“All people of Santa Fe are hereby declared to be poets,” announced Santa Fe Mayor Alan Webber in a National Poetry Month proclamation signed this month at City Hall.

While Poetry Month began nationally in 1996, this is the first time Mayor Webber made a poetry proclamation for the City of Santa Fe. Mayor Webber explained the 2025 idea came from Santa Fe’s seventh Poet Laureate, Tommy Archuleta, and Arts & Culture Director, Chelsey Johnson.

Mayor Webber says, “We’ve always been a city of poets, never more than today. For the month of April, everyone in Santa Fe is a poet, so if you feel like writing, show it!”

The City of Santa Fe libraries have joined in on the fun as well with a series of poetry focused workshops held throughout the month. Award-winning writers and renown poets including Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, Tommy Archuleta, and Renata Golden will be teaching attendees the art of writing and analyzing poetry.

Margaret M. Neill, Library Division Director, calls it a great month for creativity. “Santa Fe Public Library is celebrating the art and beauty of poetry all through the month of April. We’re excited to present programs in partnership with talented poets and writers such as Wellington, Archuleta, and Golden.”

The free workshops will be held throughout April at La Farge, Main, and the Southside libraries. Registration is online at Library Poetry Workshops.

The City of Santa Fe Arts and Culture Department features a Poet Laureate program that honors a Santa Fe poet. The Poet Laureate is an ambassador of the art form, literature, literacy, and storytelling and works to inspire the next generation of poets and their readers.

“I'm thrilled for National Poetry Month to officially take root and flourish in Santa Fe, a city of poets whether they identify as such or not (yet),” says Chelsey Johnson, Director of Arts & Culture. “Poetry is one of our oldest forms of storytelling, creative expression, and culture-bearing, and we are naturally drawn to its rhythms, images, and intensity of sensory experience and emotion. Poetry really is for everyone. We turn to it for healing, for connection, for expansiveness, to light up new parts of our brains, to express the inexpressible, and to find that we are not so alone in our deepest feelings.”

The Academy of American Poets established National Poetry Month to highlight the extraordinary legacy and ongoing achievement of poets. It is now the largest literary celebration in the world.