SOMOS is hiring a grant writer!
Please send a letter of interest and resume to somos@somostaos.org or call 575-758-0081. This is a $30/hour position up to seven hours/week. The position includes complimentary attendance at most ticketed SOMOS events. Click here to see a detailed job description. SOMOS is an equal opportunity organization and will not allow discrimination based upon age, ethnicity, ancestry, gender, national origin, disability, race, size, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background, or any other status prohibited by applicable law.
Poet Laureate:
Joshua Concha
2022-2024 Taos Poet Laureate
Joshua Concha is an Indigenous multi-media artist and writer who has been a tribal resident of the Taos Pueblo for twenty-five years. Concha has worked in a wide range of media (including film and digital storytelling, music, stone, and metal sculpture, silversmithing, and watercolor). His poem, “Rust” was chosen by the previous Poet Laureate, Catherine Strisik, as one of the fifteen poems installed in outdoor venues in Taos. His poems were also selected for “Poetry in Public Places” (2018 & 2019) and have been published in The Notebook: A Progressive Journal About Women and Girls with Rural and Small Town Roots and 200 New Mexico Poems: Celebrating the Centennial and Beyond. His 2022-23 Poet Laureate project is tentatively titled “Taos Poetry in Motion”: a film project, with 9-12 poets reading their work accompanied by visual images.
Writers Showcase:
Paul Tran
Friday & Saturday, 4/14/23-4/15/23
Paul Tran is the author of the debut poetry collection, All the Flowers Kneeling, from Penguin in the US and the UK. They are a Visiting Faculty in Poetry at Pacific University MFA in Writing and a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. A recipient of the Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and a Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, their work appears in The New Yorker, The Nation, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere.
Paul earned their B.A. in history from Brown University and M.F.A. in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, where they won the Howard Nemerov Prize, Dorothy Negri Prize, and Norma Lowry Memorial Award. As the Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow (2017-19) and Senior Poetry Fellow (2019-20) in the Writing Program, and as Faculty in Poetry (2020-Present) in the Summer Writers Institute, Paul has taught the introductory, intermediate, and advanced poetry workshops at WashU.
Writers Showcase:
Azareen Van der Vliet Oolomi
Friday & Saturday, 5/5/23-5/6/23
Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi is the author of the novels SAVAGE TONGUES (Mariner, 2021) and CALL ME ZEBRA (Mariner, 2018) which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the John Gardner Award, was long listed for the PEN Open Book Award, was an Amazon Best Book of the Year, A Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller and named a Best Book by over twenty publications. It has been translated into Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Turkish and Romanian and was published in the UK by Alma Books, a division of Bloomsbury. She received a 2015 Whiting Writers’ Award and was a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree for her debut novel, FRA KEELER (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2012). Her work has been supported by a Fulbright Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship and a Fellowship from Art OMI and has appeared in The ParisReview, GRANTA, Guernica
Taos Writers Conference
Keynote Speaker:
Tommy Orange
Friday, 7/7/23
Tommy Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland, California. He is the author of There There, a multi-generational, relentlessly paced story about a side of America few of us have ever seen: the lives of urban Native Americans. One of The New York Times’ top books of 2018 and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, There There shows us violence and recovery, hope and loss, identity and power, dislocation and communion, and the beauty and despair woven into the history of a nation and its people.
Writers Showcase:
Dr. Ray Christian
Saturday, 10/14/23 (Taos Storytelling Festival)
Dr. Raymond Christian is a retired US Army paratrooper who grew up on the poverty-ridden streets of Richmond, VA. The son of illiterate parents, his love for the written word sparked his dreams of a different life and led to many adventures, including seeming impossible educational achievements and life as an amateur farmer and professional family-man. Ray is a Fulbright Specialist Scholar in Education, with expertise in oral history and personal narrative. He is the only specialist in this field on the Fulbright roster which makes him a uniquely qualified educator, facilitator, performer and creator. Ray uses his unique combination of education and world experience to teach, inspire and entertain. From professional development workshops and fundraisers to keynote addresses, he uses the spoken word to connect to audiences and leave them encouraged and inspired to take on any challenge they might face.
Writers Showcase:
Kinari Webb
Friday & Saturday, 11/3/23 – 11/4/23
Kinari Webb is an American physician who first came to Indonesia in 1993. In the US, she founded Health in Harmony to support her work in Indonesia and then, in 2006, she co-founded Yayasan Alam Sehat Lestari (ASRI) in West Kalimantan with dentist Hotlin Ompusunngu. Kinari developed the vision for Health In Harmony on an undergraduate trip, studying orangutans at Gunung Palung National Park in Indonesian Borneo in 1993. Dr. Webb graduated from Yale University School of Medicine with honors and then founded Health In Harmony in 2005 to support the combined human and environmental work that she envisioned. Kinari also co-founded Alam Sehat Lestari (ASRI) with Hotlin Ompusunggu and Antonia Gorog. Kinari splits her time between, Indonesia, Madagascar, Brazil, international test sites and the San Francisco Bay Area. Her book Guardians of the Trees was published in 2021.
Upcoming Events
Open Tues-Sat 12pm-4pm 575.758.0081 108 Civic Plaza Drive
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 • LANL (Los Alamos National Labs) • New Mexico Humanities Council • Frost Foundation • Witter Bynner Foundation • Amazon Literary Partnership • Literary Emergency Fund