Countdown to Prose Month
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A few of our featured authors for November Prose Month
Rebecca Solnit
Prose Month
Amy Irvine
Prose Month
Major Jackson
2027 Keynote Speaker
Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, including Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (2023), The Absurd Man (2020), Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006) and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. He is also the author of A Beat Beyond: The Selected Prose of Major Jackson edited by Amor Kohli. A recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, John S. Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry London, and World Literature Today. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.
Photo by Beowulf Sheehan
Weyodi OldBear
Prose Month
Robert Westbrook
Prose Month
Sylvia Rains Dennis
Poet Laureate
Beyond an extensive career in botany and forest biodiversity focused on the Southern Rocky Mountains, my creative pursuits interweave a love of language, creative arts, music and memory. Poetry and wordsongs preceded writing during my upbringing, threading my understanding of connection to wild mountain homelands, while also visiting relatives in the northern reach of the Great Lakes woodlands and the boreal/mixed forests.
Current projects include finalizing two full poetry manuscripts, editing a dramatic lyric/poetry hybrid narrative piece, and compiling more recent poems for collections. In response to a devastating loss of biodiversity in our shared homelands, I recently completed the final draft of a five-act play, Keystone Cascade, which includes poetic and sung lyric and an opportunity for community engagement during performances planned for several mountain communities in northern New Mexico and western Colorado.
Recent poetry, narrative and lyrical compositions have appeared in SeedBroadcast (SEED:
Climate Change Resilience), Sonora Review, and the New Mexico Poetry Anthology (2023).
Among the many to show encouragement and support, I would like to recognize New
Mexico Writers, the Bread Loaf School of English, The Shakespeare Institute, Orion
Environmental Writers at Middlebury College, the Society for Ecological Restoration, Denver Women’s Press Club, the Ecological Society of America, and small communities belonging to the Institute of American Indian Arts, the University of New Mexico, as well as to all encountered by heart. Much gratitude to SOMOS for encouraging the creative voices of the land-based communities and cultural traditions of Northern New Mexico.
Having long served as faculty at the University of New Mexico at Taos and Colorado Mountain College, I have an extensive university and teaching background in forest biology, biodiversity and botany with a focus on the natural sciences and conservation-in-practice (Colorado State University, Oregon State University and the University of California at
Davis). Additional research in theater and multicultural literature include a Master's in English (Middlebury College; Oxford, Vermont and Santa Fe, New Mexico) and PhD studies at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, Great Britain.
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Mailing Address: P.O. Box 3225, Taos, NM 87571
THANK YOU TO OUR FUNDERS
SOMOS programs are made possible in part by these organizations: New Mexico Arts, a Division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts • Taos Community Foundation • The McCune Foundation • The National Endowment For The Arts • The Virginia Wellington Cabot Foundation • Taos County Lodgers Tax • TaosNetLLC for high speed internet service • Lions Club • Milagro Rotary Club • New Mexico Humanities Council • Nusenda Foundation • Witter Bynner Foundation • Amazon Literary Partnership • Literary Emergency Fund