Rescheduled: Community Reading Series #4

2022 Santa Fe Youth Poet Laureate, Elena Gonzales is a senior at New Mexico School for the Arts majoring in Music and minoring in Creative Writing. Originally from Socorro New Mexico, she plans to attend Drexel University in Philadelphia for Nursing, in the Fall of 2022. Along with her previous accomplishments, she is also an avid organizer in her community, working with Youth United for Climate Crisis Action and the New Mexico Dream Team dedicating her time to environmental and social justice. Elena’s poetry and artwork can be found on all social media platforms @naneegonzo

Joshua K. Concha lives on and tends land at Taos Pueblo, N.M. Living near the foothills of Taos Pueblo Peak enhanced his affinity to nature and influenced his art. Joshua enjoys making jewelry, stone sculpting, and watercolor painting in addition to writing and playing guitar. Most recently, his poetry appeared in the  Ekphrastic Poetry Event organized by SOMOS and the Taos Arts Council (2019 & 2020). His work is also in the Winter 2016 issue of The Notebook: A Progressive Journal about Women and Girls with Rural and Small Town Roots and in the anthology 200 New Mexico Poems. He is the current Taos Poet Laureate. 

Joanne Dominique Dwyer’s poetic life began as a self-taught, intuitive writer, whose early influences were Anne Sexton, Pablo Neruda and Sherman Alexie. After a foray in performance and slam poetry, Dwyer attended Warren Wilson’s program for Writers where she earned an MFA in Creative Writing. She was featured on the cover of The American Poetry Review, before her first poetry collection, Belle Laide, from Sarabande Books, was published. She is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award, an American Poetry Review Jerome J. Shestack prize, a Massachusetts Review Anne Halley Prize, a Pushcart nominee, and a Bread Loaf Scholar. She was also included in Best American Poetry, 2019. Dwyer counts her experiences working with teenagers and poetry, most recently in the small rural high school in Pecos, N.M., through the support of the Witter Bynner Foundation, as one of her most meaningful engagements with poetry. For many years, Dwyer was a visiting poet to people with dementia and Alzheimer’s in memory care units. RASA, chosen by David Lehman for the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize, officially out May 15, 2022, is Dwyer’s second collection of poems. 

Carol Moldaw is the author of Beauty Refracted (Four Way Books, 2018) as well as five other books of poetry, including The Lightning Field, which won the FIELD Poetry Prize (Oberlin College Press 2002) and a novel, The Widening (Etruscan Press, 2008). Her work has been published widely in journals, including The New York Review of Books, Poem-A-Day, AGNI, Denver Quarterly, FIELD, Harvard Review, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, Plume and On the Seawall, which also published Tyler Mill’s interview with her in 2020. She lives in Santa Fe, NM. 

Community Reading curator Elizabeth Jacobson was the fifth Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets 2020 Poets Laureate Fellow.  Her most recent book, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019), and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book.  She is the Reviews Editor for the online literary journal Terrain.org and co-founding director of Poetry Pollinators, an eco-poetry public art initiative supporting native solitary bees. She teaches poetry workshops regularly in the Santa Fe community.