Greetings, family! It seems our little piece of the world is beginning to reopen, and with that, opportunities for creativity and expression are beginning to re-emerge like young buds from fallow ground. As we watch artists and organizers open their doors for poets for the first time in over a year, it is safe to say these are exciting times indeed!  

And we are eager to continue building on that excitement with a few announcements. We have been working quietly behind the scenes to envision what NMSPS will be doing to promote poetry and poets in the coming days, and part of that work begins with announcing two new members of our Board.

We gratefully welcome our new Youth Chair, Scarlett Cortez, whose experience as an educator, artist and advocate make her the perfect choice for this role.

Also, we wish to welcome our new Convention Chair, Marissa Prada, whose energy, experience and passion will help us break ground on next year’s convention in spectacular style.

Look for more info on these wonderful people on our  Meet Our Board page. 

While we work to fill the remaining empty seats, know that we are developing several new ideas for the coming days that we believe will help to promote local poets in new ways, including book reviews and listings for books from our members as well as new events, contests and more!  

We will be hosting our first Board Meeting with the new Board in July as well, so expect news of these developments in next month’s newsletter (to be emailed August 9).  Also, I want to encourage all of those poetry organizers out there who wish to promote their events to visit our website’s Calendar page, where you can request a listing for one or all of your events this year, which we would love to promote!

That’s it for now, friends, but as I say, we have big plans (and some changes) in store for you, and we believe these will help us take NMSPS to new heights. We can’t wait to see you all again!  

Yours in Creativity and Light, 

Zachary

Dear NMSPS Members,

Firstly, allow me to say thank you. Thank you to everyone who voted and extended your trust to myself, Marcial Delgado and Helen Knoll to serve as your new NMSPS Officers. We are honored by this opportunity to serve, and to promote poetry and advocate for poets across the state. From our conversations so far, (as we are learning the ropes) I feel confident that all of us have a passion to build on the foundation that exists and grow NMSPS into something we can all be ever more proud to belong to.

National Poetry Month has passed us by. Despite the challenges of a world still learning to recover from the impact of COVID, the previous members of our Board delivered a convention full of powerful poets and workshops. While there was a definite learning curve as the Board sought to navigate virtual platforms, I think we can agree we were honored by the poets who agreed to read and discuss their work with us, as well as Catherine Strisik’s uplifting and insightful keynote address. In that regard the convention was a rousing success. This is due as well to the tireless efforts of Bill Nevins, who dedicated a tremendous amount of time and energy to recruiting highly respected poets. I would like to thank the outgoing officers – Bernadette Perez, Dino Leyba and Terri Klein, as well as Bill for all of their efforts to bring us this convention. All of them have agreed to continue in advisory roles, and Terri is staying on to support NMSPS with website duties as well. We owe you all our gratitude!

But I also want to acknowledge that we have work to do. The convention presented some challenges that we rose to meet and some that I believe we can do better with in the future. Some of the goals we carry with us in these next two years will address these and I would like to share a few of our goals with you, briefly.

We are going to work to improve communications society-wide, to ensure every member has access to the Board and to one another easily. We are going to work to increase transparency and establish clearly defined processes. We want to expand some of our programming because we believe membership in the society should include opportunities to connect with one another and share our – your – talents with one another and the state. We will work to develop more inclusion, and focus on extending a hand to members of the community who may not be have felt NMSPS has anything to offer them. At the end of the day, we want NMSPS to be a safe space for all as we do the work of advocacy, promotion and development of poetry and opportunities for poets across the state.

It is early days, and we have a lot to learn as your new Board. It may take some time for us to fully grow into these roles, so please be patient with us. But also, please feel free to reach out. We hope to host a town hall very soon, to give all of you some room to share your thoughts and ideas on the future of NMSPS. And we will be rolling out some new opportunities for our members very soon as well.

I hope that you all are as excited about the future as we are! Soon, we may be able to return, at least in part, to the outside world and to seeing one another in person – in fact, there are two live poetry events hosted by Voices of El Chante and MindWell Poetry on the calendar for June already, and many more to come – and we cannot wait to see you all soon!

In solidarity,
Zachary Kluckman, President New Mexico State Poetry Society

Updated July 2021