Wet: An Anthology of Water Poems and Prose from the High Desert and Mountains of the Four Corners Region

封面
Wet is an anthology of poems and prose from the Four Corners region of the United States. Inclusive of diverse cultures that make up the region, Wet honors the first and multiple languages of the writers - Spanish, Navajo, Ute, and English. Our invitation brought thirty writers to the edge of the well. Look deeply, we said, into the experience of water as a living entity. We asked the writers to put aside settlement papers, policies, water shares, and the tally of straws in the Colorado River. And then we asked them to speak love to water, instead.

關於作者 (2021)

Gail Binkly is co-owner and editor of the Four Corners Free Press in Cortez, Colorado. She is a veteran journalist who has worked as a news reporter, a sports writer, and a radio news writer. Her work has received numerous awards from the Colorado Press Association and Society of Professional Journalists. She was an assistant professor of mass communications for nine years at Colorado State University-Pueblo. She holds an M.A. in journalism from the Ohio State University. She is a native of Colorado who loves hiking. Maurus Chino is from the Haak'u, Acoma Tribe in northwest New Mexico. He belongs to the Eagle Clan and is a child of the Sun Clan. He earned a B.F.A. from New Mexico State University. Before he attended NMSU, he worked for the U.S. Forest Service, and in the underground uranium mines. In 1992, he decided to divide his life working as an artist activist and more recently, a writer. In 2007 his work protesting conquistador monuments in New Mexico and El Paso, Texas, became part of the PBS documentary The Last Conquistador (2008). Most recently, Maurus has published an essay in the anthology Qeurencia, Reflections on the New Mexico Homeland, University of New Mexico Press. He lives in Albuquerque, where he continues to paint and make jewelry. He has one child, a daughter, Anathea. Marcy Cummins is a psychotherapist practicing in Cortez, Colora- do, where she grew up on the edge of Hartman Draw. Though she doesn't consider herself a professional writer, she does believe that a person is drawn to accepting the medium for the challenge it offers as a form of record-keeping, a path toward deep understanding of personal experience. "I believe most of what I've learned is in my hands," she says. "I never fully grasp anything until I pick up a pen and write." Marcy wrote her first book in the second grade, joyously watching the stack of wrinkled notebook paper grow beside her on the floor. She's been writing ever since. In addition to publishing in her professional capacity, she has written a regular community column for the Cortez Journal. Her fiction and essays have been published in Impact Parenting, Alive!, and Southwest Colorado Arts Perspective. You can reach her at marcy@marcycummins.com. Jan D. Dixon is a feature writer and poet from Southwest Colorado. She is the editor of "ALIVE" magazine and the recipient of the 2009 Aspen Guard Station Artist-in-Residence award sponsored by San Juan Public Lands. Jan also has been a participant in "Growing Voices," an ensemble of writers and poets from the Four Corners region. She lives with her husband and two cats, Ollie and Emma, near Cortez, Colorado. For more information about Jan's writing, go to www.janddixon.com or email her at jan@janddixon.com. Dante Downey is a photographer and poet living in Montezuma County, Colorado. He is well known around town, seen at many public lunch and dinner tables, the library and meeting halls ceaselessly writing, drawing in small journals, making casual observations of his daily life into his own environmental, societal and emotional history and concern. He is of the moment, prompting us to grasp what is presented quickly. Dante accomplishes this through photography, he says, seizing moments that others may dismiss. But he also balances image with language. His poetry approaches a stream of consciousness shared by us all as we wade the waters of survival and joy with him.Dante works with youth in the Cortez community, opening avenues of trust, success and knowledge based on his own personal experience and the training he has received as a youth mentor for the Cortez Piñon Project. During the summer Arts at the Sharehouse 2019 programs Dante mentored a workshop in photography and served as videographer / photographer of record. The project is on hiatus during the CV-19 pandemic until summer 2021. His photography was also featured in the Cortez Pubic Arts Advisory com- mittee project Gallery Windows during the autumn 2019 group exhibits. Gloria J. Emerson was born to the Tsé nahabilnii clan for the Tó aheedlíinii clan of the Navajo Nation. She is a visual artist and poet, and was a consultant in the fields of Indian education and art. She has worked for the Institute of American Indian Arts, the Southwestern Association of Indian Arts, and the Native American Materials Development Center, as well as many other non-profit organizations supporting Native education, social services, and the arts. She also served on the New Mexico State Arts Commission. She was artist-in-residence at the School of American Research, which resulted in the publication of At the Hems of the Lowest Clouds: Meditations on Navajo Landscapes, a collection of paint- ings and poems.Recently Gloria has shown her paintings and sculptures in several venues in the Southwest. She has also been a businesswoman. In 2004, she owned and operated the first of its kind in Shiprock, New Mexico, a coffee shop named Ahwééh Gohwééh selling espresso drinks and showcasing the work of Native artists. She lives in Tsé Daa K'áán in the Navajo Nation. David Feela is a poet, freelance writer, writing instructor, and book collector. His work has appeared in regional and national publications, including High Country News' "Writers on the Range," Mountain Gazette, Small Farmer's Journal, Utne Reader, and as a "Colorado Voice" for The Denver Post. For 11 years he served as a contributing editor and columnist for the former Inside/Outside Southwest and currently writes monthly columns for The Four Corners Free Press and The Durango Telegraph.His poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments, Maverick Press, won the Southwest Poet Series. His first full-length poetry book, The Home Atlas, appeared in 2009. His collection of essays, How Delicate These Arches: Footnotes from the Four Corners, was selected as a finalist for the Colorado Book Award in the category of Creative Nonfiction. It was re-released as an ebook at Amazon in January 2020. David's most recent chapbook, Little Acres (April 2019) is now available from Unsolicited Press, and also as an ebook at Amazon. https://feelasophy.weebly.com/ https://twitter.com/feelasopher, https://www.goodreads.com/au- thor/show/4899002.David_Feela Rafael Jesús González advises the reader that his poems are "both in Spanish and English. Having been born and raised on the U.S./ Mexican border, El Paso, Texas/Juárez, Chihuahua, I grew up bilingual, bi-cultural, heir to two muses speaking Spanish and English. Consequently almost all my work are single pieces in the two tongues, Spanish and English, neither one the translation of the other."He attended the University of Texas El Paso, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and the University of Oregon. As a professor emeritus of creative writing and literature, he has taught at the University of Oregon, Western State College of Colorado, Central Washington State University, the University of Texas at El Paso, and Laney College, Oakland, where he founded the Mexican and Latin American Studies Dept.His poetry is relished at the Telluride Literary Arts Festival, where he served in 2019 as the judge for the national Fischer Prize and the Colorado Cantor Award. Rafael has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize and in 1996 he became the poet-in-residence at the Oakland Museum of California and the Oakland Public Library under the Poets & Writers "Writers on Site" award. He served as contributing editor for The Montserrat Review and received the Annual Dragonfly Press Award for Literary Achievement in 2002 and 2012. In 2003 he was honored by the National Council of Teachers of English & Annenberg/CPB for his writing. In 2013 he received the César E. Chávez Lifetime Award.The City of Berkeley honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015 and he was named the City of Berkeley's first poet laureate in 2017. Art Goodtimes is a poet, journalist and former Green Party elected official in Colorado, Art Goodtimes served as San Miguel County Commissioner (1996-2016) and Western Slope Poet Laureate (2011- 13). Former poetry editor for Earth First! Journal, Wild Earth and the Mountain Gazette, currently he's poetry editor for Fungi magazine and co-editor with Lito Tejada-Flores of the on-line poetry anthology SageGreenJournal.org. His books include: Embracing the Earth (Homeward Press, Berkeley, CA,1984), As If the World Really Mattered (La Alameda Press, Albuquerque, NM, 2007), and Looking South to Lone Cone: The Cloud Acre Poems (Western Eye Press, Sedona, AZ, 2013). His latest is Dancing on Edge: The McRedeye Poems (Lithic Press, Fruita CO, 2019).Retired from political life, Art serves as trustee and program director for the Telluride Institute, spearheading the Talking Gourds Poetry Club, Guest Gourd readings, the San Miguel and Western Slope Poet Laureate program, the local Ettore Rella youth poetry award, and the national Fischer/Cantor poetry prize contest. For going on 40 summers, "Shroompa" has been poet-in-residence at the annual Telluride Mushroom Festival. This year Gunnison's Mountain Words Literary Festival awarded him the Karen Chamberlain Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to Colorado poetry. Laurie Hall is a founding member of the Montezuma Food Coalition. Her proactive efforts around local food and food justice led her to take a leadership role in MFC, organizing the complimentary sectors of food production and food equity to put vision into action with The Sharehouse community food center in downtown Cortez, Colorado. Following a career in graphic design, Laurie moved to Mancos in 2005 to begin a farm with her family, and in 2009 opened a farm-to-table restaurant - the combination pro- vided a unique point of view on the regional food system. In 2014 her family farm became a member of the Southwest Farm Fresh Cooperative. She currently serves on the board of directors. Having sold the restaurant business in March of 2019, her work with MFC has blossomed into directorship of The Sharehouse. In this role she guides The Sharehouse in collaborative efforts with many other organizations engaged in building a strong and equitable local food system. Eirene Nakai Hamilton is of the Utah Diné. Ta'neeszahnii nil8. Bit'ahnii yáshchíín.Tábaahá dabicheii. Naakaiidine'é dabinálí. Eirene is a continuous resident of the San Juan River valley in Utah. Retired from thirty years of teaching, she now devotes time to writing, gardening, ethnobotany and artistic ventures. "Writing has saved my life," she says. Her poem Dishwasher was published online in Canyon Echo: A Journal of Southeastern Utah and submitted to Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature, University of Arizona Press. David Long is a self-described former hippie and vagabond who has lived all over the United States. He is a co-owner and writer for the Four Corners Free Press newspaper in Cortez, Colorado, a former reporter for the Cortez Sentinel/Montezuma Valley Journal, and a former interim managing editor at the Crested Butte Chronicle & Pilot. His news articles and opinion columns have received numerous awards from the Colorado Press Association and Society of Professional Journalists. He was born and raised in coal-mining country in Pennsylvania. L. Luis Lopez has published five books of poetry: Musings of a Barrio Sack Boy, A Painting of Sand, Each Month I Sing (which won the American Book Award, 2008), Andromeda to Vulpecula (88 Constellation Poems), and More Musings of a Barrio Sack Boy. A professor emeritus of Latin, Ancient Greek, Mythology, and English at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, Colorado, he has a Ph.D. in Medieval English Literature from The University of New Mexico. He received a National Endowment for the Humanities to study poetry at Harvard with renowned poetry critic Helen Vendler. Luis was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Lorraine Dominique Nakai was an entomologist; her work spanned best management practices for multiple crops on large irrigated farmland, recording wheat aphid behavior, and bat echolocation call detection studies. She was a graduate of Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, and served on the USDA's Agricultural Biotechnology Advisory Committee in Washington, D.C., from 1999 to 2001. More recently, Lorraine served as a member of the Diné Committee of the Utah Navajo Trust Fund. Lorraine wrote and taught in Navajo and English. She lived in Grand Junction, Colorado, and Bluff, Utah, learning Turkish while bicycling, book- binding and painting. Lorraine passed away on August 18, 2020. Beth Paulson has lived in Ouray County since 1999. Previously she taught English at California State University, Los Angeles, for more than twenty years. She leads state and local writing and creativity workshops and currently conducts "Poetica," a monthly workshop for poets. Since 2013 Beth has been co-director of the Open Bard Literary Series in Ridgway, Colorado.In April 2019 she was named the first poet laureate of Ouray County. Beth's poems have been published widely in national literary magazines and anthologies and have been nominated four times for Pushcart Prizes. Her fifth collection of poems, Immensity, was published in 2016 by Kelsay Books. Beth most recently co-authored with Don Paulson Images of the Mountain West in Photographs and Poems (Twain Publishers, 2019). Renee Podunovich is a poet and freelance writer living in Southwest Colorado. She has three chapbooks of poems: Illustrious for Brief Moments" (Finishing Line Press, 2021), Let the Scaffolding Collapse (a finalist in the New Women's Voices Chapbook Com- petition by Finishing Line Press, 2012) and If There Is a Center No One Knows Where It Begins (Art Juice Press, 2008). She is the 2019 Cantor Award winner for the best poem by a Coloradoan in the Fischer Prize awarded by the Telluride Literary Festival. Her poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2010 and 2011. Renee believes that poetry is a language that encourages us to tran- scend our constricted sense of self and connect to our essential nature within and the living intelligence of the world around us. Renee facilitates Well Writing: Wordcraft for Discovery, Wholeness & Connection workshops that are designed to use creative writing as a tool for centering, reflecting and for personal growth. www.ReneePodunovich.com on facebook and Instagram @wellwriting Kelly Shaggy (she/her/hers) holds a B.A. in Elementary Education with an endorsement in English Language Arts, a master's certification in TESOL International Association, the largest professional organization for teachers of English as a second or foreign language. Kelly has also earned an alternative licensure program certification in Secondary Eeucation. In addition, she is a school evaluator and consultant. Kelly is currently working on her M.F.A. in cre- ative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts with a poetry focus. Aside from having experience teaching high school, preschool, and adult education, she loves to write vignettes and poetry about her wonderful son, family, and experiences. She is of Bad River Chippewa, Navajo, Hopi and Ute heritage and lives in her home community of Haanaadli, New Mexico. Ed Singer is a visual artist known for his paintings, drawings, pastels and lithographs reflecting his place-based personal narrative of Diné life. His work is collected throughout the U.S. and in many European countries, where it has been on exhibit in public, private and corporate venues. He is also known for his champion saddle bronc riding, a rodeo sport he perfected in his youth. Singer was raised at Gray Mountain, near Cameron, Arizona, in the company of his eleven siblings and numerous Diné relatives. At the time he graduated high school and began his college career he was studying literature and hoped to become a writer, but he says, "I got sidetracked by the career in visual arts that grew from my work at the time and that changed the course of my life." In his essay Ed describes a dependable source of water near his home, simultaneously revealing a name for Cortez that points to where the water flows in the town where he presently resides. He maintains a studio at Gray Mountain on the Navajo Nation. www.edsinger.weebly.com Suzanne Strazza is hopefully on the tail end of her midlife crisis, which she survived by wandering aimlessly among the cactus and barren drylands of southeastern Utah. She finds solace in the never-ending skies and tenacity of the creatures residing in this wind-swept place that her heart calls home. She has been a journal- ist, freelancer, English teacher, and columnist over-sharing in the Four Corners Free Press since its inception. But her passion lies in attempting to put words to her connection to the landscapes of the Colorado Plateau. She is the lucky mom of three fabulous young men, and best friend to a corgi named Elvis. Find more of her writ- ing at highdesertdarlin.com and on Facebook at Prickly Pear. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer lives on the banks of the San Miguel River in San Miguel County with a pond (home to crawdads and occasionally to river otters) and a mudslide path nearby. She served as the third Colorado Western Slope poet laureate, 2015-2017, co-hosts Emerging Form, a podcast on creative process, is the cofounder of Secret Agents of Change and co-directs Telluride's Talking Gourds Poetry Club.Her poetry has appeared in O Magazine, on A Prairie Home Companion, in Rattle.com, and on river rocks. Her most recent collections are Hush, winner of the Halcyon Prize for poems of human ecology, and Naked for Tea, a finalist for the Able Muse book award. Rosemerry teaches poetry for 12-step recovery programs, hospice, mindfulness retreats, women's retreats, scientists and more. She's been a storyteller at the National Storytelling Festival and Taos Storytelling Festival. Since 2006, she's written a poem a day. One-word mantra: Adjust. Three-word mantra: I'm still learning. www.wordwoman.com and find her daily poems on her blog, www. ahundredfallingveils.com Cindy Yurth is a lifelong journalist who has worked for the Navajo Times for the past fifteen years. She and her husband, Eric Swanson, divide their time between the desert of Chinle, Arizona, and the wetlands of Rockwood, Colorado.

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