Inaugural Lifetime Poetry Award to John Brandi

2024 Lifetime Poetry Award: John Brandi


NMLA has extended our award circle to include the inaugural 2024 Lifetime Poetry award, which comes with recognition for a poetry life well-lived and small $500.00 token of our appreciation!!  And our first recipient is John Brandi.  Joan Logghe, one of the founding members of NMLA, and our current president offers these words to accompany the award:


I came across A New Mexican article from 1981 of John Brandi with children writing poems that are observations of the world around them.     He was part of the poets-in-the school program funded by New Mexico Arts, which lasted for many years when there was more government support for the arts in New Mexico.


I started thinking about John Brandi, and the first time I ever went to a reading at a Zen Center house in Santa Fe.  I bought a book of poems from Joaquin Brandi, age 9, for 50 cents. I still have it.  And John Brandi still has his wide and deep life in poetry.  It occurred to me we should celebrate a person who has been a poet all his life, who created the word and paintings of travel and the ordinary observed. He won a National Endowment just about when we met, and the word was that John didn’t have a day job, his poetry was his work and he led a poet’s life of travel, painting, and the outdoors. From Tooth of Time, his poetry press, to long visits to the Four Corners  tribes, to the archives at Berkeley, to last week reading in Santa Fe,  his has been a lifetime of words where his day job was his life job.


After the first reading I did on KUNM radio, he called to say how good it was to hear about family in poetry.


The world of New Mexico poetry and poets is a community, and John Brandi has been an integral and contributing member of that community all his life.  New Mexico Literary Arts is pleased to award John Brandi its inaugural LIFETIME POETRY AWARD, given at the discretion and joy of the board.