Taos Writers Showcase

Storytelling was a way of life in Eldrena’s upbringing. She grew up in New Mexico and Arizona among the Pueblo tribes of the Laguna, Tewa & Hopi. Activities with family and friends included listening to songs and stories. Eldrena pursued and obtained her Master’s degree in Elementary and Early Childhood education to impact the lives that surrounded her. Her experiences as a public school teacher and her unique Native upbringing benefited her tremendously as she began her next journey as a professional storyteller, author, and workshop presenter. In 1993, she was encouraged to teach through storytelling about her life experiences, sharing the history of the Pueblos and their contributions to our country. Eldrena travels the country offering captivating stories, a variety of recorded music, and historical accounts from Native American tribes. For example, a story presentation, “Bison, Bison,” gives insight into the history of the bison. A workshop, “Creative Spirit,” focuses on imagination, listening, and story crafting using creative thinking. A lecture, “Nampeyo, Her Legacy,” showcases her revival of Hopi pottery. In 2014, the Tejas Storytelling Association awarded Eldrena with the state’s prestigious John Henry Faulk Award for her significant contribution to the art of storytelling in the southwest. Photo by Katy Pair. Contact Eldrena or Visit Eldrena’s Website

Nick Flynn (writer, playwright, poet) has published twelve books, most recently This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire (2020), a hybrid memoir; and Stay: threads, collaborations, and conversations (2020), which documents twenty-five years of his collaborations with artists, filmmakers, and composers. He is also the author of five collections of poetry, including I Will Destroy You (2019). He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress, and is on the creative writing faculty at the University of Houston. His acclaimed memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), was made into a film starring Robert DeNiro, and has been translated into fifteen languages.

Levi Romero was selected as the inaugural New Mexico Poet Laureate in 2020. 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. His co-edited, New Mexico Poetry Anthology 2023, is forthcoming from Museum of New Mexico Press, 2023. He has served as co-editor on various journals and anthologies, including Chamisa: A Journal of Literary, Performance, and Visual Arts of the Greater Southwest. His poems and book publications have received numerous awards, including two 2017 Society for Humanistic Anthropology Poetry Award Honorable Mentions, a 2015 International Latino Book Awards, 2014-2015 Southwest Book Award, New Mexico Arizona Book Award, Writers’ League of Texas Book Award, Finalist, and a Best Books of the Southwest. He is also the recipient of several NEA and NEH grant awards, including a Research and Creative Works Leadership Award. He was awarded the post of New Mexico Centennial Poet in 2012. Romero is a bilingual poet whose language is immersed in the regional manito dialect of northern New Mexico. His work has been published throughout the United States, Mexico, Spain, and Cuba. His poem writing exercise, “Where I’m From, De dónde 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 collaborated 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 is a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop. 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. Romero is from the Embudo Valley of northern New Mexico.He is an Associate Professor in the Chicana and Chicano Studies department at the University of New Mexico where he directs the New Mexico Cultural Landscapes Certificate program and the Digital Cuentos project. 

Dani Loumena began performing her writing in Chicago during her junior year of college, when a class introduced her to the wildly wonderful and slightly unhinged world of Solo Performance. After graduating, she joined a group called Solo Crowd, which is still active in Chicago. The group focused on workshopping original pieces in a supportive space—helping writers move through blocks and emotions to create performances that could be healing for both the artist and the audience.

These days, writing is more of a personal and therapeutic practice for Dani, but she’s excited to share this piece from her early Solo Crowd days. It reflects on the inner struggles with beauty, love, and learning to accept the things we can’t control. Dani grew up in Taos in the ‘90s, spending most of her time on the mountain or at The Laughing Horse Inn, which her parents, Paul Loumena and Alexandra Lorraine, owned until the early 2000s. She returned to Taos from Chicago in 2020 and is so ecstatic to be back.

In her new novel, Because You Are Mine, set in the harsh, relentless landscape of Northern New Mexico, Amy Boaz, “a superb stylist” (Entertainment Weekly) whose writing has been aptly characterized as “satisfyingly subtle” and “evocative” (Kirkus Reviews), “compelling,” “beguiling” and “touching” (Publishers Weekly), has woven an intriguing web of human relationships that is filled with misunderstandings and hazards, but also with compassion and joy. Narrated by the young transgender musician, George, who has come back to live with their mother, Louise, in New Mexico after a carefree life abroad with their partner, a dancer, the novel pursues the rocky relationship among the three as they navigate attempts at finding work and freedom. Moreover, women go missing in this unforgiving land, and a life of ferocious
independence is attained at great cost.

Amy Boaz is the author of two previous novels, A Richer Dust (winner of the Washington Irving Award) and Beat. She worked as a writer, journalist, and teacher in New York, was a maestra of English in Mexico City, and has taught composition, rhetoric, and literature. She is back in her native New Mexico and is the book critic for Taos News.

Victoriano Cárdenas is a trans poet and native of Taos. He graduated with an MFA in 2020 from the University of New Mexico where he served as editor in chief of Blue Mesa Review and executive editor of Skull + Wind Press. His literary work has appeared in Witchcraft Magazine, Terraform by VICE, [PANK], and Quarterly West. Cárdenas co-wrote and appeared in the Audible Original Eminent Domain and currently writes for Lime Salt Productions and Meow Wolf.

Rachel Coventry lives in Galway. She holds a PhD in Heidegger’s poetics from the National University of Ireland, Galway. Her poems have appeared in various journals including The North, The Moth, Poetry Ireland Review, Cyphers, Stand, Southword, The Irish Times, and The SHop. She won the Galway University Hospitals Arts Trust Annual Poetry Competition in 2016 and has been short-listed for many other competitions including The Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Prize. Her debut collection Afternoon Drinking in the Jolly Butchers (2018) is published by Salmon Poetry and her second collection, Detachable Heart, was published in 2022 (Salmon Poetry).

Ray’s stories have appeared in Readers Digest’s  Best Stories in America (2016) and  American Hero’s (2017) editions. He was selected as the 2017 Serenbe France Focus Storytelling Fellow (Atlanta, GA) and his stories have been featured on NPR radio shows such as The Moth Radio Hour, Snap Judgment, and Backstory as well as the Risk podcast, among many others.  As a competitive storyteller, Ray is a ten-time Moth Story Slam Champion, and winner of the 2016 National Storytelling Festival Story Slam. Sharing his stories across the US and Canada, Ray has made several appearances on Moth Mainstage, The National Storytelling Festival Exchange Place (2019) , and was part of the 2018 tour of Snap Judgment Live!

In 2018, Ray has been named as the best known story teller in the south by Bitter Southerner magazine. Glynn Washington, host and producer of Snap Judgement, calls him “a storyteller’s storyteller.”  He is distinguished for his exceptional accomplishments as a performer and spoken word performer and his training and experience as an educator and motivator.

Ray is currently the producer and host of What’s Ray Saying, a podcast that utilizes history , storytelling and commentary to provide a unique perspective on the African American cultural experience.

She is a psychotherapist, activist, public speaker, and author devoted to the exploration of identity and the relationship between individual and society, the diversity of gender identity and sexual expression, and the search for meaning. Jacobs is the editor of Surviving Transphobia: Transgender and Nonbinary Experts on Endurance