Nick DePascal's New Book

Former Taos Summer Writers' Conference graduate assistant, Nick DePascal is the winner of the first West End Press Poetry Prize. His book, Before You Become Improbable is just out from West End Press/University of New Mexico Press.
 
Of the book, Sasha Pimentel says, "Before You Become Improbable  is rich with the artifacts we are left with just before, or in the wake of, absence. It is a book which opens its windows, the floral curtains bunched and billowing, and on the stained wood floors we find finger bones and tufts of hair, or a dead crow with 'feathers erect like goosebumps on the skin'--all invitation to intimacy and history. Equally love poem and elegy, equally an exploration of the artist's life and a frank reflection on marriage, each line falls delicately, though the words and things which make them are hard and sharp. I love the 'stiff fingers' which 'pull the tongue' of this book, each 'bit by bit.' Like Dickinson, Nick DePascal is a poet's poet, a lover's poet."

Nick will be reading at Bookworks in Albuquerque on Friday, September 19th at 7PM. Congratulations Nick! We can't wait to get a copy.

Nick DePascal lives in Albuquerque, NM, with his wife and son. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in RHINO, Sugar House Review, The Emerson Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Laurel Review, Aesthetix, ditch, and more. His essays and criticism have appeared in BoldType, The Rumpus, Pleiades, Rain Taxi, and Tucson Weekly, among others.

Meet the Native Writer Award Winner: Matthew Skeets

Matthew Skeets of the Navajo Indian Reservation from Vanderwagen has been awarded the 2014 Native Writer Award. He is a recent graduate summa cum laude from the University of New Mexico with two Bachelor of art degrees in poetry and Native Studies. During his undergraduate career he worked closely with poets Luci Tapahonso, Lisa Chavez, and Natalie Scenters-Zapico. Currently he is an intern in communications and social media for American Indian Opportunity in Albuquerque.

Skeets began to write poetry when he first read Emily Dickinson. He spent nearly two years of high school emulating her style, line, and meter. Other poets that Skeets admires include Luci Tapahonso, Sherwin Bitsui, Orlando White, Joy Harjo, Natalie Diaz, Eduardo C. Corral, Rigoberto Gonzales, and Tomás Q. Morín. The Native Writer Award was created in memory of Native author and former colleague Louis Owens. It offers paid tuition for one weekend or weeklong workshop, as well paid lodging to any Native American who is a resident of New Mexico. The award recognizes excellence in fiction, poetry, or nonfiction.

When informed about his award Skeets responded, “It’s a small dream of mine to come to the Conference. Thank you.” Matthew will be attending the weeklong workshop with Tomas Q. Morin. In the past recipients like Chee Brossy, Coral Dawn Bernal and Christina M. Castro have been awarded the Native Writer Award, making Skeets even more honored to have been given the award. This will be his first time attending a writing conference and one of Skeets’ goals after this conference is to compile his best work to then apply to graduate creative writing programs in the fall. Skeets also hopes to gain some perspective on how to normalize his writing life, gaining precision in his writing style and learning to be an active writer outside the workshop setting. Finally, Skeets is thankful to the organizers of the conference for giving him this great opportunity.

An Evening of Poetry and Art to Celebrate 2006 Native Award Winner Max Early's New Book!

Saturday, July 5, at 7:00 p.m., in the Mural Room of the Old County Courthouse in the Plaza in Taos, NM will be an extraordinary evening of poetry and art to celebrate Laguna Pueblo artist's Max Early's new book, Ears of Corn: Listen, published by 3: A Taos Press.

The evening will include a history of the Laguna Pueblo, poetry reading by Max Early, display and discussion of his pottery, musical selections by Norvin Johnson and Brandon Cheromiah, and performance of the Laguna Butterfly Dance by Fanithya Johnson. A book signing will follow.

This event is sponsored by the Taos Arts Council and is free and open to the public.

Meet the Leo Love Poetry Award Winner: Monika Cassel

Photo by Jamey Stillings

Monika Cassel is a passionate teacher, who has come back into writing through teaching at the New Mexico School for the Arts. For her, poetry is just another kind of conversation from which both student and teacher can learn. A major goal of hers is to get more people to read and write poetry, to have it be a living and interactive project that all kinds of people feel connected to. 

Currently, Monika is writing about Germany and her family history–––her father’s immigrant family in the Midwest and her mother’s childhood in WWII and postwar Germany. Having family members and stories from all over the spectrum in the Nazi era, Monika has been working to square the history and origins for a long time in a way that does justice to the broader history and affords the personal a space, which allows her to engage with her position, removed by years but holding the inheritance of that time. Her broader goal is to encourage people to take this difficult history seriously, instead of sweeping it under the rug or thinking they are “done,” particularly from a broader perspective of historical responsibility or culpability.

Along the way, Monika has been writing ekphrastic pieces, working with old letters and recently with her grandmother’s gardening book. Her deep interest in language that stems from growing up bilingual has led Monika to pursue translation, and she is intrigued by what happens when she translates ideas, experiences, and images into the music of language. What she sees her students doing in their art majors while they are deeply at work is what she feels when she has the time and space to work on her poems, and that creative process she finds incredibly invigorating.

This summer will be Monika’s first time at the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference. Former teaching colleague Robert Wilder, who has taught at the Conference for years, informed Monika of the great writing community at the Conference, and former workshop participant Jennifer Simpson also reinforced this idea. Additionally, at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, Monika has taken workshops with Dana Levin and Emily Rapp, both who have served as faculty at the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference in previous years.

Monika looks forward to Tomás Morín’s afternoon poetry workshop this summer and was excited by the description of his workshop. She is arriving at the point where she feels like she knows where her poetry is working well, and she would like a workshop that is a good space to reconsider and revise pieces that are not there yet. For Monika, Taos boasts a beautiful landscape that is not so far from her home, and she hopes to spend a fair amount of her mornings writing outside.

Poet Richard Vargas and The Writer's Almanac

April is National Poetry Month and The Writer's Almanac is kicking it off with a poem from the 2011 TSWC Hispanic Writer Awardee, Richard Vargas. Garrison Keillor will be reading from Vargas's book, Guernica, Revisited. The show airs in Albuquerque on KANW, 89.1, tomorrow, April 1st, around 8:15 AM. Be sure to tune in and enjoy!

Faculty Feature: Hilda Raz

Hilda Raz is Luschei Professor emerita at the University of Nebraska where she taught in the Ph.D. program in creative writing. She is a past president of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and has taught at Stanford, Harvard, Goucher, and elsewhere, as well as at MFA programs and writers’ conferences including Bread Loaf, Writers at Work, Taos, and University of Nebraska. A poet, nonfiction writer, and editor, she has published thirteen books. A member of the national literary board for the PRAIRIE SCHOONER Book Prize, she is poetry editor for bosque (the magazine) and now is director of the Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series for the University of New Mexico Press.

At the 15th annual Taos Summer Writers' Conference, Hilda will be co-teaching a weekend workshop in ekphrastic poetry with our featured artist Ouida Touchón. The class is called "Making visual art with poetry, making poetry with visual art: an ekphrastic workshop." In this weekend workshop, you'll have the opportunity to write about a work of art - using tempera paint, colored pencils, or scissors and paste - to create visual art in response to poems. Think of form, color, or collage and your own favorite poems. Or you could write poems in response to visual images. It is going to be a great workshop!

Poetry Reading: Natalie Diaz

Thursday, March 28, 2013 at 7:00pm at CNM Main Campus, Smith Brasher Hall, room 100

Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. She was part of the Old Dominion Lady Monarch basketball team that made it to the NCAA Championship game in 1997. After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia for several years, Diaz returned to Old Dominion and completed a double-MFA in poetry and fiction. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press in May of 2012. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Black Renaissance Noire, Crab Orchard Review, and others. She is a 2012 Bread Loaf Scholar and a recipient of a Lannan Residency in Marfa, TX. She was also awarded a 2012 Lannan Literary Fellowship, the 2012 Narrative Prize from Narrative Magazine, and a 2012 Native Arts & Culture Foundation Artist Fellowship. Diaz currently lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona, and directs the Fort Mojave Language Recovery Program, working with the last remaining speakers at Fort Mojave to teach and revitalize the Mojave language.

Participant Accomplishments: Eleni Bastea's New Book of Poems

We are thrilled to announce that former Taos Summer Writers' Conference participant, Eleni Bastea's first poetry collection, Venice without Gondolas, is scheduled to be published this summer by Finishing Line Press. The book is available for pre-order now!

Eleni Bastéa was born and raised in Greece. She studied art history at Bryn Mawr College and architecture and architectural history at the University of California at Berkeley. She teaches at the University of New Mexico.

“Eleni Bastéa's "Venice Without Gondolas" is a collection rich in sense of place, highly imagistic, and labyrinthian in its explorations of the past. The poems work beautifully as a sequence exploring family, history and mythology, often simultaneously. It begins with Marco Polo's reflections on Venice and ends with a liturgy at a contemporary kitchen table. This small book travels great distances.” — Diane Thiel, "Echolocations," Winner of the 13th Annual Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize

Faculty Feature: Amy Beeder

Amy Beeder is the author of Burn the Field (Carnegie Mellon UP, 2006) and Now Make An Altar (2012.) Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, AGNI, The Nation and many other journals. She has taught poetry at the University of New Mexico and The Taos Summer Writers' Conference. Check out this recent review of Now Make An Altar by Cerise Press.

At the 15th annual Taos Summer Writers' Conference, Amy will be teaching a weekend poetry workshop called Exercises in the Art of Poetry. "Amy has a wonderful and relaxed demeanor coupled with being astute, knowledgeable, insightful and enthusiastic." - 2012 Workshop Attendee

Participant Accomplishments: Marge Saiser's New Book of Poems

Marge Saiser was the 2007 Leo Love Scholarship recipient for the Taos Summer Writers' Conference. Her new book, Losing the Ring in the River, is forthcoming from UNM Press.We can't wait to read it!

Marge Saiser is the author of five books, including Lost in Seward County, Beside You at the Stoplight, and Bones of a Very Fine Hand. Her honors include an Academy of American Poets Prize and several Nebraska Book Awards. In 2009 Saiser was named Distinguished Artist in Poetry by the Nebraska Arts Council. Her poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, Chattahoochee Review, Field, and other journals.

The Leo Love Scholarship for the 15th annual Taos Summer Writers' Conference is now accepting applications. Go here for details.

An Interview with Joy Harjo at As Us Literary Journal

Joy Harjo talks poetry and writing with As Us: Indigenous Women's Literary Journal. Harjo is teaching a poetry master class at the 15th annual Taos Summer Writer's Conference. There is one spot left. Click here for more information.

Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is an internationally known poet, performer, writer, and saxophone player of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation. Her seven books of poetry include such well-known titles as How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, and She Had Some Horses, all published by W.W. Norton. Her poetry has garnered many awards including the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, 1998 Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America.
Harjo's memoir, Crazy Brave (W.W. Norton, 2012), tells of her journey to becoming a poet and was called "The best kind of memoir, an unself-conscious mix of autobiography, spiritual rumination, cultural evaluation, history and political analysis told in simple but authoritative and deeply poetic proze" by Ms Magazine . Soul Talk, Song Language (2011) is a collection of Harjo's essays and interviews was published by Wesleyan Press. She co-edited an anthology of contemporary Native women's writing:Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Native Women's Writing of North America, one of the London Observer's Best Books of 1997. She wrote the award-winning children's book, The Good Luck Cat (Harcourt), and in 2009 she published a Young Adult, coming-of-age-book, For A Girl Becoming, which won a Moonbeam Award and a Silver Medal from the Independent Publishers Awards.