ONLINE! Santa Fe's Poets Laureate Celebrate National Poetry Month

The City of Santa Fe Arts Commission's Poet Laureate program was established in 2005. The Poet Laureate is an honorary position that is both ceremonial and educational, with the goal of promoting the presence of poetry in the city and the power of poetry and the spoken word while celebrating the spirit of the people and special qualities of the city. 

Elizabeth Jacobson currently serves as the city’s fifth Poet Laureate, and will serve through June 2021. Elizabeth’s second book, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch, and was published in January 2019, by Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press. Her other books include two chapbooks, A Brown Stone and Are the Children Make Believe? both from Dancing Girl Press and a full-length collection, Her Knees Pulled In, from Tres Chicas Books. She is the founding director of the WingSpan Poetry Project, a not-for-profit that conducts weekly poetry classes in battered family and homeless shelters in New Mexico.

Arthur Sze was the first Poet Laureate for the City of Santa Fe. Born in New York City in 1950, Arthur Sze is a poet, translator, and editor. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including Sight Lines (2019), which received the 2019 National Book Award in poetry; Compass Rose; and The Ginkgo Light. He is also a celebrated translator from the Chinese, and released The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese in 2001. His poems have been translated into Chinese, Italian, Romanian, and Turkish.

Valerie Martinez served as the City’s second Poet Laureate, from 2008 through 2010. Valerie Martínez is an arts administrator, educator, program director, facilitator, poet, and collaborative artist. After a 23 year career in college/university teaching, Valerie spent over 10 years directing large-scale community arts projects as Executive Director of Littleglobe and Founding Director of Artful Life. She is currently the History and Literary Arts Program Director at the National Hispanic Cultural Center.  She also continues to write and publish as a professional poet.

Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014, Jon Davis is the author of five chapbooks and six full-length collections of poetry, Preliminary Report, Scrimmage of Appetite, for which he was honored with a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry, and Dangerous Amusements, 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 also co-translated Dayplaces from the Arabic with author Naseer Hassan.