poetry

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.

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.

We’re almost at the finish line of one of the snowiest winters in quite a while for the Colorado Plateau. And writer Jodie Hollander has a poem for us to mark the transition from winter to spring. It's the latest installment of KNAU's series PoetrySnaps!

Writer Wendy Videlock describes poetic inspiration as being ambushed. An idea emerges and then tells her where to go. In her poem, Deconstruction, Videlock, uses an array of bird species to symbolize the infinite experience of being human.

In this week's segment of KNAU's series PoetrySnaps! we hear from David M. Parsons, a prolific writer and former Texas Poet Laureate. When he is struck by inspiration, he writes ideas down on small pieces of paper which he later develops into poems. That’s how Parsons’ poem, I Would Give You the Single Strawberry, came to life.

This week's installment of KNAU's series PoetrySnaps! features Colorado-based poet Claudia Putnam reading her poem Baba Yaga. In it, Putnam twists the idea of the forest witch, concentrating not on scary mythology, but on independence and connection with nature.

In the first segment of KNAU's new series PoetrySnaps!, we hear from Colorado-based poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. Her poem Big explores a post-pandemic world where lost time and pent-up energy take center stage.

The park’s latest Astronomer-in-Residence is poet Lauren Camp, a recipient of the American Fiction Award for Poetry. She spoke with KNAU’s Bree Burkitt about her first starry night on the job and finding inspiration in the dark.