Taos Writers Showcase

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).

Stevie Elyse Czerniel, was born as Steven John August 10 th 1957 and raised in Los Angeles. In 1965 at eight-years-old he felt female inside but vowed to keep it secret. He lived as a male, but escaped to his real life as a girl when he was alone.
Over 30 years, Steve rose to senior VP at BBDO Advertising in San Francisco but always endured the pain of gender dysphoria alone. In 2021 after six decades of inner conflict and hidden outbursts of suicidal rage, Steven finally revealed herself as Stevie Elyse. Today Stevie lives happily as a transgender person in Taos New Mexico. What began as writing lessons with Catherine Strisik two years ago, has blossomed into a creative partnership of writing styles
determined to tell Stevie’s story.

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. 

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