Past Poet Laureates of Santa Fe
Elizabeth Jacobson
Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2021, Elizabeth Jacobson has worked continuously in the Santa Fe community as an educator of poetry and writing since she moved to Santa Fe in 1989. Her first position was as an adjunct in the English Department at the Santa Fe Community College, where she taught poetry and fiction workshops, Technical Writing, and Freshman Composition. Marriage and the birth of two children seventeen months apart prompted her to find ways to teach with a more flexible schedule. Thus she continued her work in the community at CCA's Warehouse 21, the Youth Development Program for incarcerated teens, and with ArtWorks, where for many years, she taught in public elementary schools as a teaching artist. In 2013 she founded the WingSpan Poetry Project. The project was implemented at the Esperanza Shelter for Battered Families.
Additionally, WingSpan teachers, of which there are now five, have taught city-wide in other shelters, including Youth Shelters, the Esperanza Support Center, the St. Elizabeth's Men's Shelter, and the St. Elizabeth's emergency shelter for women and families, Casa Familia. Weekly classes at both these St. Elizabeth facilities are ongoing. WingSpan has received four grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry and a Community Partnership Award from Esperanza.
Elizabeth Jacobson's second 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). Jacobson is also the author of Her Knees Pulled In (Tres Chicas Books) and two chapbooks, A Brown Stone and Are the Children Make Believe?, both from Dancing Girl Press. Her work has appeared in numerous literary publications, including the American Poetry Review, Hinchas de Poesia, On The Seawall, Orion Magazine, Ploughshares, Plume, Poet Lore, The American Journal of Poetry, Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art, Vox Populi, Women's Studies, Zocalo Public Square and others. Elizabeth is the Reviews Editor for Terrain.org., and she has a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University.
Jon Davis
Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014, Jon Davis is the author of three chapbooks and three full-length collections of poetry, Preliminary Report (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), Scrimmage of Appetite (University of Akron Press, 1995), for which he was honored with a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry, and Dangerous Amusements (Ontario Review Press, 1987), for which he received a G.E. Younger Writers Award and the Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the Academy of American Poets. He has also received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Lannan Residency, and a fellowship to The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Photographers, Writers, and the American Scene; Poet's Choice; Sixty Years of American Poetry; The Best of the Prose Poem; and Telling Stories: A Writer's Anthology, and in literary journals such as The Georgia Review, Manoa, Hambone, American Letters & Commentary, Iowa Review, Narrative, and Poetry. His poems have also been translated into Arabic and Vietnamese. About his poems, June Owens, writing in Manoa, had this to say: "Davis's poems so deeply probe the human condition that we find ourselves lost in new, perplexing, and unidentifiable territories, where our minds and our preconceived ideas about loss and remembrance, pain and epiphany are completely changed."
In addition to poetry, he has written and published short stories, reviews, essays, and parodies. He has also written or co-written scripts for short films that have screened at the National Geographic All Roads Film Festival, the National Museum of the American Indian Film & Video Festival, The American Indian Film Festival, and on Movieola: The Short Film Channel in Canada. For four years, he taught screenwriting for the ABC/Disney Summer Film & Television Workshops. He has also served as Writing Program Coordinator for the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, edited the literary journals CutBank, Shankpainter, and Countermeasures: A Magazine of Poetry & Ideas, and taught at College of Santa Fe, Santa Fe University of Art & Design, and Salisbury University (Maryland). He is currently Chair of the Creative Writing Department at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where he has taught since 1990.
Joan Logghe
Joan Logghe was the third poet to hold the position of Santa Fe Poet Laureate. Her tenure began in 2010 and concluded in June 2012.
True to her vision of poetry in the community, Logghe's term was marked by community performances, presentations, and workshops too numerous to count. With Jeremy Bleich, she traveled to schools throughout Santa Fe, presenting her "Joan and the Giant Pencil" education series. Logghe's Valentine's Day "Drive-By-Love-In" brought joy, friendship, and of course, poetry to Santa Fe's senior citizens. Her blog kept the community updated on her many comings and goings as Poet Laureate. "Odes and Offerings" was the culmination of her term, bringing together visual artists, poets, and the community for an engaging exhibit and dynamic program series in the Community Gallery.
Joan Logghe works at poetry in community, off the academic grid in La Puebla, New Mexico, where she and her husband, Michael, raised three children and built three houses. She studied at Tufts University, where she graduated as Class Poet. Logghe began a life in poetry by volunteering at her children's school thirty years ago.
Awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry Grants, a Mabel Dodge Luhan Internship, and a Barbara Deming/Money for Women grant. Logghe teaching life has included Ghost Ranch Abiquiu, University of New Mexico-Los Alamos, Santa Fe Community College, Artworks, Santa Fe Girls' School, and Santa Clara Pueblo Day School. She taught poetry in Bratislava, Vienna, and Zagreb, Croatia, in 2004.
Her books include What Makes a Woman Beautiful, Twenty Years in Bed with the Same Man (a finalist in Western States Book Award), Sofia, and Rice. Her latest publication is The Singing Bowl from the University of New Mexico Press, and Greatest Hits: Love & Death, a triptych of selected poems from Joan, Renée Gregorio, and Miriam Sagan, the three founders of Tres Chicas Books.
Valerie Martinez
Valerie Martinez served as the City's second Poet Laureate from 2008 through 2010. During her term, she presented and participated in over 30 public readings, workshops, and events.
"Lines & Circles: A Celebration of Santa Fe Families" brought together three generations of eleven Santa Fe families to envision and create a unique family work of art. The works reflected the family name, history, or simply the intergenerational collaboration that happened during the project. Each work was accompanied by an original poem authored by the family, Poet Laureate with the family, or the Poet Laureate on the family's behalf. The finished pieces were presented in an exhibit entitled "Lines & Circles: A Celebration of Santa Fe Families" in January 2010.
The goal of the "Lines and Circles" project was to nurture and celebrate the Santa Fe community, encourage positive relationships within and between families, nurture meaningful community dialogue, and generate a body of art and poetry that commemorates city life. The "Lines and Circles" families included the Akers Hunt Covelli, Carmona, Goler Baca, Ingram, Jones Brown, Martínez Ridgley, Quintana Gallegos, Ortiz Dinkel Hasted, Salazar, Shapiro Bachman, and Strongheart families.
Martínez is a poet, educator, playwright, librettist, and collaborative artist. She is the author of six books of poetry, including Absence, Luminescent, World to World, and Each and Her (winner of the Arizona Book Award, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and Pulitzer Prize). Martinez has more than twenty years of experience as a teacher, primarily at the college level. For over ten years, she has also worked with children, young adults, adults, seniors, and teachers in a wide range of community outreach and educational programs. Martinez is Executive Director and Core Artist with Littleglobe, an artist-run non-profit that collaborates with communities to create significant works of art, installation, and performance.
Arthur Sze
Arthur Sze was the first Poet Laureate for the City of Santa Fe. Arthur Sze is a second-generation Chinese American who was born in New York City in 1950. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Berkeley and is the author of eight books of poetry: Quipu (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese (Copper Canyon, 2001), The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998 (Copper Canyon, 1998), Archipelago (Copper Canyon, 1995), RiverRiver (Lost Roads, 1987), Dazzled (Floating Island, 1982), Two Ravens (1976; revised edition, Tooth of Time, 1984), The Willow Wind (1972; revised edition, Tooth of Time, 1981). His poems have appeared internationally in such magazines and anthologies as The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Field, Harvard Magazine, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Kyoto Journal, Manoa, Mother Jones, New Letters, Orion, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Today (Hong Kong), Unitas (Taipei), Virginia Quarterly Review, The Best American Poetry, The Gift of Tongues, Photographers, Writers, and the American Scene: Visions of Passage, Poets of the New Century, Pushcart Prize XXI, and Verse and Universe.
His poems have been translated into Chinese, Italian, Romanian, and Turkish. He was the 2004-2005 Elizabeth Kirkpatrick Doenges Visiting Artist at Mary Baldwin College, a 2005 Visiting Hurst Professor at Washington University, and has conducted residencies at Brown University, Bard College, Naropa University, and the Vermont Studio Center. He is the recipient of a Western States Book Award for Translation (2002), a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award (1998-2000), an Asian American Literary Award (1999), a Balcones Poetry Prize (1999), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1997), an American Book Award (1996), a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry (1995), four Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry grants (1980, 1983, 1994, 1997), two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships (1982, 1993), a George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship, Brown University (1991), a New Mexico Arts Division Interdisciplinary Grant (1988), and the Eisner Prize, University of California at Berkeley (1971). He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.