicably in 2015, while he was serving as Governor of Colorado. Thorpe has
taught narrative nonfiction writing as a member of the faculty at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and as
a visiting professor at Regis University, Colorado College, and Princeton University.
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Thorpe began her journalism career as an assistant to the newsroom at The New York Observer, then became a staff writer for that publication. She left to join an in-house team of contributors to the “Talk of the Town” section at The New Yorker. Later she joined the writing staff of Texas Monthly, where she wrote feature stories. She has also written for many other publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Westword, and 5280.
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Helen has written nonfiction books about people who have changed countries: immigrants seeking legal status, military veterans returning home from conflict, and refugees in the midst of resettlement. She has also published a collection of linked essays about her family’s moves from Ireland to England and then the United States, and their subsequent attempts to maintain ties with aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents on the other side of the Atlantic. The New Yorker has said, “Thorpe is meticulously observant, always attuned to the poignant ironies of her topic.”
Helen Thorpe's novel, Finding Motherland, is a digital only collection of linked essays on the themes of family, food, migration, and privilege. The author begins by depicting life on the dairy farm in rural Ireland where her mother was raised, and then describes how her experience of motherhood resembled moving to an entirely
different country. She celebrates the accomplishments of an undocumented student who carries the American flag in his ROTC unit in the years before DACA offered him protection, explains the predicament of a single mother at their shared public school who faces income challenges due to her lack of legal status, and documents the labor done by migrants with agricultural visas in fruit orchards on the Western Slope. In the book’s final essay, she recalls the arrival of Irish immigrants to the US in the wake of the potato famines, and asks why some Irish-Americans are hostile toward people who are migrating today. She posits this is due in part to a misplaced “ethnostalgia” for a bygone homeland of yesteryear. You can find the collection as an ebook on Amazon.
Plaque Biography
Personal
Born in London in January 1963, Helen grew up in the United States and became a citizen at twenty-one years of age. Ms. Thorpe is a graduate of Princeton University, Magna Cum Laude, and received her Masters Degree in English Literature from Columbia University.
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Of Note
She is a journalist and an author who has written four books of narrative nonfiction. Ms. Thorpe has taught narrative nonfiction writing as a member of the faculty at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and as a visiting professor at Regis University, Colorado College, and Princeton University. She has written articles which have appeared in a wide variety of local and national publications. She also served as Colorado’s First Lady for four years after her time as Denver’s First Lady. Ms. Thorpe is a board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver.