SOMOS – 2019

TAOS ENVIRONMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL A SOMOS BENEFIT

CELEBRATING EARTH DAY APRIL 22 at 7pm

108 Civic Plaza Drive, Taos NM 87571 575-758-0081

Will Barnes

Will Barnes was raised in Colorado and has lived in New Mexico for 24 years. He is an ecologist and botanist, and teaches middle school language arts and science in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 1998 and 1999, he was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize while studying for his masters in biology at the University of New Mexico. He has recent poems in the CutBank Review and has just completed his first manuscript of poems. He lives in Santa Fe with his wife and three children and is thrilled to contribute to the Taos Journal of Poetry and Art. The Ledgerbook, with author Will Barnes’ poetry, found diary entries, and photographs, encourages a lyric exploration of landscape, memory, and identity in the American West. Drawing from the indigenous traditions of record keeping on the western plains—winter count, ledger art, diary making, letter writing, scientific description and journalism—The Ledgerbook takes the motif of writing over and on top of the stories and texts that make up the history of the American West to write its own story of identity and the experience of dissolution. These poems are lyric, ambitious, and multi-faceted. Using collage and erasure, The Ledgerbook then surely creates polyphony of voices through which a personal reconciliation of the beauty and violence of the West might take place. Underneath all of it, always, is the land itself.

Olivia Romos

Olivia Romos is a farmer, poet and water rights activist from Taos, New Mexico. She earned her dual Bachelor’s degrees in English and Chicana/o Studies from the University of New Mexico in 2015. Currently, she is the Communications and Outreach Coordinator at the New Mexico Acequia Association, a grassroots, statewide organization that defends water rights and cultivates an inter-generational movement to protect water resources and educate people about the various aspects of acequia systems. Olivia is also a recognized spoken word artist. In 2011, she was titled the New Mexico State Slam Poetry Champion. Olivia is a bilingual poet whose language is immersed in the regional Manito dialect and culture of Northern New Mexico. Olivia intentionally focuses her activism and poetry to educate and mobilize New Mexicans around the risks and uncertainties of their natural resources. She was featured in the Western Folklife Center’s poem-film Series.

Anne MacNaughton

Anne MacNaughton originated the Taos High School’s award-winning Poetry Slam Team –the first one in the nation specifically for teenagers– and established the very first State Championship Poetry Slam for secondary students. She continues to work with youth through workshops and mentorships.
Along with the poet Peter Rabbit and eight others, she co-founded S.O.M.O.S., the Taos Poetry Circus and the Poetry Education Project, later creating the spin off non-profits Minor Heron and The World Poetry Bout Association. She still produces poetry shows through Lucid Performance, a company she started with Rabbit. https://www.lucidperformance.com/ Anne MacNaughton holds a B.A. in history and government from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.A. in English from the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque.

Her work has been published in many journals and anthologies, including The Best Poetry of 1989 (Scribners 1990), Robert Bly’s The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart (HarperCollins 1992), and In Company: an Anthology of New Mexico Poets after 1960 (UNM Press 2004). The New Mexico Poetry Renaissance (Red Crane, 1994), The Ecstatic Moment: The Best of Libido (Dell 1997), Written with a Spoon (Sherman Asher); Thus Spake the Corpse: (Black Sparrow 2000); XY Files (Sherman Asher, 2001), Written with a Spoon (Sherman Asher, 1995)

and The Hell with Love Poems to Mend a Broken Heart (Time-Warner, 2002) among others.
Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, small magazines and periodicals including several volumes of Adobe Walls, Blue Mesa Review, Exquisite Corpse, The Taos Review, Libido, Crosswinds, Ant Farm,

Esprit, la Ventana, ARTlines, Taos Magazine, Seen From Space, Alma, Wordworks, The Taos News, Albuquerque Poetry Festival Anthology, 51% Magazine, Desnudas del desierto, Venus Envy, Howl, and others.

VISUAL ART

Although MacNaughton considers herself primarily self-taught, as a child she was able to study briefly under Lowell Collins on scholarship to what is now the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and in her youth she took classes now and then in various university art programs. She has participated in several group shows in Taos and her illustrations have been printed in publications from Baton Rouge to Taos. She has won several awards, including placing at Taos County Fairs in the 1980s and an honorable mention from the Museum of Fine Arts as a teenager.

Alexandra Grajeda