ORGANIZER: Art Goodtimes-Telluride
Telluride Institute’s Talking Gourds poetry program
We will be hosting a 100tpc poetry reading in the courtyard of Telluride’s Wilkinson Public Library Sept. 29th — Austin’s Nathan Brown, Telluride’s Daiva Chesonis, Wrights Mesa’s Art Goodtimes & special guests
Nathan Brown is an author, songwriter, and award-winning poet living in Wimberley, Texas. He holds a PhD in English and Journalism from the University of Oklahoma where he taught for seventeen years. He served as Poet Laureate for the State of Oklahoma in 2013/14, and now travels fulltime performing readings and concerts, teaching workshops and speaking on creativity, poetry, songwriting, and creative writing.
Nathan has published roughly nineteen books. Most recent are An Honest Day’s Confession; Apocalypse Soon: The Mostly Unedited Poems of Ezra E. Lipschitz; and Don’t Try, a collection of co-written poems with Austin Music Hall of Fame songwriter, Jon Dee Graham. Karma Crisis: New and Selected Poems, was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Oklahoma Book Award. His earlier book, Two Tables Over, won the 2009 Oklahoma Book Award.
He’s taught memoir, songwriting, performance, and creativity workshops from Tuscany to the Sisters Folk Festival in Oregon, the Taos Poetry Festival, the Woody Guthrie Festival, Laity Lodge, the Everwood Farmstead Foundation in Wisconsin, as well as for Blue Rock Artist Ranch near Austin, Texas.
Naomi Shihab Nye said about Nathan’s book, My Salvaged Heart: “Brave new world! The sizzle of couplings and uncouplings – attraction and romance, ineffable magnetism, mysterious as ever – but doused with a savory dose of Nathan Brown humor, a tilted long-ranging eye that sees the next bend in the road even when he’s standing right here, firmly planted.” www.brownlines.com
Daiva Chesonis is a former Baltimoron, transplanted to Colorado half her life ago to build Telluride’s gondola transportation system. Although birthing chairlifts was not part of her initial goal after a Cold War-era B.A. in Russian Studies, she quickly decided to bed down in the box canyon to see what unfolded. A quarter century later, she is the co-owner of Between the Covers Bookstore with stints in between as snowboard instructor, owner/operator of Vision Design, Art Director at Telluride Magazine, and a traveling minstrel for Mountainfilm on Tour. In 2005, she earned an M.A. in Diplomacy and International Conflict Resolution, mostly for fun. In her spare time, this fiercely proud Lithuanian and “mother of Olivija” can be found writing poems (and that darn book on walls), putting on the Literary Arts Festival, playing tennis, and hunting mushrooms. She’s also a pro at finding herself lost in neighboring deserts.
Peter Anderson’s most recent books include Heading Home: Field Notes (Conundrum Press, 2017), a collection of flash prose and prose poems exploring rural life and the modern day eccentricities of the American West; Going Down Grand: Poems from the Canyon (Lithic Press, 2015), an anthology of Grand Canyon poems edited with Rick Kempa, which was nominated for a Colorado Book Award; and First Church of the Higher Elevations (Conundrum Press, 2015), a collection of essays on wildness, mountain places, and the life of the spirit. Peter was the Bennett Fellow Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy for the 2015-16 school year. He teaches writing at Adams State University in Alamosa, Colorado and lives with his family on the western slope of the Sangre de Cristo Range. Peter Anderson recently retired from twenty years of teaching, the last ten of which were at Adams State University. Currently he is a full time word wrangler on the western edge of the Sangre de Cristos in the San Luis Valley.