Writers Festival at the Institute of American Indian Arts

JANUARY 2014 WRITERS FESTIVAL SCHEDULE

[All events free and open to the public. All events in the Center for Lifelong Learning Common Room unless noted.]

Saturday, January 4, 6 p.m. Natalie Diaz & Jon Davis

Natalie Diaz grew up in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia for several years, she completed her MFA in poetry and fiction at Old Dominion University. She has been awarded the Bread Loaf 2012 Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry, the 2012 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Literature Fellowship, a 2012 Lannan Residency and the 2012 Lannan Literary Fellowship. Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published in June 2012 by Copper Canyon Press. The winner of a 2013 Pushcart Prize, Diaz currently lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona, and directs a language revitalization program at Fort Mojave, her home reservation. There she works and teaches with the last Elder speakers of the Mojave language. 

Jon Davis, Director of the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing, is the author of four chapbooks and three full-length collections of poetry—Preliminary Report (Copper Canyon Press 2010), Scrimmage of Appetite, for which he received a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry, and Dangerous Amusements, for which he received a G.E. Younger Writers Award and the Lavan Prize. He has also received two NEA Fellowships, a Lannan Residency, a Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, and a residency at Cill Rialaig in Ireland. He has taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts since 1990 and is currently Santa Fe Poet Laureate.

Sunday, January 5, 6 p.m. Chris Merrill & Melissa Febos

Christopher Merrill has published six books of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and books of translations; and five works of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars and Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain. His latest prose book, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, chronicles his travels in Malaysia, China and Mongolia, and the Middle East, in the wake of the war on terror. His writings have been translated into twenty-five languages; his journalism appears widely; his honors include a knighthood in arts and letters from the French government. A member of the National Council on the Humanities and the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO, he directs the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir, Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press, 2010). Her work has been widely anthologized and appears in publications including Glamour, Salon, Dissent, New York Times, Kenyon Review, Post Road, Bitch Magazine, The Rumpus, Drunken Boat, Hunger Mountain, The Portland Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Chronicle of Higher Education Review. She has been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air, Anderson Cooper Live, and elsewhere. The winner of the 2013 Prairie Schooner Creative Nonfiction prize, she is the recipient of a 2012 Bread Loaf nonfiction fellowship, and 2010 & 2011 MacDowell Colony fellowships. Melissa is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Monmouth University and MFA faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). A member of the board of directors for VIDA, Women in Literary Arts, she grew up on Cape Cod, and lives in Brooklyn.

Monday, January 6, 6 p.m. Gabrielle Calvocoressi & Ramona Ausubel

Gabrielle Calvocoressi's first book, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart (Persea Books, 2005), was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award and won the 2006 Connecticut Book Award in Poetry. Her second collection, Apocalyptic Swing (Persea Books, 2009), was a finalist for the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Calvocoressi's awards and honors include a Stegner Fellowship, a Jones Lectureship at Stanford University and a Rona Jaffe Women Writers' Award. Her poem "Circus Fire, 1944" received The Paris Review's Bernard F. Connors Prize. She teaches at the MFA programs at California College of Arts in San Francisco and at Warren Wilson College. She also runs the sports desk for the Best American Poetry Blog.

Ramona Ausubel is the author of the novel No One is Here Except All of Us, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award.  The novel was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a San Francisco Chronicle and Huffington Post Best Book of the Year.  Her new collection of stories, A Guide to Being Born, was also a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Story Award.  Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, One Story, The Best American Fantasy and shortlisted in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading.

Tuesday, January 7, 6 p.m.  Joan Kane & Chip Livingston

Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from King Island and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. She received a 2009 Whiting Writers’ Award for her first poetry collection, The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, published in its first edition by NorthShore Press Alaska and in its second edition by the University of Alaska Press. Her second book, Hyperboreal, was chosen as the winner of the 2012 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She has received an individual artist award from the Rasmuson Foundation, a fellowship from the Alaska State Council on the Arts, the Alaska Conservation Foundation’s Native Writers on the Environment award, a Literature Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. She is the School for Advanced Research Indigenous Writer in Residence for 2014.

Chip Livingston is the mixed blood author of the mixed genre collection Naming Ceremony, forthcoming in February from Lethe Press. He’s also published two poetry collections – Crow-Blue, Crow-Black and Museum of False Starts. Chip has received writing awards from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, the AABB Foundation and University of Colorado. Chip divides his time between Montevideo, Uruguay, and Lakewood, Colorado. 

Wednesday, January 8, 6 p.m. Sherwin Bitsui & Ken White

Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is Dine of the Todich’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl’izilani (Many Goats Clan). He is the author of Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press, 2003) and Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009). His recent honors include a 2011 Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship and a 2011 Native Arts & Culture Foundation Arts Fellowship. He is also the recipient of a 2010 PEN Open Book Award, an American Book Award, and a Whiting Writers Award.

Ken White is a poet and screenwriter who divides his time between Montana and Southern California and teaches Screenwriting in the MFA program at Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. He co-wrote and co-produced the feature film Winter in the Blood, and has adapted Debra Earling's Perma Red for the screen, which he is attached to direct. He is currently adapting the YA novel Stolen for the screen with Lucy Christopher. He is the author of one book of poems, Eidolon (Peel Press 2013).

Thursday, January 9, 6 p.m. Linda Hogan & Santee Frazier *In IAIA Auditorium*

Linda Hogan, Writer in Residence for The Chickasaw Nation, is an internationally recognized public speaker and writer of poetry, fiction, screenplay, and essays. Her books include Rounding the Human Corners, a Pulitzer nominee; People of the Whale; Mean Spirit, a winner of the Oklahoma Book Award, the Mountains and Plains Book Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Solar Storms, a finalist for the International Impact Award, and Power, also a finalist for the International Impact Award in Ireland. WW Norton has published her fiction. In poetry, The Book of Medicines was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other poetry has received the Colorado Book Award, Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, an American Book Award, and a Lannan Fellowship. She has also received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, The Wordcraft Circle, and The Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association.

Santee Frazier is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. He holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Syracuse University. He is the recipient of various awards including: a Syracuse University Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship, The School for Advanced Research Indigenous Writer in Residence, and a 2013-14 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Literature Fellowship. His poems have appeared in American Poet, Narrative Magazine, Ontario Review, Ploughshares, and other literary journals. His first collection of poetry, Dark Thirty, was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2009.

Thursday, January 9, 8:30 p.m. Student Showcase 

Students in the Institute of American Indian Arts' Low Residency MFA Program will read from their works.

Friday, January 10, 6 p.m. Sherman Alexie *In IAIA Auditorium*

Fiction writer, poet, performer, screenwriter, and filmmaker Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene) is the author of twenty books, including, most recently, Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories from Grove Press; War Dances, stories and poems, from Grove Press; and Face, poetry, from Hanging Loose Press. He is the winner of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, the PEN/Faulkner Award, National Book Award, PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, American Book Award, and a Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Award. He was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction. In 1999, he was selected by The New Yorker as one of its “20 Writers for the 21st Century” and, in 1996, Granta named him one of the “Twenty Best American Novelists Under the Age of 40.”

Barbaric Yawp 3

A Poem is Not a Puzzle to be Solved, but a Chocolate to be Savored

In the third installment of "The Yawp Barbaric," I discuss Dana Levin's poem, "Moo and Thrall." I've been trying to foreground a discussion of the pleasures of poems rather than their thematic concerns, though the two are, of course, entwined. As the poet John Ciardi wrote long ago in his essay  "How a Poem Means": "The human-insight of the poem and the technicalities
 of the poetic devices are inseparable. Each feeds the other. This interplay is the poem’s
 meaning, a matter, not of WHAT IT MEANS (nobody can say entirely what a good poem
 means) but HOW IT MEANS–a process one can come much closer to discussing." At any rate, this is an old-fashioned idea with feet stuck in what some would call the mud of New Critical reading. 

In fashionable classrooms these days, we're apt to leap straight to the "social position" of the author,  the political context in which the poet authored the poem, and the way the poem circulates in society--how it challenges or supports the power structure. And that's a valid enterprise. Certainly languages are socially constructed and carry the weight of imperialism, occupation, and border negotiations; and the author is partly socially-constructed, either carrying or rejecting (but never stepping entirely outside) historical and cultural circumstances. But this process commodifies the poem, asks What kind of product is this? It's a useful approach if your interests are political, but what if you're interested in everything about the poem? 

We may, in fact, at least sometimes, not be bearers or resisters of power. We share most biological traits across cultures, and we have made our various rituals around births, comings of age, marriages, funerals, and our negotiations with the universe.  All of this living can, of course, be seen through the lens of power, but as with any single lens, we miss more than we see. A wedding, for example, involves all sorts of powers--a battle between church and state over the right to sanction the wedding, a ritual whose existence might be traced to either patriarchal concerns about womens' independence or the tribe's concerns about the men's commitment to their families or both, etc. etc.  But also, within that arena, a man and a woman (or, at last, a man and a man or a woman and a woman) vow to remain together, often in total ignorance of the historical conditions that precede and surround them. And if you asked them whether their kiss was the pope's or the king's... Well, you do want to stay for the reception, don't you? 

So I have chosen the lens of pleasure, the lens of the kiss. Depending on who you talk to, the lens of pleasure is a decadent distraction, the only lens (because meaning is illusory), or one among many qualities that make a poem a poem. Which raises another unanswerable question: What is poetry? We humans created and keep recreating poetry, but like the economy, we don't always agree on what it is or how it works. In most ages poetry is marked by an intense interest in life (and, Lorca reminds us, death), in embodying aspects of life and death in language, and in bringing an intense focus to the language we use in this process. Finally it's the intensity of the tradition that distinguishes the poets. As the poet Chuck Calabreze likes to say, "Poets experience life more intensely than the rest of us--and then make us feel bad by writing about it." 

Avoidance and Confrontation: Dana Levin takes on women's rights in the age of spectacle

Santa Fe Poets 2 Rescheduled for December 15!

On Sunday, December 15, from 3:00 to 4:30 pm, in the Common Room at the Institute of American Indian Arts' Center for Lifelong Education, City of Santa Fe Poet Laureate Jon Davis will host “Santa Fe Poets 2,” the second of six readings that will take place over the next nine months at various venues in and around Santa Fe. Each reading will feature a different group of five poets reading with the poet laureate. Readers on the program for Santa Fe Poets 2 are Lauren Camp, Joanne Dominique Dwyer, Jamie Figueroa, dg nanouk okpik, and former Santa Fe Poet Laureate Arthur Sze.

The Yawp Barbaric, 2

 

 The second installment of "The Yawp Barbaric" introduces "[Malinche]" by Carmen Gimenez Smith. My historical account is, of course, much compressed and simplified. La Malinche was placed in a difficult situation--abandoned, disinherited, and enslaved. Her rapid climb from slave to power broker led some feminists in the 80s to reevaluate her legacy, but it's a difficult legacy to approve, given the consequences. Gimenez Smith's poem looks primarily at the role of language in the conquest: The Yawp Barbaric.

The Yawp Barbaric

The first of my monthly columns, called either "The Yawp Barbaric" or "Poetry Unexplained" (I'm leaning toward the latter, since it suits my sense of irony) came out in the Santa Fe Reporter yesterday. This one discusses "Horse Face" by Santa Fe's first poet laureate, Arthur Sze. The column will appear the last week of each month at least until June, maybe longer. You can read it online here: The Yawp Barbaric.

"Santa Fe Poets 2" Reading on November 24 at the Institute of American Indian Arts

On Sunday, November 24, from 3:00 to 4:30 pm, in the Common Room at the Institute of American Indian Arts' Center for Lifelong Education, City of Santa Fe Poet Laureate Jon Davis will host “Santa Fe Poets 2,” the second of six readings that will take place over the next nine months at various venues in and around Santa Fe. Each reading will feature a different group of five poets reading with the poet laureate. Readers on the program for Santa Fe Poets 2 are Lauren Camp, Joanne Dominique Dwyer, Jamie Figueroa, dg nanouk okpik, and Arthur Sze.

At this second reading, Davis will read from a new manuscript, Reply All, and from his most recent books, Preliminary Report, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2010, and Thelonious Sphere, a chapbook published by Q Ave Press in 2013.  Davis is director of the Low Residency MFA Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where he has taught for 23 years.

Lauren Camp, a workshop leader at various venues in and around Santa Fe and host of the poetry show Audio Saucepan on KSFR,  is author of the collection, This Business of Wisdom (West End Press, 2010). 

Joanne Dominique Dwyer is the author of Belle Laide (Sarabande Books, 2013). She works as a facilitator for the Brooklyn-based Alzheimer’s Poetry Project.  

 

Jamie Figueroa, a Jack Kent Cooke Arts Scholar, is currently attending IAIA's MFA program and teaching at the New Mexico School for the Arts. 

 
dg nanouk okpik, an Inupiaq-Inuit, is author of a chapbook, In the Time of Okvik, that appeared in Effigies (Salt Publishing, 2009) and a full-length book, Corpse Whale (University of Arizona Press, 2012).  

 
 Arthur Sze, IAIA Professor Emeritus, was Santa Fe's first Poet Laureate and is now a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He is the author of eight books of poetry, with a ninth, Compass Rose, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2014.

For directions to the Institute of American Indian Arts' campus, visit the website: http://www.iaia.edu/about/directions/

For more information, call Jon Davis at 424.2365 or e-mail him at jdavissimo52@gmail.com.

Established in 2005, the Poet Laureate program actively promotes poetry and the spoken word as integral parts of our civic life.

Beyonce, Renga, New Mexico Poetry, and a Return to the Laureate Trail

No, I'm not the popstar. The popstar was, apparently, Beyonce, or someone very like her. I wrote the story of her visit to Marfa, Texas. Well, sort of. I mean, not exactly. I exaggerated. Obfuscated. Made stuff up. But it's all true. In a way. And can be found in Versal 11.


After an intense several months creating an MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, I'm planning some readings and a series of monthly columns on New Mexico poetry for the Santa Fe Reporter. Watch for announcements here.

And don't forget the ongoing renga project which erupts suddenly and briefly on Fridays at 5 pm between Site Sante Fe and W21. Still the fastest poetry reading on the planet. Get in, get cultured, get out.

William Butler Yeats

This past April, I spent a month in Ireland, part of it in Cill Rialaig on the Southwestern Coast. At the end of my stay I toured the country with my partner, Teresa. It was a cold, rainy day when we caught up with the old man of Irish poetry.

Portrait by Christopher Felver

Was honored to have Chris Felver shoot an impromptu portrait. He's shot a few other folks, too. Check out the poets here: Christopher Felver

 

Hello, Friends,

Okay, it's pricey, sure. Fifty dollars. You could get a pretty good meal for that price, even in Santa Fe. But it's for a very good cause. Our MFA students are extraordinary people, many of them the first in their families to attend college, never mind grad school, and they are doing it on a shoestring because they're driven to do it, determined to do it. So your help is much appreciated.

And not only that. Sherman is sure to be his uproarious self.

So, if you want to do some good and be entertained and challenged and kept a little off balance all night, think about it.

We'd love to see you.

Thanks,

Jon Davis, Santa Fe Poet Laureate & Director, MFA in Creative Writing
Institute of American Indian Arts
Office: (505) 424-2365

THE RENGA PROJECT

Renga is an ancient collaborative form of linked poetry from Japan. Classical renga was written in one sitting, with each poet having three minutes to complete a stanza before passing it on to the next. Given the logistical difficulties of getting 50 New Mexico poets in one building for three hours, this particular renga will be written via e-mail over the course of several months.  I was asked by Jerry Wellman and Matthew Chase-Daniel of Axle Contemporary to host the renga and write the second and final stanzas. The other stanzas will be written by 25 poets selected by me and an additional 25 poets selected by the poets I selected. Many excellent poets were, of course, left out by the vagaries of the selection process, but many I might not have thought of were included. I've been delighted to discover poets whose work I hadn't known.

Paul Baglione built the beautiful wooden signboard and installed it between SITE and WAREHOUSE 21 in the Railyard Park in Santa Fe.  Each week Matthew and Jerry will hang a new stanza on the sign.  The renga poets will be invited to read their stanzas. Eventually, there will be six stanzas at a time on the sign.  As each new stanza is added, the oldest will be removed.  We will experience, over the course of a year, a changing and evolving 52 stanza collaborative poem. Jerry and Matthew have also invited 52 New Mexico Artists to create a linked drawing which illustrates the poem.  They’ll publish a book at the close of the project with the full poem and the full linked drawing.  There will be three versions of the book -- an affordable paperback, a series of four seasonal miniature Japanese-style folded books, and a beautiful limited edition handmade accordion book.

All of this will culminate with a reading of the poem with the poets at the New Mexico Museum of Art and an exhibition of the drawings in the Axle Contemporary mobile gallery in the summer of 2014.

The Renga Project is made possible by the generous support of Baglione Custom Woodworks, Santa Fe Jin, New Mexico Literary Arts, Artisan Santa Fe, The Railyard Art Project, The New Mexico Museum of Art, Ellsworth Gallery, Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeehouse, OpCit, La Montanita Co-Op, THE magazine, David Richard Gallery, Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, and individual donors.

RENGA PROJECT BIOS

Britta Andersson holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University.  She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Helena Andolsek is a 12-year old student at the Santa Fe Girls School. She enjoys writing poetry and horseback riding. When she's not reading a book, she's drawing horses.

Erin Bad Hand is a poet, mommy, artist, and wife. Not necessarily in that order. She lives and writes in Taos, New Mexico, because that is where her heart is.

Will Barnes teaches middle-school science and language arts in Santa Fe, has a consulting business in rangeland and riparian monitoring and restoration, and is studying for his MFA in poetry at NYU.

Amy Beeder, author of Burn the Field (2006) and Now Make An Altar (2012), both from Carnegie Mellon University Press, has taught poetry at the University of New Mexico and Taos Summer Writers Conference.

Hakim Bellamy. Hip Hop generation dad. Person-in-progress. Poetry-in-practice. Journo. Author. Community Organizer. Bright ideas magnet. Music addict. Inaugural Albuquerque Poet Laureate. Find him at www.hakimbe.com

Sherwin Bitsui is the author of Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press) and Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press). His honors include a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a PEN Open Book Award.

Sonja Bjelić studied creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts and the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared online at Petri Press, in Earthwords, and on KRUI’s “Poetry on Air.” 

Chee Brossy is a poet and journalist living in Santa Fe. He is Diné from Lukachukai, Arizona, with degrees from Dartmouth College and the Institute of American Indian Arts. Poems online in Taos Journal of Poetry.

Paige Buffington, calls Gallup, New Mexico, her hometown and its surrounding areas (the great Navajo Nation) her home. She will pursue an MFA in poetry at the Institute of American Indian Arts beginning in fall 2013.

Santa Fe’s inaugural Poete Maudit Chuck Calabreze has lately become involved in the environmental movement.  “As a poet,” he says, “I’m writing for the ages.  It’d be good if we had some.”

Lauren Camp is the author of This Business of Wisdom, and writer for the poetry blog Which Silk Shirt. She hosts “Audio Saucepan,” a music/poetry program on KSFR 101.1FM. www.laurencamp.com

Deborah Casillas, long-time Santa Fe resident, studied poetry at College of Santa Fe and with local poets Greg Glazner, Jon Davis, and Valerie Martinez. Her poems have appeared in various literary journals.

Ungelbah Davila is the owner and editor of La Loca Magazine. A graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts, Davila is a writer, photographer, and burlesque performer and queen of all trades.

Jon Davis, Director of the MFA in Creative Writing at IAIA and Santa Fe Poet Laureate, has published seven collections of poetry, including Preliminary Report (Copper Canyon Press).

Matt Donovan is a poet and lyric essayist and the author of Vellum (Mariner, 2007). He is the recipient of a Rome Prize and a Whiting Award, and teaches at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.

Joanne Dominique Dwyer, author of Belle Laide (Sarabande, 2013), is part of the Alzheimer's Poetry Project and, through the Witter Bynner Foundation, works with teens at Bernalillo High School on the "Poetry and Identity" project.

When Jamie Figueroa is not writing or teaching writing or reading fat novels that she promptly forgets the plot lines for or wandering through endless poems that leave her breathless, she can be found in the bathtub trying to perfect her disappearing act. 

Ann Filemyr. Academic Dean at IAIA. Books: On the Nature of Tides (LaNana Creek, 2013), The Healer's Diary (Sunstone, 2012), Growing Paradise (LaNana Creek, 2011). Co-conspirer on startup of IAIA’s low residency MFA in Creative Writing.

Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of four poetry collections, including Milk and Filth and a memoir called Bring Down the Little Birds. She teaches creative writing at New Mexico State where she edits Puerto del Sol.

Greg Glazner's books are From the Iron Chair and Singularity, both from Norton. He recently completed a genre-bending novel, Opening the World, and recorded a literary/musical performance with his band, Professor Len & the Big Night.

Lise Goett wonthe Robert H. Winner Memorial Award in Poetry for her manuscript, Leprosarium.  Her other awards include The Paris Review Discovery Award and The Pen Southwest Book Award.

Veronica Golos is author of Vocabulary of Silence, 2011 New Mexico Book Award, and A Bell Buried Deep (Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize / Story Line Press), to be re-issued by Tupelo Press.

Gabe Gomez writes poetry and sometimes writes about music. You’ve probably heard him on the radio, too. He works at St. John’s College, and serves on the Art Commission.

Richard Greenfield is the author of several books of poetry. He is a professor in the MFA program in poetry at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.

Renée Gregorio has lived in New Mexico since 1985 as poet, publisher, teacher, aikido practitioner, legislative drafter and somatic coach. She recently completed a collection of tanka entitled Snow Falling on Snow, from which Tangram Press published a poetry broadside.

Joy Harjo's seven books of poetry include How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems. Crazy Brave, a memoir, is her most recent publication. She lives in the Mvskoke Nation in Oklahoma. 

Elizabeth Jacobson is the author of Her Knees Pulled In, a book of poems.  

Christopher J. Johnson is a man in the world.  He publishes poems, book reviews, and articles for magazines and newspapers.  Currently he lives in Santa Fe, NM and Madison, WI.

Stephanie Johnson’s first book of poetry, Kinesthesia (New Rivers, 2010) won the 2008 Many Voices Project prize. Her work has appeared in AGNI, BPJ, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Abiquiu with her two daughters.

Past NEA Fellow and Academy of American Poets Forum Featured Poet Donald Levering is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Algonquins Planted Salmon and The Number of Names.

Dana Levin is the author of three books, most recently Sky Burial. A Guggenheim and Whiting Fellow, she teaches at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.

Jane Lin received her MFA from NYU and has taught at UNM-Los Alamos for many years. Her poetry has most recently appeared in Cura, jmww, and The Collagist.

Santa Fe's third poet laureate, 2010-2012, Joan Logghe has been wildly interested in getting poetry into community and worked joyfully to these ends, a great stealth mission.

2012 Ted Talk speaker Jessica Helen Lopez’s first poetry collection, Always Messing With Them Boys (West End Press, 2011) made the Southwest Book of the Year reading list and received the NM Press Women’s Zia Book Award. 

Valerie Martínez is the author of six books of poetry including Each and Her and Absence, Luminescent. She was the Poet Laureate for the city of Santa Fe from 2008-2010.

Dora E. McQuaid is an award-winning poet, activist, and teacher, whose blend of art, emotion, and service has earned numerous awards. She performs, speaks, and teaches internationally and publishes widely.  www.doramcquaid.com

Carol Moldaw is the author of five books of poetry—most recently, So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems—and a novel, The Widening.

Malena Mörling is the author of two books of poetry, Ocean Avenue and Astoria. She is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship.

Sawnie Morris won the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial award in 2010 for a selection of five poems and was co-winner of the New Mexico Book Award in 2007.

dg nanouk okpik (Inupiaq, Inuit) holds a BFA from IAIA and an MFA from Stonecoast. She has published two collections: In the Time of Okvik, in Effigies (Salt Publishing) and Corpse Whale (University of Arizona).

Margaret Randall's most recent books of poetry are Where Do We Go From Here? and The Rhizome as a Field of Broken Bones (both from Wings Press).

Jamie Ross lives on the Carson Mesa. Big Thrills: (1) chosen for Best New Poets 2007;

(2) Vinland, first collection (2010), awarded the Poetry Prize from Four Way Books.

Miriam Sagan first wrote renga with her mentor, Elizabeth Searle Lamb. She curated a free verse renga and poetry give away for the town of Salida, Colorado in summer 2012.

Henry Shukman’s collection In Dr No’s Garden was Book of the Year in the Guardian and Times of London. He is Mountain Cloud Zen Center’s teacher, and writes for Tricycle and the New York Times.

Jonathan Skinner lives in the English Midlands and teaches poetry writing and theory at Warwick University. Founder of ecopoetics journal, his publications include Political Cactus Poems and Birds of Tifft.

James Thomas Stevens (Akwesasne Mohawk), author of eight books of poetry, including, Combing the Snakes from His Hair, and A Bridge Dead in the Water, received a 2000 Whiting Award.

Catherine Strisik lives and writes poetry in San Cristobal. Her collection Thousand-Cricket Song was published in 2010. Strisik is co-editor of Taos Journal of Poetry & Art.

Luci Tapahonso is the inaugural Navajo Nation Poet Laureate. She is an English Professor at UNM and is the author of three children’s books and six books of poetry.

Leslie Ullman lives in Taos and teaches in the Vermont College of the Fine Arts low-residency MFA Program. Her fourth poetry collection will appear in August 2013 from UNM Press.

Connie Voisine has taught in New Mexico since 2001. Her books, Cathedral of the North, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream, and In This Factory (forthcoming) are all renga of a sort. 

Reading on Thursday, May 23, 6 p.m. at Collected Works

I'm reading at Collected Works this coming Thursday, May 23, 2013, at 6 p.m.

I'll be reading mostly new work from my Q Ave Press chapbook, Thelonious Sphere, and from my manuscript, Reply All.

I might toss in a translation or two from Iraqi poet Naseer Hassan's book, Dayplaces, that I just finished translating with him.

City of Santa Fe Poet Laureate Jon Davis to Host Poetry Reading at the Performance Space in Eldorado

Photo by Teresa White

On Sunday, March 24, from 3:00 to 4:30 pm, City of Santa Fe Poet Laureate Jon Davis will host “Santa Fe Poets 1,” the first of six readings that will take place over the next fifteen months at various venues in and around Santa Fe. Each reading will feature a different group of five poets reading with the poet laureate.

At this first reading, Davis will read from a new manuscript and from his most recent book, Preliminary Report, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2010. In addition to being Santa Fe’s fourth poet laureate, Davis is director of the new Low Residency MFA Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where he has taught for 22 years.

The other readers will be Dana Levin, who teaches at Santa Fe University of Art & Design and is the author of three books, including Sky Burial (Copper Canyon Press, 2011); Gabe Gomez, author of The Outer Bands (U. of Notre Dame Press, 2006) and Seed Bank (Mouthfeel Books, 2012); Ungelbah Daniel Davila, author of the chapbook Outlaw Neon, which is forthcoming in Effigies II from Salt Press; and Deborah Casillas, whose poems have appeared in Ontario Review, Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, and North American Review.

Suggested donation of $2 to support The Performance Space at La Tienda (9 Caliente Road) but no one will be turned away. For more information, call Jon Davis at 424.2365 or e-mail him at jdavissimo52@gmail.com.

Established in 2005, the Poet Laureate program actively promotes poetry and the spoken word as integral parts of our civic life.