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PoetrySnaps!

PoetrySnaps!

  • Courtesy
    /
    Austin Davis
    Austin Davis learned to channel his emotions through poetry writing and performance from a young age. He often writes through the lens of his work as an activist for people experiencing homelessness. With the holidays upon us — a time of reflection and gratitude — Davis celebrates some of the people he has known and loved in his poem, "we call it grief."
  • Gilbert-based poet Karen Rigby
    Photo by Marie Feutrier
    Gilbert-based poet Karen Rigby says the inspiration for her poem, "Tangelo," came from her childhood memory of seeing a disturbing magazine cover photo depicting political violence. Rigby’s poem weaves together that trauma with vivid sensory beauty, creating a fragile balance of human experiences.
  • In the latest installment of KNAU's series PoetrySnaps!, Pam Davenport shares with us her poem As She Shows Me My Heart. She wrote it after undergoing an echocardiogram, and it’s a reminder to all of us to count our blessings; big or small, obvious or subtle, mundane or dramatic.
  • In the latest installment of KNAU's series PoetrySnaps!, we meet Lauren Camp, the current Poet Laureate of New Mexico. She didn’t know she was a poet until someone attending one of her visual art shows many years ago told her she was based on the blurbs she wrote for her pieces. It was a revelation that changed her life.
  • Remember when you were on the verge of adulthood and all you wanted was to get a job and an apartment and start your life? Remember when you finally got there and were hit with the surprising realization that youth is actually fleeting, and adulthood is a very long journey full of responsibility and repetition? Poet Hunter Hazelton does.
  • Flagstaff-based writer Andie Francis is the featured writer in the latest installment of KNAU's series PoetrySnaps! In her poem When My Head Hangs Too Low, Francis weaves together landscape, grief, and love for a brother she hadn’t seen in many years. It’s set at Gates Pass in the Tucson Mountains. If you’ve ever been there, you know it’s a truly sublime place to watch the sunset.
  • In the latest installment of KNAU's series PoetrySnaps!, southern Arizona-based poet Shawnte Orion brings us a little dark humor with his poem Cul-De-Sacrifice. It’s an updated version of something he wrote years earlier about a neighbor’s missing cat. The neighbor long-suspected foul play at the hands of her then-boyfriend. It was only through a chance encounter years later that she learned the truth. Shawnte Orion calls it a classic story about life in the desert.
  • In the latest installment of KNAU's series PoetrySnaps!, we meet Sean Avery Medlin, a writer and educator based in southern Arizona. Since their teen years, Medlin has used writing as a form of self-expression and a way to make sense of the world around them. Medlin’s work is a fluid mixture of poetry, raps and musicality, and they are always blurring the lines and mixing things up.
  • In the latest installment of KNAU's series PoetrySnaps!, we meet poet and environmental educator David Martin. He believes poetry is “artful communication and connectivity” to each other, ourselves, and the natural world. Today, he shares an excerpt of his poem The Ground Nest.
  • Colorado River guides who are in relationships with other Colorado River guides are sometimes on the water at the same time, but on different trips. It’s a unique, romantic kind of adventure being simultaneously separated and connected by the same body of water. Page-based poet Holly Sullivan captures the experience beautifully in her poem To You. Sullivan spent years as a boat swamper in the Grand Canyon and today shares her take on river love.
  • In the latest installment of KNAU's series PoetrySnaps! we meet Rosemarie Dombrowski. She is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Phoenix and a full-time caregiver to her adult son with non-verbal autism. Dombroski's mission is to bring poetry to vulnerable populations as a means of healing.
  • In the latest segment of KNAU's series PoetrySnaps!, we meet Kinsale Drake. She grew up in two very different places: Los Angeles, California, and Navajo Mountain where her maternal grandmother lived. Drake knits them together in her poem Put on that KTNN.