Conventions
The 2021 NMSPS State Convention was a blast! Thanks to all who presented and attended!
Watch the 2021 Keynote from Taos Poet Laureate Catherine Strisik
NMSPS State Convention
Saturday, April 24, 2021
2:00-7:00 p.m., via Zoom
Keynote Speaker: Taos Poet Laureate
Catherine Strisik
Catherine Strisik, poet, teacher, editor is Taos, New Mexico’s Poet Laureate 2020-2021; recipient of 2020 Taoseña Award as Woman of Influence based on literary contribution; is author of Insectum Gravitis (finalist New Mexico/AZ Book Award in Poetry 2020); The Mistress (awarded New Mexico/AZ Book Award for Poetry 2017); Thousand-Cricket Song, and recently completed manuscript And They Saw Me Turn To Hear Them (semi-finalist, Philip Levine Prize in Poetry, 2021). Her poetry is translated into Greek, Persian, and Bulgarian. Co-founder of Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art and on advisory board of Pocket Samovar, Catherine, for 38 years has lived in Taos, New Mexico. Hear Catherine Strisik read the title poem from And They Saw Me Turn to Hear Them. Visit Catherine Strisik’s website. Catherine Strisik will also be featuring via Zoom with Elizabeth Jacobson at the April 22 Earth Day and Global Peace event.
Workshop 1 Un-earth the Earth in us!
EcoPoetry writing with Liza Wolff-Francis
Join us for a little nature-love in this brief poetry writing workshop. This will be a focused generative session. We will talk briefly about nature poems and eco-poetry, read a poem or two and begin writing a poem of our own. Bring nature into your poetry and into your life.
Liza Wolff-Francis’s Liza Wolff-Francis is a poet and writer with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College who served two terms as a member of the Albuquerque Poet Laureate Program’s Selection Committee and continues on the organizing committee. She was chosen to write in Tupelo Press’ 30/30 poetry challenge for the month of September 2020. Her writing has been widely anthologized and her work has appeared in El Palacio magazine, Evening Street Review, We’Moon, among others. Her chapbook, Language of Crossing has been described as “a political outcry, a finely tuned collection of endurance of a people, and a passionate advocacy for all to take notice.” Liza blogs to support mental health through writing at Writeyourbutterfly.com.
Workshop 2 Death Self: Writing from Essence with V. B. Price
Many people who have written for a long time know that their work is often much wiser and more insightful than they are to themselves. If you have a daily writing practice, as many of us do, you encounter, from time to time, this wiser self speaking through your pen. I’ve called it my “death self” because it seems to me that it must be the me that exists before and after life and in that mysterious “creative” space where new things are made in spite of our inadequacies.
V. B. (Vincent Barrett) Price (born August 30, 1940) is an American poet, human rights and environmental columnist, editor, reporter, publisher, and teacher. His most recent works include the poetry volumes Innocence Regained: Christmas Poems and Memoirs of the World in Ten Fragments, and the nonfiction book The Orphaned Land: New Mexico’s Environment Since the Manhattan Project. He is the co-founder, with Benito Aragon, of New Mexico Mercury, an online platform featuring news, commentary and analysis from a variety of experts and writers around New Mexico. Since January 2017, the Mercury Messenger has featured Price’s online column of politics and the environment. Price has taught off and on since 1976 in the University of New Mexico’s School of Architecture and Planning, and as continuing faculty in the UNM Honors College from 1986 to 2014. His seminars range from the classics in translation to modern poetry, urban studies, and New Mexico’s environmental history. Hear V. B. Price on “Colores” – NMPBS, Albuquerque
Featured Readers
Levi Romero, New Mexico State Poet Laureate
Levi Romero was selected as the inaugural New Mexico Poet Laureate in 2020 and New Mexico Centennial Poet in 2012. His most recent book is the co-edited anthology, Querencia: Reflections on the New Mexico Homeland. His two collections of poetry are A Poetry of Remembrance: New and Rejected Works and In the Gathering of Silence. He is co-author of Sagrado: A Photopoetics Across the Chicano Homeland. He is an Assistant Professor in the Chicana and Chicano Studies department at the University of New Mexico. His poem writing exercise, “Where I’m From, De donde yo soy,” based on the original poem, “Where I’m From,” by George Ella Lyon, was published by Scholastic as part of a nationwide educational project and has been used extensively, nationally and internationally. He has taught writing workshops for schools, universities, incarcerated populations, libraries, community centers, writers’ organizations, private mentorships, and has also worked with community libraries on various ethno-poetry and oral history documentation projects. His work has been featured in numerous anthologies and on-line publications. He has co-directed two films on acequia culture. Bendición del agua, a short film, premiered at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, and Going Home Homeless won a People’s Choice Award at the Taos Shortz Film Festival.
Mary Oishi, Albuquerque Poet Laureate
Mary Oishi was named Albuquerque Poet Laureate on July 1, 2020. Oishi is the author of Spirit Birds They Told Me, and co-author with her daughter, Aja Oishi, of Rock Paper Scissors, finalist for the New Mexico Arizona Book Award. She is one of twelve U.S. poets in translation in 12 Poetas: Antologia De Nuevos Poetas Estadounidenses, a project of the Mexican Ministry of Culture. Her poems have appeared in Mas Tequila Review, Malpais Review, The Blue Nib, Harwood Anthology, and numerous other publications. Oishi worked professionally and as an on-air personality in public radio for 26 years, hosting blues shows at four radio stations in New Mexico and Colorado. Her involvement in the work of community and social justice is life-long. She served as lead facilitator for an LGBTQ youth group for seventeen years, produced Peace Buzz, an event of art-as-protest in 2003, and was an NGO delegate to the UN World Conference Against Racism in 2001.
Return to Convention Timeline
Elizabeth Jacobson’s Academy of American Poets page
Elizabeth Jacobson will be featuring via Zoom with Catherine Strisik at the April 22 Earth Day and Global Peace event.
Elizabeth Jacobson, Santa Fe Poet Laureate
Elizabeth Jacobson is the Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets 2020 Poets Laureate Fellow. Her most recent book, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019), and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. Her other books include Her Knees Pulled In (Tres Chicas Books, 2012) and two chapbooks from Dancing Girl Press, Are the Children Make Believe? (2017) and A Brown Stone (2015). She is the founding director of the WingSpan Poetry Project, a not-for-profit which from 2013-2020 conducted weekly poetry classes in battered family and homeless shelters in New Mexico. WingSpan has received four grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. Elizabeth is the Reviews Editor for the on-line literary journal Terrain.org and she teaches poetry workshops regularly in the Santa Fe community.
Artemesio Romero y Carver, Santa Fe Youth Poet Laureate
Artemisio is an artist, poet, and grassroots organizer based out of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
He is a Co-Founder and Steering Committee member of Youth United For Climate Crisis Action (YUCCA), a youth led nonprofit working to combat environmental racism. YUCCA works to educate voters and mobilize communities, in pursuit of a just and livable future. Artemisio’s visual art pursues those same goals. His visual art has been shown at the Zolma Lofton Gallery, The Napa Valley Museum Yountville, and Warehouse 508, among others. He has curated exhibitions at the SITE Santa Fe Museum and ARTsmart Gallery. Artemisio is Santa Fe’s Youth Poet Laureate. His writing has appeared in publications that include Rigorous Literary Journal, Inlandia Literary Journal, Tumbleweeds Magazine, and Magma Poetry. Artemisio is a high school senior at the New Mexico School for the Arts.
Billy Brown hosts the Fixed and Free monthly poetry reading series. Next Fixed and Free is April 22, 2021.
Billy Brown
Billy Brown holds a PhD in Mathematics, teaches part-time at UNM, has a Math/Stat tutoring business and a baking business, sings tenor in the male chorus De Profundis (on COVID hiatus), and organizes and hosts the 13-year-long monthly Fixed and Free poetry readings. Billy’s son Alex, DIL Lake and two grand daughters Nevada (5) and Dusty Rainbow (6 mo), live in Los Angeles. He lives with his sweetheart Sandi, an addicted gardener, and their cat (Little Orphan) Annie. All these activities bring him JOY, which is his life purpose! Billy’s hatred for poetry for 35 years is now WAY over-balanced by the passion and JOY he finds in poetry, after the 1996 death of his daughter Elizabeth changed his mind, as poetry became his grief self-therapy. Billy loves to provide opportunities for others to express their deepest feelings in poetry, by hosting the monthly Fixed and Free readings and editing the Fixed and Free Poetry Anthology, 2011, 2015, 2018 and 2021 (forthcoming in August).
Amit Dahiyabadshah-ADB
Amit Dahiyabadshah-ADB believes that poetry is the resonance between a throat trembling with a secret and sacred truth and an ear aching with thirst for that truth. He loves nothing better than to read his simple deep poetry to a live audience. ADB has been a full time working poet for the last 25 years, with 20 collections to his credit. ADB lives in New Delhi, India, where he hosts the long running Thousand Poets Reading series. He’s hosted The Night of a Thousand Poems in New Delhi at the Samavar (2016) and a Thousand poems relay reading at The Bacchus Marsh Library in Victoria, Australia (2017). ADB’s signature poem, “The Last Will of the Tiger,” aired on NDTV, helped raise a half million dollars to help save the tiger.
Marcial Delgado
Marcial Delgado is a poet, devoted husband, and a construction worker from Albuquerque, NM. He is also the host and organizer for the vibrant and welcoming space known as Voices of the Barrio Open Mic Poetry at El Chante:Casa de Cultura in the heart of downtown Albuquerque. In 2017, Delgado became the Abq Slams City Champion. Marcial along with the 2017 Abq Slams Team went on to become the SouthWest Shootout Regional Group Piece Champions in Laredo, TX. In 2019, Delgado was part of the Mindwell Slam Team and traveled to Fayetteville, NC for the Southern Fried Regional Poetry Slam. He has been featured in the Albuquerque Journal and La Bloga. His poetry has also been featured in Burque Soul, Desert Blood (2 Pens & Lint), Those Poets Are All Bad, Huh! Collaborative Art and Fire Spitting, and Stronger Than Stigma: Poetry from the 2019 Mindwell Poetry Slam Team. In early 2020 Marcial captured the Mindwell Slam Albuquerque City Championship and was nominated to the Albuquerque Poet Laureate Program. Marcial’s first publication, Sell Me Insanity, was released in 2019. Marcial Delgado is just a vato from the barrio who fell in love with writing and poetry.
Bob Holman
Bob Holman is the founder of the Bowery Poetry Club and the author of 18 poetry collections (print/audio/video), most recently The Unspoken, Life Poem, The Cutouts (Matisse), and Sing This One Back To Me Bob Holman has taught at Princeton, Columbia, NYU, Bard, and The New School. As the original Slam Master and a director at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, creator of the world’s first spoken word poetry record label, Mouth Almighty/Mercury, and the Artistic Director of the Bowery Poetry Club, Holman has played a central role in the spoken word, slam and digital poetry movements of the last several decades. All told, he has performed well over 1,000 times, around the globe. He is the producer/director/host of various films, including The United States of Poetry (International Public Television Award) and On the Road with Bob Holman. His film about language loss and revitalization, Language Matters with Bob Holman, winner of the Berkeley Film Festival’s Documentary of the Year award, aired nationally on PBS. His short film, Khonsay: Poem of Many Tongues, has lines of poetry in 50 languages. In 2018, Holman was awarded the Chambra d’Oc Premio Ostana Award for his work in language revitalization. His roots are in Harlan, KY, and he currently lives on the Bowery in New York City.
Find Barbara Rockman at motherpoet@aol.com
Barbara Rockman
Barbara Rockman is author of Sting and Nest, Poems, winner of the 2012 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award.
Her 2019 collection, to cleave | University of New Mexico Press received the National Federation of Press Women Poetry Book Prize and was a finalist for the International Book Award and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award.
Recipient of the Baskerville Poetry Prize, New Mexico Discovery Award, and The MacGuffin Prize, her Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominated poems appear in Calyx, Cimarron Review, Bellingham Review, terrain.org., Thrush, Nimrod, Louisville Review and Verse Daily.
Barbara teaches poetry and memoir at Santa Fe Community College, Esperanza Shelter for Battered Families, and in community workshops. She earned her MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Santa Fe.
Tanaya Winder
Tanaya Winder is an author, singer / songwriter, poet, motivational speaker and educator who comes from an intertribal lineage of Southern Ute, Pyramid Lake Paiute, and Duckwater Shoshone Nations where she is an enrolled citizen. She received a BA in English from Stanford University and a MFA in creative writing from the University of New Mexico. She co-founded As/Us: A Space for Women of the World, a literary magazine publishing works by BIPOC women. She is a 2016 National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development “40 Under 40” list of emerging American Indian leaders recipient and a 2017 First Peoples Fund Artists in Business Leadership fellow. Winder’s poetry collections include Words Like Love and Why Storms are Named After People and Bullets Remain Nameless. Winder’s performances and talks blend storytelling, singing, and spoken word to teach about different expressions of love and “heartwork.”
Sandra Yannone reads from her book, Boats for Women
Sandra Yannone hosts the Facebook group Cultivating Voices
Sandra Yannone
Sandra Yannone grew up near the edge of the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island Sound in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Her interest in the Titanic disaster of 1912 sparked a dialogue with Ireland, the country where Titanic was built (Belfast) and her last port of call (Cobh, formerly Queenstown), as well as with other international sites connected with the disaster. Her poems, book reviews, and articles have appeared in numerous print and online journals including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Stony Thursday Book, Glass: A Poetry Journal, Women’s Review of Books, the Gay and Lesbian Review (Worldwide), CALYX, and Seattle Review. She has written numerous articles about the intersections between poetry and social justice for the monthly newspaper Works in Progress. Her work has received the Academy of American Poets Prize and the AWP Intro Award. Yannone’s debut collection Boats for Women has just been published by Salmon Poetry. In 2021 her new book The Glass Studio is being published by Salmon Poetry. She earned her B. A. in writing and literature from Wheaton College (MA); an M. F. A. from Emerson College; and a Ph. D. in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Currently, she is the Faculty Director of the Writing Center at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA.
Updated May 2021
Last updated on April 9, 2024