Hello, Hola, Ya'át'ééh.
Meet Our Writers
Author Biographies from FLAME
Kirbie Bennett
Kirbie Bennett is an essayist, poet and audio producer. His work has appeared in various publications, including The Durango Telegraph, High Country News, Chapter House Journal, KSUT Public Radio and Four Corners Voices: Stories, Poetry, Essays, Volumes 1 and 2. He is also part of the creative team behind The Magic Southwest, a regional history podcast. A recipient of the 2026 Saad Prize in Diné Poetics, Kirbie was born and raised in the Navajo Nation, and Durango, Colorado, is another place he calls home.
Daiva Chesonis
Daiva Chesonis was born in Baltimore, Maryland, but now lives off-grid in southwest Colorado. She has a B.A. in Russian Studies and an M.A. in Diplomacy & International Conflict Resolution. So, naturally she moved to Telluride in 1992 as part of the team that built the Gondola transportation system. She was a snowboard instructor, Art Director at Telluride Magazine, and a traveling minstrel for Mountainfilm on Tour before becoming co-owner of Between the Covers Bookstore, where she co-founded the Telluride Literary Arts Festival.
From 2019-21 she was San Miguel County Poet Laureate. In the fall of 2025, she and her husband Craig Childs were Writers in Residence for a month at the Hemingway House in Ketchum, Idaho. Her poems—in translation or written in her first language—appeared in the 2025 and 2026 Anthologies of Lithuanian American Poetry. Although she considers herself a performance poet, her first book of poetry is set to publish sometime this century.
Peggy Cloy
Peggy was born and raised in Midland, Michigan. After graduation from the University of Michigan, she became head of the Art Department at a junior college in Ann Arbor. She showed her painting extensively, having shows that included Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. She and her husband also adopted two children, 5 and 6. She later moved to Seattle, Washington, and built a successful career in painting and sculpture.
In 1992, she purchased 60 acres in Colorado. Woods, streams, forests and a large lake, full of largemouth bass and a view of Mesa Verde National Park. Peggy named it Willowtail Springs. Cabins were available for Peggy and other artists, plus vacation guests. There was a studio for artists, group retreats and workshops, plus presentations for the surrounding communities.
In 2000, Peggy married Lee Cloy, an expert in property and building management, a Tai Chi Practitioner and a true visionary and problem-solver. Stewardship of the land, water, and wildlife increased.
In 2012, they became a nonprofit, providing residencies in the arts. Willowtail Springs Nature Preserve and Education Center offered up to 20 weeks of fully-funded residencies each year, until early 2025 when it was sold. Peggy and Lee now live in Mancos.
Tina Deschenie
Tina Deschenie is Ta’neeszahnii, born for Tó’aheedlíini. Her cheii are the Tewa from First Mesa in Arizona and her nálí are Bit’ahnii. Her maternal family home is in Crystal, NM, where she was raised. She is married to Michael Thompson, Mvskoke Creek, a retired educator. They have four grown children and several grandchildren. She holds a BA from Fort Lewis College, MA from UNM and an EdD from NMSU.
She worked in Indian Education for nearly 30 years in numerous schools and at the Department of Diné Education. Deschenie was the first Diné woman provost at Navajo Technical University, and the first Native editor of Tribal College Journal.
She is a lifelong advocate of Native writers, hosting readings in schools and promoting their works wherever possible. She has written poetry since high school, publishing her first work in 1973 in Northfield Mount Hermon School’s Mandala Arts Magazine. Her writing is included in The Diné Reader (2021), WET: An Anthology of Water Poems and Prose (2021), Satchel Story Objects (2022), Transforming Diné Education, Innovations in Pedagogy and Practice (2022), and FERTILE: An Anthology of Earth Poems and Prose (2023), as well as numerous journals and other publications.
Dante Downey
Dante Downey is a multidisciplinary artist living in Montezuma County, Colorado. Working across writing, photography, film, painting, and music, his practice explores the intersections of image, memory, and observation. Often carrying a small journal or camera, he documents the overlooked moments of everyday life, drawing from personal, environmental, and emotional landscapes.
Dante is a member of the inaugural Patio Poets cohort with the ZU Arts Initiative as of 2026. His work has also been featured in Satchel and published in the anthologies WET (Sharehouse Press, 2021) and FERTILE (Four Corners Press, 2023). His poetry and prose navigate themes of self-destruction, addiction, memory, grief, and introspection, with moments of tenderness and hope woven throughout.
Sharon K. Englehart
Sharon strives to be a good steward of the planet through curiosity, creativity and exploration. Her writing on everyday subjects is a reflection of this process. Professionally, she was an Art and English secondary school teacher for 32 years. She was also a certified Vinyasa yoga instructor for seven years. Since retiring in 2014, she has focused on creating images, reading and listening to books, writing “On the Nature Of…” essays and exploring the backcountry of the Four Corners region and the National Parks of the Western United States.
https://substack.com/@sharonkenglehart
David Feela
David Feela has published three books of poetry: Thought Experiments (The Maverick Press, 1998), The Home Atlas (WordTech Editions, 2009), and Little Acres (Unsolicited Press, 2018). His earlier essay collection, How Delicate These Arches (Raven’s Eye Press, 2011), was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. His second book, Feelasophy: Selected Essays (Say Yes Quickly, 2025), is his newest collection. He lives in Cortez, Colorado. Explore his website at https://davidfeela.com
Art Goodtimes
Art Goodtimes is a fourth-generation San Franciscan with a granddaughter in Glen Park (Indigenous Ohlone homelands). Art ran with the Union of Street Poets in the Sixties, moved to the San Juan Mountains of Colorado (Nuche homelands) after they shot Harvey Milk, served five terms as San Miguel County commissioner, one term as Western Slope Poet Laureate, and serves as the Telluride Mushroom Festival Creative Director.
His books include As If the World Really Mattered (La Alameda Press, New Mexico, 2007); Looking South to Lone Cone: the Cloud Acre Poems (Western Eye Press, Arizona, 2013); and Dancing on Edge: The McRedeye Poems (Lithic Press, Colorado, 2019). He writes monthly poems for the Colorado Times Recorder and co-directs the Telluride Institute’s Talking Gourds poetry program.
Eirene Nakai Hamilton
Ta’neeszahnii nilį. Bit’ahnii yáshchíín. Tábaahá dabicheii. Naakaiidine’é dabinálí. Utah Diné Eirene Nakai Hamilton is a San Juan River valley resident. Retired from teaching, she now devotes time to writing, gardening, and artistic ventures.
While teaching in Arizona, Eirene became literate in her first language, Diné Bizaad. Many of her written works are bilingual pieces. Her short stories and poems have been published in University of Arizona Press’ SunTracks and Diné Reader (2021), Satchel Story Objects, WET An Anthology of Water Poems and Prose from the High Desert and Mountains of the Four Corners Region and FERTILE An Anthology of Earth Poems and Prose from the High Desert and Mountains of the Four Corners Region, in occasional periodicals, and online in the Canyon Echo. During the COVID pandemic, Eirene wrote a monthly article on gardening for a newsletter sent along in boxes of food shares.
An alumna of the Four Corners Poets and the Bisti Writing Project, Eirene enjoys giving writing workshops. She is a board member of Project 1100, a nonprofit that advocates for the robust survival of 1100 species of Utah native bees. In her home community, Eirene volunteers at a community garden, which is a happy union of plants and pollinators!
Vicki Holmsten
Vicki Holmsten published academic work in a variety of places during her teaching career. More recently, she has been a finalist in writing contests for short stories (LAURA short story contest by Women Writing the West and Pasatiempo, weekly arts magazine of the Santa Fe New Mexican) and poetry (Southwest Writers). She won first place for Adult Nonfiction in the December 2025 Pasatiempo Writing Contest. She taught English at both the secondary and college levels in San Juan County, New Mexico, where she lived for more than 30 years. Vicki now lives in Santa Fe. ~ vickiholmsten.com
Xavier A. Lee
Xavier is a Two-spirit Diné hippie vegetarian chef and brand-new writer. He is of Tódích’íi’nii and Bilagaana descent. He grew up among the dust and rez dogs of Shiprock, NM, on the Navajo Nation and loves to recollect his adventures and experiences living in Colorado, California, and New Mexico. He offers his unique perspectives on life, philosophy, family, relationships, spirituality, healing and recovery in essay form as a means of sharing the experiences and offering messages of hope, love, and self-awareness to anyone who is open to receiving them.
Xavier is an undergraduate at Fort Lewis College studying Psychology while chronicling, compiling and analyzing his storied life as an intellectual, a son, a musician, a lover, a drunk, a vagabond, a friend, a student, and as a spiritual being having a human experience.
David Lopez-Jones
David Lopez-Jones is the grandson of a Welsh immigrant. He is also a descendent of Spanish/Indigenous New Mexican people who lived in the Upper Rio Grande Valley. His parents represent the marriage and confluence of these cultural intersections.
David was raised with stories, myths, and traditions rooted in these diverse cultural landscapes. David experiences a deep connection to his ancestors through dreams, food, dance, music, and spoken word. Despite a connection to these distinct peoples, he has experienced the tension of disaffection and bias from some who would judge by outward appearance or surname.
David invites readers to explore the overlapping circles, the Mandorla, a sacred space where all voices are honored. The Mandorla is like the image of a mandala (Sanskrit for circle) merging until an almond shape is formed in the center. This space embodies the spirit of healing. The overlap is very thin at first, only a sliver of a new moon, but it is a beginning. With time, the overlap increases, the greater and more complete the healing becomes. The Mandorla binds together that which was torn a-part and made us un-whole. This is a profound space we reconcile with ourselves and the world around us.
Zoey McKenzie
Zoey McKenzie, Diné (Navajo), is currently unraveling the mysteries of honey mesquite and palo verde trees in her backyard. When asked about chili loyalty, she answers without hesitation: “GREEN!” Zoey is a mixed-animal veterinarian who may try to convince you that cow breath smells like honey.
In her free time, Zoey loves watching science-fiction and fast-zombie movies on DVD with her cat, Nermal. She hikes with her dog, Delta Dawn, and rides her mountain bike to work. As a child, she dreamed of becoming a circus trapeze artist—but unfortunately, the circus never came to the reservation. Zoey is from Shiprock, NM and currently lives in Las Cruces, NM.
Ellen Marie Metrick
Well into adulthood and despite decades fighting it, Ellen is beginning to accept that she is what she once thought she could be: a relatively self-sufficient jane-of-many-trades. She has taught middle school English, preschool, and writing classes for teens and adults; run rivers for a living; made and shoveled snow; lived in her truck and a tipi; built a straw bale home with her (late) husband and raised a lovely, thoughtful and creative human being. She has tried to fix her lawnmower.
Poetry has been her lifeblood since before she can remember. She loves teaching and sharing poetry aloud in solo readings and in company with dear poet friends from around Colorado’s Western Slope.
She has two published books of poetry: Poetisattva (2000) and Teasing out the Divine (2012). She dabbles in creative nonfiction and is deep in a fiction project. She writes for local newspapers and magazines and is a creative and line editor who partners with clients on their passion projects. And she’s in love. Life is good. Except for that lawnmower.
Ellen is available for readings and teachings with kids and adults, and for editing and coaching. Connect with her at ellenmetrick.net or email metricke@gmail.com.
Shaina Nez
Shaina A. Nez is Táchii’nii born for Áshįįhí. She earned her Ph.D. in Justice Studies from Arizona State University and M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is originally from Lukachukai, Arizona, and currently resides in New Mexico. Shaina currently teaches in the English Department within the School of Arts and Humanities at Diné College’s Shiprock Campus.
Her dissertation, “Emerging BIWOC Authors: An Examination of Experiences in Social Capital, Career Preparation, and Gender Inequality in MFA Creative Nonfiction Programs,” (2024) calls for a literary future that values and sustains BIWOC narratives in higher education and post-graduate journeys to solo publication.
Her recent contributions include the chapter “Diné Brevity as Indigenous Theory” (2025) in Indigenous Poetics: Native American Poets on Method and Expression, edited by Inés Hernández-Ávila and Molly McGlennen (Michigan State University Press), and essay “Shimá is Silver, Shizh’e’é is Iron,” (2026) in Past Present Magazine, edited by Heather Moqtaderi. She recently co-authored an article, “Strengthening Faculty Development at Tribal Colleges and Universities: A Critical Review and Three-Tiered Framework,” (2026) in New Directions for Community Colleges, Issue 213: Faculty Development in Community Colleges: Advancing Teaching Excellence.
Beth Paulson
Beth Paulson has been widely published in national literary journals, anthologies, and online sites for more than two decades. Her poems have been nominated four times for Pushcart Prizes as well as Best of the Net, and she was named a Finalist for the Able Muse Write Prize in 2019. She has six previously published books including Luminous (Kelsay Books, 2021), which won the National Press Women Book Prize. Beth’s newest book, Postcards from Altadena, was published in early 2026.
A former writing teacher at California State University in Los Angeles, Beth has taught numerous poetry workshops and was co-founder of the Open Bard Poetry Series in Ridgway, Colorado. In 2019 she was named Poet Laureate of Ouray County. Since early 2025 Beth has lived in Altadena, California.
Renee Podunovich
Renee Podunovich is a collection of tiny particles of light and dark matter that came together through specific strands of genetic coding and DNA, creating a complex chemical blend during the summer of love in 1969. She was influenced by the cosmos’ unique configuration at that time. Indeed, she will continue to burn off the karmic patterns of these influences until she disperses back into the vast ocean of the unmanifested life force from which she came.
She is an Honorary Fellow of the Conservancy of the Wild Heart and a recipient of the Intergalactic Endowment for Poets Against Autocracy and Violent Oppression on Earth. She lives with her husband of 35 years in an Earthship home in southwest Colorado.
Renee has also published three chapbooks of poems and lots of poetry, articles, essays and other experimental writing under this name and other monikers over the past 40 years. She is currently active in printmaking and photography. Find her on IG @blue_imaginarium or rpod007@gmail.com
Anna Redsand
Anna Redsand is a Bilagáana (White person) of Dutch heritage. She was raised by missionary parents in the Navajo Nation. She worked in Diné education and in bilingual materials development and was part of the Diné Language Teachers Association (DLTA) team working on a Diné language revitalization project. Her most recent book is Crevice: A Life Between Worlds, a memoir in essays awarded the 2024 Kenneth Johnston Nonfiction Book Award and a finalist in the 2026 Eric Hoffer Book Awards. The book explores the effects of colonization, race relations, non-binary thinking, and the dynamics of cultural contact and identity through story and reflection.
Anna is also the author of To Drink from the Silver Cup and Viktor Frankl: A Life Worth Living. Her shorter works have appeared in Solstice, Dove Tales, Isthmus, [Spaces], Mount Hope Magazine, Clockhouse Review, Linden Review and Fireweed. “Naturalization” was notable in Best American Essays 2014. She was an invited writer to WET and FERTILE. Anna identifies as a cis gender lesbian. She lives in Elk Horn, Iowa, to be near her daughter and family. Learn more about Anna and her work at: http://www.annaredsand.com
Kelly Shaggy
Kelly Shaggy is a Diné and Ojibwe leader, educator, writer, and communications strategist, whose work centers Indigenous sovereignty, digital equity, and community development. With over a decade of experience across Tribal government, education, and enterprise leadership, she brings a culturally grounded approach to building systems that serve Native communities.
She currently serves as Manager of Superior Connections, the Bad River Tribe’s tribally owned broadband enterprise, where she oversees operations, strategic planning, grant compliance, and infrastructure expansion. In this role, she collaborates with Tribal leadership, federal agencies, and community members to improve broadband access and strengthen long-term sustainability for rural Indigenous communities. Kelly is also the founder of EduTechTrek LLC, where she supports Tribal programs, small businesses, and nonprofits through digital marketing, branding, and communications strategy.
Her work emphasizes storytelling, visibility, and self-determination. Her background includes teaching Ojibwe language and developing culturally grounded curriculum with her TESOL and ELA certifications. As a writer, her work explores Indigenous identity, leadership, memory, and resilience. She remains committed to strengthening community through culture, technology, and Indigenous-led innovation. She is still a chizhii rez girl at heart, though.
Suzanne Strazza
Suzanne Strazza is mother, boat-woman, and award-winning author who has been writing about connection to Place for over thirty years. Her work has appeared in The American Whitewater Journal, High Desert Journal, Mountain Gazette, Four Corners Free Press, Inside Outside Magazine, and the anthologies, WET and FERTILE. Although she calls the Colorado Plateau “home,” she has just embarked on a new adventure into the heart of Idaho, in a remote community on the banks of the River of No Return, where she dwells with family, new friends, and more golden eagles than she can count.
Michael Thompson
Michael Thompson, Mvskoke Creek, was born in Holdenville, Oklahoma, and raised on a cattle farm near the Flint River in southwest Georgia. He has been a teacher, writer, and occasional community activist in Georgia, Kansas, California, and New Mexico. He is married to Tina Deschenie, Diné/Tewa, and between them they have four children and six grandchildren.
Most of his life he taught high school English, including fourteen years at Bloomfield High School in New Mexico. From 2014 until he retired in 2019, he served as the coordinator of alternative licensure at San Juan College and as the Site Director of the Bisti Writing Project.
Michael has presented papers and lectures on contemporary Native literature at state and national conferences and published poetry and articles in a variety of journals. He supported the inaugural anthology WET: An Anthology of Water Poems and Prose (2021), acting as liaison for Native writers. He and his family support numerous Native American activities, traditions and political causes.
Geneva Toland
Geneva Toland is a writer, song leader, naturalist, and educator living in the juniper-piñon pine foothills of the La Plata mountains, homelands of the Ute, Diné and Puebloan peoples. Her debut poetry collection, Council of Thunder, is the winner of Wayfarer Book's 2025 Homebound Poetry Prize. Her work has also appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Camas Magazine, Four Corners Voices, Reckoning, and humana obscura, among others.
She is a poetry editor at Terrain Magazine and received her MFA in Poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. She feels lucky to spend her time writing poems, teaching creative writing workshops, leading monthly song circles, and playing with kids in the woods. See her other offerings at www.genevatoland.com.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer has written and shared a poem a day since 2006. Her daily poems can be found on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils. A curated version is available on her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, on the Ritual app.
She co-hosts Emerging Form (podcast on creative process), Secret Agents of Change (a surreptitious kindness cabal), and Soul Writer’s Circle. Her poetry has appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, on Carnegie Hall stage, and on river rocks she leaves around town. Her collection Hush won the Halcyon Prize. Naked for Tea was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. Her most recent books are All the Honey, The Unfolding, and Exploring Poetry of Presence II: Prompts to Deepen Your Writing Practice. Her spoken-word albums include Dark Praise and Risking Love.
As poet laureate for Evermore, she helps others explore grief, wonder, and love through poetry. She’s been an organic fruit grower, a newspaper and magazine editor, and a parent educator for Parents as Teachers. She earned her MA in English Language & Linguistics at UW-Madison.
Her three-word mantra: I’m still learning. If limited to one word: Adjust.
Tanya Tyler
Tanya Tyler (she/her) is Diné from Sanostee, New Mexico, on the Navajo Nation. She graduated with honors from the University of New Mexico with a Bachelor of Arts and double majored in English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her work has been published in Conceptions Southwest, Yellow Medicine Review and The Diné Artisans & Authors Capacity Building Institute Anthology. She is an MFA candidate studying creative nonfiction and fiction at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). She serves as the Nonfiction Editor for Chapter House Journal at IAIA and currently resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Travis Wade
Travis Lane Wade is an Assistant Professor of English and head of the Creative Writing Department at San Juan College in Farmington, New Mexico. He has an Associate’s Degree in Liberal Arts from San Juan College, a Bachelor’s Degree in English with a concentration in Writing from the Clarion University of Pennsylvania, and a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Poetry and Creative Nonfiction from Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Travis has performed at dozens of venues across the Four Corners, is in his ninth-year teaching at SJC, is the faculty editor of Perspective(s): San Juan College’s Art and Literary Magazine, and currently resides in Aztec, New Mexico.
Julien Wolf
Julien Wolf hails from a land of vast blue skies and monumental features, a place where two environments formed by mountains and desert become one; where, in the distance, she remains engaged with her backpack full of where she’s been and a notebook to rewrite where she’s going. Born in the Colorado portion of the Four Corners region, Julien spent much of her childhood on the road with her family, adding a uniquely deep point of view to her field of vision. Her writing and visual art are informed by the trials of her life, she says; words, art, and music provide respite and insight as she moves forward in her journey. She returns as an invited author to FLAME, our third anthology, after contributing to both WET and FERTILE.
Venaya Yazzie
Venaya Yazzie is Diné/Hopi, a woman from the San Juan Valley in northwestern New Mexico. Her heritage is rooted in the Huerfano and Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, area. Venaya is an alumnus of the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe; Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado; and the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, where she earned an M.A. in education/Indian education. She participated as an invited poet in WET (2021) and FERTILE (2023). Venaya's poem "when Creation perpetuates - in four parts" won the 2025 Stephen Dunn Prize for poetry in Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices in 2025.
Through her art and academic research, Venaya works to reaffirm Indigenous identity, tribal tongues and cultural landscape; her efforts encompass the need to re-tell and thus re-establish the narratives and experiences of the 21st century Indigenous individual. She bases all her acquired knowledge in the teachings of her late maternal grandmother, Jane Werito Yazzie. Venaya produces and hosts the podcast Native Art Voices 4Corners.
Cindy Yurth
Cindy Yurth is a retired journalist who lives with her husband, two dogs and two cats on four definitely magical acres in Rockwood, Colorado. She reported and edited for the Navajo Times for 17 years. She is the author of Exploring the Navajo Nation Chapter by Chapter, available from salinabookshelf.com, and has essays published in WET: An Anthology of Water Poems and Prose (Sharehouse Press, 2021), the companion to this volume, and Satchel Story Objects (Art Juice Studio Press, 2022), a collection of family migration stories presented in an exhibition at The Cortez Cultural Center.
Additional Author Biographies from WET, 2021, and FERTILE, 2023
Marcy Cummins is a psychotherapist practicing in Cortez, Colorado, where she grew up on the edge of Hartman Draw. Though she doesn’t consider herself a professional writer, she does believe that a person is drawn to accepting the medium for the challenge it offers as a form of record-keeping, a path toward deep understanding of personal experience. “I believe most of what I’ve learned is in my hands,” she says. “I never fully grasp anything until I pick up a pen and write.” Marcy wrote her first book in the second grade, joyously watching the stack of wrinkled notebook paper grow beside her on the floor. She’s been writing ever since. In addition to publishing in her professional capacity, she has written a regular community column for the Cortez Journal. Her fiction and essays have been published in Impact Parenting, Alive!, and Southwest Colorado Arts Perspective. She returns as an invited author to FERTILE … after publishing in WET** (Sharehouse Press, 2021). Reach her at marcy@marcycummins.com.
Jan D. Dixon is a feature writer and poet living in Southwest Colorado. She is a past editor of ALIVE magazine and the recipient of the 2009 Aspen Guard Station Artist-in-Residence award sponsored by San Juan Public Lands. The time spent in the C.C.C. ranger’s cabin resulted numerous poems and publications about her experiences near the escarpment of Hesperes Peak in the summer heart of the aspen forest. Her poetry was featured in WET**…(Sharehouse Press, 2021) the preceding anthology in this series. Jan also participated in “Growing Voices,” an ensemble of writers and poets from the Four Corners region. She lives with her husband and two cats, Ollie and Emma, near Cortez, Colorado. For more information about Jan’s writing, go to www.janddixon.com or email her at jan@janddixon.com.
Gloria J. Emerson was born to the Tsé nahabi nii clan for the Tó aheedlíinii clan of the Navajo Nation. She is a visual artist and poet, and consultant in the fields of Indian education and art. She has worked for the Institute of American Indian Arts, the Southwestern Association of Indian Arts, and the Native American Materials Development Center, as well as many other non-profit organizations supporting Native education, social services, and culture. She also served on the New Mexico State Arts Commission. She was artist-in-residence at the School of American Research, resulting in the publication of At the Hems of the Lowest Clouds: Meditations on Navajo Landscapes, a collection of paintings and poems. She is published in WET** (Sharehouse Press, 2021) a companion to this anthology. Gloria accepted an invitation to participate in Satchel* (Art Juice Press, 2022) a visual art and narrative exhibition and publication project about migration. She exhibits her paintings and sculptures in multiple, regional venues. In 2004, she owned and operated the first of its kind in Shiprock, New Mexico, a coffee shop named Ahwééh Gohwééh selling espresso drinks and showcasing the work of Native artists. She is from Tsé Daa K’áán in the Navajo Nation.
Timorie Harvey, Hovenweep/Cahone Mesa, Diné, is a Business Administration graduate of Utah State University. She resides in North Carolina today creating opportunities for individuals one day at a time working in human resources at a medical facility. Timorie was raised in the Northern Navajo Nation among her maternal family. Sonja Horoshko was artist-in-residence at nearby Hovenweep National Monument in 1995-1996. While there she mentored residents of the mesa, including Timorie’s maternal parents, aunties, uncles, and siblings. One hot summer afternoon Horoshko met with Timorie and her sister, Eudora, to make drawings and write stories. Sheets of hard, stiff, craft-finish toweling were the only paper in her car that day. Timorie wrote, Bat in the Hogan on the paper towels. She made a drawing of the mesa as well, showing the Hogan, the tree, the nest with a bat, and the outhouse while Sonja made a contour drawing of Timorie writing her story. The writing and two drawings were recently found in a storage box―a little aged, yellowed at the edges, but her handwriting, grammar and punctuation remained perfectly legible today. The Bat in the Hogan is published with her permission. It is placed as an opening to the book reminding us all that the children will live on Earth beyond our lifetimes. We cherish their presence among us. All three pieces of paper towel art reside in the Tso family art collection.
Sonja Horoshko was a multi-disciplinary visual artist, freelance journalist, essayist and educator, who passed in June 2024. She was the founder of Art Juice Studio in Cortez, Colorado, personal work space for many place-based programs. She was awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts Challenge America Grant, Colorado Council for the Arts, Colorado Creative Industries, Utah Art Council, Mesa Verde Museum Association, Mobil Oil, an Annenberg Rural Challenge Fellowship to study a Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English, and much more. As a former member of the Denver Women’s Press Club; Colorado Press Women, the National Federation of Press Women as well as the Society of Professional Journalists, she received numerous awards for her journalism published at Four Corners Free Press, Durango Herald, as editor of Southwest Colorado Arts Perspective Magazine, and for her broadcast news and culture programming at a local Public Radio station. Among her many recognitions she was most appreciative of the 108th United States House of Representatives Congressional Tribute honoring her in March 2003, “for expanding the reach of artistic endeavor in Montezuma County and the four corners region…encouraging communities and individuals, both young and old, to tell their stories in their own voice.” Sonja served twelve months on-site as artist-in-residence at Hovenweep National Monument, followed by three residencies over five years at Peetz Consolidated Schools, Colo., the Aspen Guard Station, Aztec National Monument, Mesa Verde National Park, Willowtail Springs and many more. For nearly three decades she tirelessly supported the arts in Cortez. The effort helped establish the Cortez Public Arts Advisory Committee, 2018. The first volume in this anthology series, WET** was supported, in part, by the committee and published by the Sharehouse Press.
An Individual Artist National Endowment for the Arts grant funded her project Satchel* (2022), She invited 16 multi-cultural artists/writers to participate in the project, publishing a catalogue of the exhibition held at the Cortez Cultural Center.
tomoe natori Originally from Tokyo, tomoe has called the wilderness of the Four Corners region home for three decades. Her days are lived with seeds and plants in her garden. She walks cross-country, writes counter-narratives, and plays bass for a honky tonk band. Her daily aim is to hover in beauty of Mother Earth and love and practice kindness for Earthlings.
Ed Singer is a visual artist known for his painting, drawing, pastel, and lithography reflecting his place-based personal narrative of Diné life. His work is collected throughout the U.S. and in many European countries, where it has been on exhibit in public, private and corporate venues. He is also known for his champion saddle bronc riding, a rodeo sport he perfected in his youth. Singer was raised at Gray Mountain, near Cameron, Arizona, in the company of his ten siblings and numerous Diné relatives. At the time he graduated high school and began his college career he was studying literature and hoped to become a writer, but he says, “I got sidetracked by the career in visual arts that grew from my work at the time and that changed the course of my life.” In his essay, published in WET** (Sharehouse Press) Ed describes a dependable source of water near his home, simultaneously revealing a Navajo name for Cortez that points to where the water flows in the town where he presently resides. He maintains a studio at Gray Mountain on the Navajo Nation. Most recently, his visual art was on exhibit in the Satchel Story Objects* project at the Cortez Cultural Center. The pastel was accompanied by an essay about the nearly migration of his mother and grandmother when they moved the sheep to summer pastures. www.edsinger.weebly.com, or directly on Facebook: Edward Singer
Gail Binkly is co-owner and editor of the Four Corners Free Press in Cortez, Colorado. She is a veteran journalist who has worked as a news reporter, a sports writer, and a radio news writer. Her work has received numerous awards from the Colorado Press Association and Society of Professional Journalists. She was an assistant professor of mass communications for nine years at Colorado State University-Pueblo. She holds an M.A. in journalism from the Ohio State University. She is a native of Colorado who loves hiking.
Maurus Chino is from the Acoma Tribe in Northwest New Mexico. He belongs to the Eagle Clan and is a child of the Sun Clan. He earned a B.F.A. from New Mexico State University. Before he attended NMSU, he worked for the U.S. Forest Service, and in the underground uranium mines. In 1992, he decided to divide his life working as an artist activist and more recently, a writer. In 2007 his work protesting conquistador monuments in New Mexico and El Paso, Texas, became part of the PBS documentary The Last Conquistador (2008). Most recently, Maurus has published an essay in the anthology Qeurencia, Reflections on the New Mexico Homeland , University of New Mexico Press. He lives in Albuquerque, where he continues to paint and make jewelry. He has one child, a daughter, Anathea.
Rafael Jesús González advises the reader that his poems are “both in Spanish and English. Having been born and raised on the U.S./Mexican border, El Paso, Texas/Juárez, Chihuahua, I grew up bilingual, bi-cultural, heir to two muses speaking Spanish and English. Consequently almost all my work are single pieces in the two tongues, Spanish and English, neither one the translation of the other.”
He attended the University of Texas El Paso, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and the University of Oregon. As a professor emeritus of creative writing and literature, he has taught at the University of Oregon, Western State College of Colorado, Central Washington State University, the University of Texas at El Paso, and Laney College, Oakland, where he founded the Mexican and Latin American Studies Dept.
His poetry is relished at the Telluride Literary Arts Festival, where he served in 2019 as the judge for the national Fischer Prize and the Colorado Cantor Award. Rafael has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize and in 1996 he became the poet-in-residence at the Oakland Museum of California and the Oakland Public Library under the Poets & Writers “Writers on Site” award. He served as contributing editor for The Montserrat Review and received the Annual Dragonfly Press Award for Literary Achievement in 2002 and 2012. In 2003 he was honored by the National Council of Teachers of English & Annenberg/CPB for his writing. In 2013 he received the César E. Chávez Lifetime Award.
The City of Berkeley honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015 and he was named the City of Berkeley's first poet laureate in 2017.
David Long is a self-described former hippie and vagabond who has lived all over the United States. He is a co-owner and writer for the Four Corners Free Press newspaper in Cortez, Colorado, a former reporter for the Cortez Sentinel/Montezuma Valley Journal, and a former interim managing editor at the Crested Butte Chronicle & Pilot. His news articles and opinion columns have received numerous awards from the Colorado Press Association and Society of Professional Journalists. He was born and raised in coal-mining country in Pennsylvania.
L. Luis Lopez has published five books of poetry: Musings of a Barrio Sack Boy, A Painting of Sand, Each Month I Sing, which won the American Book Award in 2008, Andromeda to Vulpecula, 88 Constellation Poems, and More Musings of a Barrio Sack Boy. A professor emeritus of Latin, ancient Greek, mythology, and English at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, Colorado, he has a Ph.D. in Medieval English Literature from The University of New Mexico. He received a National Endowment for the Humanities to study poetry at Harvard with renowned poetry critic Helen Vendler. Luis was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Lorraine Dominique Nakai, who unfortunately passed in August 2020 prior to the publication of WET, was an entomologist; her work spanned best management practices for multiple crops on large irrigated farmland, recording wheat aphid behavior, and bat echolocation call detection studies. She was a graduate of Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, and served on the USDA's Agricultural Biotechnology Advisory Committee in Washington, D.C., from 1999 to 2001. She also served as a member of the Diné Committee of the Utah Navajo Trust Fund. Lorraine wrote and taught in Navajo and in English. She divided her time between Grand Junction, Colorado, and Bluff, Utah, learning Turkish, while bicycling, bookbinding and painting.
Dr. Dana E. Powell is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Appalachia State University and one of seven U.S. and Canadian scholars awarded a Cornell University Society for the Humanities Fellowship, 2019-2020 academic year. As a faculty member at Appalachian State University she designed the Anthropology Department program “Social Practice and Sustainability”.
Powell began a collaborative ethnography with Diné colleagues exploring atmospheres of vulnerability and resilience in the Anthropocene in 2019 by looking at the entanglements of water and energy in riparian environments in the Navajo Nation. The work is supported by her Cornell University Fellowship, a project development grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, a grant from Appalachian State University Research Council, and with a research permit from the Navajo Nation Historic Preservation department.
Her attention to Southwest Native power and energy issues coincided with the 2008 Dooda Desert Rock Exhibit at the Center for Southwest Studies in Durango, Colorado. From the introduction to political activism revealed in the artists’ submissions Powell was able to take into account additional interfacing layers of responses to politics and energy development on Navajo land. Her 2018 book on the subject, Landscapes of Power (Duke University Press), includes visual art by regional Native painters included in the exhibit curated by Veneya Yazzie and Esther Belin.