Gratitude Awards
We are not a big organization with a lot of money. Actually, we’re lucky to have any money at all! Yet the well seems to fill up and a few years back we wanted to give some of it away. We decided to offer a Gratitude Award of $500 to both an individual and an organization who we feel are deserving of some appreciation. No one can apply for it, the award is at the discretion of the board.
2023
Dale Harris
Axle Contemporary Gallery (Jerry Wellman & Matthew Chase-Daniel)
Dale Harris
Axle Contemporary Gallery (Jerry Wellman & Matthew Chase-Daniel)
These New Mexicans are recognized for their relentless generosity to our community of poetry, and adding to the general New Mexico poetic joie de vivre!
2022
Tom Leech
These New Mexicans are recognized for their relentless generosity to our community of poetry, and adding to the general New Mexico poetic joie de vivre!
2021
Art Goodtimes
V.B. Price
Art Goodtime's involvement and support of poetry as a poet and editor reaches beyond the borders of Colorado, and his work has influenced and included many from the New Mexico poetry community. Art was poetry editor for Earth First! Journal and Mountain Gazette before getting elected to five terms as a Green County commissioner in Southwestern Colorado. Art hosts the Union of Mountain Poets on Facebook, co-edits the online Tanthology SageGreenJournal.org and is national poetry editor for Fungi magazine. He is co-director of Talking Gourds, a Telluride Institute poetry program. He served as Colorado’s Western Slope Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2013 and in 2020 was awarded the Chamberlain Award for lifetime achievement in Colorado poetry at the Mountain Words Literary Festival in Crested Butte.
His poetry books include As If the World Really Mattered (La Alameda Press, Albuquerque, 2007) and Looking South to Lone Cone (Western Eye Press, Sedona, 2013). He was co-editor of the anthology MycoEpithalamia: Mushroom Wedding Poems (Fungi Press, CA, 2016). Turn Star Press of Telluride brought out a limited edition chapbook in 2019 that he co-authored called Telluride Valley Floor. Art’s latest book is due out this fall from Lithic Press of Fruita (CO) called Dancing on Edge: The McRedeye Poems.
His poetry books include As If the World Really Mattered (La Alameda Press, Albuquerque, 2007) and Looking South to Lone Cone (Western Eye Press, Sedona, 2013). He was co-editor of the anthology MycoEpithalamia: Mushroom Wedding Poems (Fungi Press, CA, 2016). Turn Star Press of Telluride brought out a limited edition chapbook in 2019 that he co-authored called Telluride Valley Floor. Art’s latest book is due out this fall from Lithic Press of Fruita (CO) called Dancing on Edge: The McRedeye Poems.
V.B. (Barrett) Price is a passionate and prolific poet, writer and activist. Since 1971, he has published a column once a week, sometimes three times a week, in New Mexico Independent, Century, The Albuquerque Journal and the Albuquerque Tribune, as well as the on-line New Mexico Independent, the New Mexico Mercury and Mercury Messenger—nearly 3,000 essays, and counting.
Barrett is also a generous publisher and editor for other writers. In the 1980s, in Century Magazine and The New Mexico Mercury, he was instrumental in publishing more than 500 (mostly New Mexican) writers. In the 2000s, as editor of the Mary Burritt Christensen Poetry Series at UNM Press, he ushered twenty-eight books of poetry into print. As editor and friend he is generous and forthcoming; any writer who works with Barrett comes away with a better appreciation for what it is s/he does.
Barrett’s personal writing practice springs from a bountiful font. He has written a poem nearly every day since he began publishing in 1962. This November, a sequel to his selected poems 1966 to 2006 Broken and Reset will be published by Casa Urraca Press under the title Polishing the Mountain, Poems 2008 to 2020. Some of his other titles include Albuquerque: A City at the End of the World; The Orphaned Land: New Mexico’s Environment Since the Manhattan Project; Anasazi Architecture and American Design, edited with Baker Morrow; Chaco Body, with photographs by Kirk Giddings; Chaco Trilogy; the Seven Deadly Sins; Myth Waking: The Homeric Hymns, A Modern Sequel; Death Self, poems with paintings by Rini Price and Roma MMI, poems with photographs by Jan Schmitz.
To learn more about Barrett, please visit vbprice.com. You can also read his astute, urgent weekly reflections on politics, culture, human rights and the environment on-line in the Mercury Messenger.
Barrett is also a generous publisher and editor for other writers. In the 1980s, in Century Magazine and The New Mexico Mercury, he was instrumental in publishing more than 500 (mostly New Mexican) writers. In the 2000s, as editor of the Mary Burritt Christensen Poetry Series at UNM Press, he ushered twenty-eight books of poetry into print. As editor and friend he is generous and forthcoming; any writer who works with Barrett comes away with a better appreciation for what it is s/he does.
Barrett’s personal writing practice springs from a bountiful font. He has written a poem nearly every day since he began publishing in 1962. This November, a sequel to his selected poems 1966 to 2006 Broken and Reset will be published by Casa Urraca Press under the title Polishing the Mountain, Poems 2008 to 2020. Some of his other titles include Albuquerque: A City at the End of the World; The Orphaned Land: New Mexico’s Environment Since the Manhattan Project; Anasazi Architecture and American Design, edited with Baker Morrow; Chaco Body, with photographs by Kirk Giddings; Chaco Trilogy; the Seven Deadly Sins; Myth Waking: The Homeric Hymns, A Modern Sequel; Death Self, poems with paintings by Rini Price and Roma MMI, poems with photographs by Jan Schmitz.
To learn more about Barrett, please visit vbprice.com. You can also read his astute, urgent weekly reflections on politics, culture, human rights and the environment on-line in the Mercury Messenger.
2017
JB Bryan and Cirrelda Snider-Bryan
JB Bryan and Cirrelda Snider-Bryan
Jeff aka JB Bryan and Cirrelda Snider-Bryan were 2017 winners of the Poetry Gratitude Award, the ninth year of this award which is one of the gems of NMLA.
Oddly, JB was on the board at the time of its conception. Not until he retired from our board could we thank him, and also Cirrelda, for the endless and exhaustive gifts they gave to poetry in the southwest, both in the form of La Alameda Press and their personal showing up and giving their all. We like to honor an individual and an organization, and they are both. JB did the La Alameda editing and book design, and Cirrelda was right there keeping the press vital and vivid, shipping, reading manuscripts, and she helped me with issues of translation for my book Sofia. Each book a gift of beauty in its design. I have them lined up on the shelf in my home. The covers alone reflect the aesthetic that we miss as JB has gone on to other venues, less type face and more constructed. I love these two, and it was love at first sight when their child CB was an infant and we all had Greek food in Albuquerque. The whole board delighted that we could honor this couple in this way, the only good thing about JB retiring from the board from my perspective. Not that we aren't happy for him and grateful for hie decades of service. Nobody says to a small press person, "Thank you for your service" but we should. And with this Gratitude Award we do. ~ Joan Logghe, Vice Pres-NMLA |
2016
Tony Hoagland (1953 - 2018)
Tony Hoagland's fifth and most recent book of poems, Application for Release from the Dream, was published by Graywolf Press in 2015. His next collection, Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God, is scheduled for publication in 2018. His collaboration with Martin Shaw of translations from Anglo Saxon and Celtic literature, titled Rough Gods, will be published in 2018. He has published two collections of essays about poetry. He has received the James Laughlin Award, Mark Twain Award from the Poetry Foundation, the Jackson Poetry Prize, and the O.B. Hardisson Prize for teaching. He teaches at the University of Houston and elsewhere, and lives whenever he can in Santa Fe with his partner, the writer Kathleen Lee.
2015
Alvaro Cardona-Hine (1926 - 2016)
Teatro Paraguas
Alvaro Cardona-Hine (1926 - 2016)
Teatro Paraguas
2014
Miriam Sagan
Collected Works Bookstore (Mary Wolfe & Dorothy Massey)
Miriam Sagan
Collected Works Bookstore (Mary Wolfe & Dorothy Massey)
Miriam Sagan has been a generous soul since she moved here in the mid 1980's. I first met her at Burnt Horses Bookstore in 1985. She was there with haiku poet Elizabeth Lamb. That she befriended Elizabeth and went on to edit a collection of Elizabeth's haiku posthumously is just one example of how Miriam moves through the poetry world. It is with a spirit of joy and generosity that she has taught, created a vibrant creative writing certificate program at Santa Fe Community College, The Santa Fe Literary Review, and nudges so many students into a life in writing.
She has personally inspired me over and over, her Santa Fe Poetry Broadside with the late Miriam Bobkoff, her blog Miram's Well, poetry posts at SFCC, collaborations with photographers, ceramic artists, sculptors, and with Renée Gregorio and myself to create Tres Chicas Books. She weathered the early death of her husband, Robert Winson, who was himself a force for community in music and poetry, the editor of FishDrum magazine.
There is movement in her work, literally writing at the Everglades, Painted Desert, and seven places in America. She recently wrote in Miami at the Betsy Hotel, and her poems were molded into the sand for a bit. She is a mover and shaker. To all of these ends, we gladly honor Miriam as the 2014 Poetry Gratitude Award individual poet. May her generosity be contagious in our poets
She has personally inspired me over and over, her Santa Fe Poetry Broadside with the late Miriam Bobkoff, her blog Miram's Well, poetry posts at SFCC, collaborations with photographers, ceramic artists, sculptors, and with Renée Gregorio and myself to create Tres Chicas Books. She weathered the early death of her husband, Robert Winson, who was himself a force for community in music and poetry, the editor of FishDrum magazine.
There is movement in her work, literally writing at the Everglades, Painted Desert, and seven places in America. She recently wrote in Miami at the Betsy Hotel, and her poems were molded into the sand for a bit. She is a mover and shaker. To all of these ends, we gladly honor Miriam as the 2014 Poetry Gratitude Award individual poet. May her generosity be contagious in our poets
2013
Larry Goodell
Mitch Rayes, The Projects
Larry Goodell was born in 1935 in Roswell, New Mexico, where crossing cattle trails meet the Pecos River. He is married to Lenore Goodell, photographer & phenologist, and has lived in Placitas since 1963, extending poetry into its ceremonial roots – performance, masks, costume, lighting, song, scene, with cloth or painted backings to poems when appropriate. Although tagged as a performance poet since the early 60's he loves the printed page and founded Duende Press in ‘64. His writing comes from the myth of local inspiration, and often generates from organic gardening and love for New Mexico. He is a risk-taker in language who avoids revision considering the hand written original as precedent. His work is often satirical and seriously funny. Books: Cycles, 1966 (duende press), Firecracker Soup, 1990 (Cinco Puntos Press), Here on Earth, 1996 (La Alameda Press). Larry has also been an integral force behind the Duende Poetry Series at the Anasazi Fields Winery in Placitas. His online work is on the move, see http://about.me/larrygoodell for interviews, articles, numerous poems, plays, songs and blogs.
Mitch Rayes was born in Detroit. For years he worked as a professional outfitter in the jungles of Chiapas. During the ‘90s he was influential in the developing Albuquerque poetry scene as founder of the poetry non-profit Flaming Tongues, as publisher of the Tongue newsletter, and as producer of several Albuquerque Poetry Festivals. His warehouse performance space THE PROJECTS was closed in June after hosting more than a hundred events, including four seasons of the Local Poets Guild’s weekly poetry reading “East of Edith.” Mitch has been called "the godfather" of the Albuquerque poetry scene (Danny Solis), one of the "two best poets in New Mexico" (Mark Weber), and the best poet in New Mexico without a book (Richard Oyama).
www.mitchrayes.com
www.mitchrayes.com
2012
James McGrath
SOMOS
James McGrath
SOMOS
2011
Stan Noyes (1924 - 2014)
Kenn Rodriguez, ABQ Unidos Youth Slam Team
Stan Noyes (1924 - 2014)
Kenn Rodriguez, ABQ Unidos Youth Slam Team
2010
Lisa Gill
Sin Fronteras
Lisa Gill
Sin Fronteras
Sin Fronteras/Writers without Borders, founded in the 1990's by Michael Mandel and Joe Somoza, is an organization of poets and writers in Las Cruces, NM that fosters and supports poets in the Rio Grande Valley with an ongoing reading/open mic series at Palacio's in Mesilla. They published poetry collections for a number of Las Cruces area poets, included Joe Somoza and Michelle Holland. They also published a yearly poetry journal, Sin Fronteras/ Writers without Borders Journal, for over twenty years.
2009
Mary McGinnis
Anne MacNaughton
Peter Rabbit (1936 - 2012)
Mary McGinnis
Anne MacNaughton
Peter Rabbit (1936 - 2012)
Anne MacNaughton originated 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.
Peter Rabbit was a mover and shaker in Taos Poetry, producing and initiating many events. His home was a hangout for poets obscure and renowned.
Mary Mcginnis is the godmother of poetry groups in Santa Fe and the force behind the annual International Women's day poetry reading.
Peter Rabbit was a mover and shaker in Taos Poetry, producing and initiating many events. His home was a hangout for poets obscure and renowned.
Mary Mcginnis is the godmother of poetry groups in Santa Fe and the force behind the annual International Women's day poetry reading.