Each week, Metro Times editorial team goes beyond other media to provide our readers with the straight story on news, arts, music and culture along with the most comprehensive restaurant, event and club listings in metro Detroit. We've earned a reputation for comprehensive and insightful news, arts and entertainment coverage and we have a tradition of editorial excellence.
Know of a news story we should tell?
E-Mail News Hits or contact news editor Curt Guyette at 313-202-8004.
Have a story idea or tip related to arts, music or culture? Contact one of our editors:
W. Kim Heron, Editor
313-202-8011
Brian Smith, Features Editor
313-202-8024
Travis Wright, Arts Editor
313-202-8012
Here's how it is - to publish an event, we need essential info i.e. date, place, phone number for readers to call and an event description. Incomplete submissions will not be printed. Those received past the deadline (2 weeks prior to publication) cannot be printed but may appear online.
Mail submissions to:
Listings Editor
Metro Times
733 St. Antoine
Detroit, MI 48226
You can also fax your submissions to 313-961-6598 or e-mail Listings
Another way to get your events listed is by using our online self-publishing form.
Due to the volume of submissions, we cannot guarantee all submissions will appear in print.
Got something to tell us? You may submit a letter to the Editor by e-mailing the Editorial Department.
You may also fax a letter to 313-961-6598 or send them to the following address:
Letters
Metro Times
733 St. Antoine
Detroit, MI 48226
Your letter must be signed and must include your city of residence (which will be printed) and a phone number for verification (which we won't print). Letters without these items cannot be published. If you e-mail us, we'd like permission to print your e-mail address, but that isn't mandatory. All letters may be edited for length and clarity.
W. Kim Heron, Editor
W. Kim Heron,sang the line "Rama-rama watch me now" on the first Was (NotWas) album. He played percussion with a number of obscure bands (Trainable, Warm Jets, Bad Crunch, Dry Guitar), entertaining dozens and dozens of people, including the late MC5 singer Rob Tyner, who once helped cart Heron's drums to the car after a gig. So much for stardom. He grew up in Amherstburg, Ontario, until the age 11 when his family moved to Detroit and took pity on his pleas not be left behind; thus began a long love affair with the city. He attended Cass Tech High School (chem-bio program) and Michigan State (journalism department), then worked at the Lansing State Journal after graduation before going to work for the Detroit Free Press from 1979 to 1995. He reported on homicides and fires, Motown memories, Marvin Gaye's funeral, George Clinton's funkadelia, city politics, nuclear physics, lead poisoning, and the experience (first-hand) of nearly losing consciousness in the cockpit of a fighter jet. Taking a break from reporting to spend three months on the copy desk, he found that he loved editing and more or less stayed there for seven years. He served a stint as managing editor of the strikers' Detroit Sunday Journal during the great newspaper strike the mid-'90s and began work (to be finished years later) on his masters of library science at the University of Michigan around the same time. He became managing editor of Metro Times in 1997 and editor in 2006. For many years, he hosted The Kim Heron Program and its predecessor Destination Out on WDET-FM, playing an eclectic range of jazz. He drags his bongos to jam sessions whenever he can.
Bill Holdship, Music Editor
Bill Holdship, a native of Bad Axe, got into the rock critic game at Michigan State University, where he was Entertainment & Book Editor of the State News, the largest daily college newspaper in the world at the time. He knew he was doing something right when Lou Reed phoned to compliment (!) him on a review; the Marshall Tucker Band returned to play a free concert at MSU, cursing Holdship by name from the stage ("This time we're here to play for the people and not some damned critic!") after he'd blasted them for doing a short show with no encore their previous time through town; and frat boys began viewing him as though he didn't bathe for championing "punk rock" like the Ramones, Elvis C., Patti Smith and Iggy Stooge, among numerous others. He became an editor at the legendary CREEM magazine — then based in Birmingham, 15 miles outside of Detroit — immediately after graduation, and then moved to Los Angeles with the magazine in 1987. He spen 20 years in a city that sometimes felt like a fantasy, even while he was living it. He was an editor at the trade rag Radio & Records, the California rock and pop magazine BAM, Daily Variety, HITS, New Times L.A. and DVDExpress.com during those years, and freelanced for publications as varied as the L.A. Times, SPIN (where he was a contributing editor for six years), US Weekly, NME, Yahoo! Music and Britian's MOJO, among numerous others. The last thing he did was to write Sex Pistol/radio DJ Steve Jones' official bio before leaving L.A. and returning to Detroit in 2007 to be closer to his roots (although he wasn't properly prepared for the Kwame Kilpatrick years ...). He's still trying to figure out what he wants to be when he grows up and hopes that America can fully recover from eight horrible years under George W. Bush, with whom he's never wanted to share a beer. ...
Curt Guyette, News Editor
Curt Guyette grew up in the wilds of central Pennsylvania, the son of a police detective and the grandson of newspaper typesetter. "I guess, in some weird way, by becoming an investigative reporter, I've melded their two professions," he says. Guyette first attended college at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in keg tapping with a minor in libertine studies. He stayed there off an on for four years, quitting occasionally to embark on cross-country hitchhiking excursions, supporting himself with a variety of jobs. After a few brushes with death while working as a deckhand on a boat pushing barges up and down the Mississippi River, he decided a college education might not be such a bad idea after all and transferred to the University of Pittsburgh. At Pitt he majored in English writing, working during the day and attending class at night. After graduation he stuck his thumb out again, landing for a time on a kibbutz in Israel, where he picked bananas. After that, he found his way to Mexico, hooking up with a traveling circus that hired him on as a roustabout. By the early '80s he'd migrated to Northern California, finding employment in a slaughterhouse. At the age of 27, the woman who would become his wife seduced him into giving up his vagabond ways and goaded him into getting a newspaper job. He worked two years covering sports for a small-town daily, then moved on to feature writing and, eventually, hard news. In 1990 he found a home at an alternative newspaper in Sacramento, Ca. Five years later he came to Metro Times as an investigative reporter. He's still married (although his wife, Beth, frequently thinks she must have done something very bad in a previous life to have deserved such a fate) with two delightful teenage children, who consider him an unrepentant oddball with embarrassingly bad fashion sense. As far as he's concerned, they're right on both counts.
Brian Smith, Managing Editor
Brian Jabas Smith was born to a huuuge family of critters under a shining star in Tucson, Arizona, some time in the last century. The nearby military installation shot it down, and Smith's been misguided ever since. Early attempts at childhood were met with moderate success; the enduring words being "shy," "skinny" and "dropout." Also "fast," as a lifelong habit of being able to vanish from sticky situations manifested itself in an early promise as a professional cyclist. But visions of Greg Le Mond in his underpants in Paris vanished in a newfound love of Creem magazine, Ramones and beer. Ever the competitive one, Smith became the 98-pound king of his own teenage wasteland in the Arizona punk rock explosion that has matured to yield so many of our critical darlings of today. Fortunately, maturation wasn't what Smith had in mind - fuck that, he wanted to be a pop star! A total rock 'n' roll love letter, an absolute pop obsessive, Smith became a walking vinyl crush, a marinated and opinionated pain the arse. Along the way, he learned how to write a decent pop song, one of which wound up on a record that sold a million copies worldwide. Almost as an afterthought, he learned how to write, which is a good thing, since rent was one of those universal truths with which had eluded Smith for years. Toss in a handful of journalism awards, spills and black eyes and here he is, walking in the ghost of Creem and supporting bartenders all over Detroit.
Michael Jackman, Copy Editor
Michael Jackman is a fire sign, just like Omar Sharif, who played Dr. Zhivago (except that Sharif is an Aries and Jackman is a Sagittarius). This is important because some people think he looks like Dr. Zhivago. Others say he looks like "that guy from Queer as Folk." Born in 1969 at Mt. Carmel hospital in Detroit, Jackman grew up just 100 yards from the Detroit city line in east Dearborn. His construction worker dad and homemaker mom did their best to raise this middle child and his older brother and younger sister. After a brief misadventure in the Army that ended with Jackman being fired for refusing to get out of his pajamas, he escaped to New York City for twelve years, where he developed an aversion to people who stand in front of elevator doors and a deepening hatred for those who block crosswalks with their cars. Jackman has attended New York University, the School of Visual Arts, Northwestern University and Wayne State University, though he never got a degree. He has worked as a bar back busboy, pool hall manager, office manager, foot messenger, truck driver, combustible electrician, perfume salesman, record store clerk, bouncer, bodyguard, landscaper and sandwich artist. According to a highly scientific test from the Internet, Jackman values love more than money. Or he really prefers sheep to pigs. He can wiggle his ears and prides himself on being an autodidact. Jackman has no felony convictions.
Sandra Svoboda, Staff Writer
Sandra (Sandi) Svoboda grew up in Chicago's suburbs where she was her high school mascot: a purple horse. After wasting two years at Indiana University, she made good use of the next two writing about the female condom, STDs and other hot campus health topics at the Indiana Daily Student newspaper. After graduation and a stint at her hometown paper, she escaped Chicago for Detroit, a real city, in 1990 to work for the Associated Press. Ah, the glory days of Detroit journalism: Jack Kevorkian, Ken Weiner, and Gulf War I. Enamored with the hope of national health insurance, she earned a master's in public administration in the early '90s at Wayne State, hoping to become a health policy analyst. The closest she got was health care PR (eeek, the dark side of this business). She spent the late '90s teaching in WSU's journalism and PR programs (hey, you should train those PR people to do what you want them to do!) and freelancing. Incidentally, she wrote one of the few sports stories to grace the MT's cover, "She Got Game," June 3, 1998. Svoboda spent six years south of the border covering education and children's issues for The (Toledo) Blade before making a foray into media management as the GM at WSU's student paper, The South End. Now at the MT full-time and free of the worries of advertising budgets, she still terrorizes students as an adjunct faculty member at WSU. When not working, look for her on the Detroit River — an avid sailor, she races out of Bayview Yacht Club where they don't always understand her leftie politics.
Dennis Shea, Proofreader
Dennis Shea has been proofreading at Metro Times nearly 20 years, 18 of them paid. He wrote short reviews and event articles in the 1990s. Now his writing concentrates on personal poetry and his ever-astounding Wayne State University-area apartment building. Dennis was born in Berkley, Mich., in 1951. He attended Berkley High School, got an English B.A. from WSU, and after about a dozen years of lost weekends, landed in middle age at MT in 1988. He has read voraciously since age 3 or 4; being legally blind in his right eye (lazy eye) distinguishes him from other proofreaders. Dennis plays guitar and sings, golfs and bicycles, all at about intermediate proficiency. His poetry has appeared in the anthology Abandon Automobile and in several small magazines. Of the headlines he's written for MT, his favorite appeared on a Savage Love column discussing condom use: "Don't rubber the wrong way."
Sean Bieri, Design Director
Sean Bieri designed ads in the Metro Times production department from 1990 to 2000. He took a break to work for local ad agency Brogan & Partners, then returned to MT in 2004 as design director. An avid graphic novel reader, he's written several arts-related articles and reviews and illustrated many more for the paper over the years. A DIY cartoonist and printmaker (with his trusty Print Gocco machine), he's a founding member of the Hamtramck arts collective Hatch and coordinates the Detroit chapter of the burlesque life drawing program Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School.
Metro Times is consistently recognized for the quality of our newspaper. Following is a list of some of the awards we've been given. The Society of Professional Journalists, Michigan Press Association, and Association of Alternative Newsweeklies have all recognized Metro Times with awards for editorial excellence.
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