Lawton Eddy has written poems since childhood, but didn’t dream, until moving to Salida in ’99, that anyone would want to hear them outloud!  Co-creating Sparrows, Salida’s 7- year Performance Poetry Festival, and performing original works with the performance poetry troupe River City Nomads since the early 2000’s have been highlights.  Along with fellow Nomad Craig Nielson, Lawton organizes Salida’s quarterly poetry gathering, Season of Words, now and its third year.

Lawton’s poems have appeared in regional magazines and newspapers and her many performances include Telluride Mushroom Festival, Ziggys in Denver, Crestone’s Poem Fest, as well as City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco.  She self-published her poetry collection Chasing Grace – poems of a life, in 2021. Work from that collection was featured in a multi-performance International Women’s Day celebration in Salida.  She is currently compiling her next collection, Sensual is the New Sacred.

Aspen Everett is a parent, writer, and organizer from the wind-tossed flatlands of southeast Kansas. Despite their best efforts, there are still grass seeds and muddy rivers in most of their poems. Aspen is the author of "Tributaries" from Middle Creek Publishing, and their poems have been published by Planted Journal, Twenty Bellows, South Broadway Press, Anthropocene Magazine, and more. They were nominated for the Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize in 2025. Aspen is a Community Outreach Instructor with Lighthouse Writers, Assistant Editor for Screaming at America, and the Poetry Coordinator for the Artist Resistance Coalition. They live in Boulder, Colorado with their seventeen-year-old and stubborn houseplants. You can follow Aspen on Instagram for poems, events, workshops, and more @aspengrovepoetry.

Fourth generation San Franciscan, seventh generation Californio, Art Goodtimes ran with the Union of Street Poets in the Psychedelic Sixties. Moved to Colorado after they shot Harvey Milk. Served as San Miguel County Commissioner (Green Party, 1996-2016), Western Slope Poet Laureate (2011-13), and continues as the Telluride Mushroom Festival’s Creative Director and Poet-in-residence (since 1981). 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, Sedona, AZ, 2013) and Dancing on Edge: The McRedeye Poems (Lithic Press, Colorado, 2019). He writes an op-ed column for Colorado Times Recorder and directs the Telluride Institute’s Talking Gourds poetry program:

Catherine Gregory is an award-winning author and cofounder of Modern Wisdom Press. A seasoned editor, meditation guide, and book coach for transformational writers, she blends decades of publishing expertise with mindful, intuitive practices to help authors access creative flow and birth meaningful books into the world. She is the author of two books, including Awaken Into Flow: The Soulful Leader's Guide to Writing a Transformational Book, and believes that every strong book begins with listening deeply to the wisdom within.

Lyric Haworth (she/they) is a fem-tastic graduate of Slay the Runway, has been featured in the Stage-Fluid Drag Show, published in Screaming at America and Twenty Bellows, and performed in countless spaces across the Front Range. With experience in fashion, poetry, fiction, screenplays, theatre, art and much more, she combines raw emotion with vivid imagery in whatever she brings.

Mark Irwin is the author of thirteen collections of poetry, including Once When Green (2025), Joyful Orphan (2023), Shimmer (2020), American Urn: Selected Poems (1987-2014), Tall If (2008), and Bright Hunger (2004). Recognition for his work includes The Nation/Discovery Award, two Colorado Book Awards, four Pushcart Prizes, the James Wright Poetry Award, the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, The Juniper Prize for Poetry, and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, and NEA. He has also translated three volumes of poetry and lives in Colorado and Los Angeles, where he teaches half the year at the University of Southern California. His poetry has been translated into several languages.

Rachel Kellum lives with her husband at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo mountains where she has made a life teaching greenhouse gardening,  visual and language arts to valley children, writing at Adams State University, and humanities and literature courses for Trinidad State College. For seven years, she and a posse of local poets put on the Crestone Poetry Festival. Kellum earned a BFA in Art from Millikin University and an MA in English from Colorado State. Her career began as an English and art instructor at Morgan Community College for eleven years, during which time she served six years as director of the MCC CACE Gallery of Fine Art and host of Open Mic Poetry Nights, featuring Colorado’s finest poets. A Pushcart Prize nominee and NFSPS award winning poet, her poetry has been featured in several online journals and print collections. She leads writing workshops, performs her poetry around Colorado and blogs at wordweeds.com. Her first book, ah, published by Liquid Light Press, was released in 2012. Her newest collection, Walking the Burn, explores the terrain of generational family trauma and healing in the context of the natural world, and is available through Middle Creek Publishing and Audio.

Jessica Helen Lopez is the City of Albuquerque Poet Laureate, Emerita (2014-2016), a NM Humanities Chautauqua Scholar, Rural Women's Collective Fellow at Justice for Migrant Women and the Zia Book Award Recipient for her inaugural poetry collection, Always Messing With them Boys (West End Press). She is also the author of recently released My Heart is a Pomegranate/Mi Corazón es una Granada (Flowersong Press), as well as The Blood Poems (University of New Mexico Press), The Language of Bleeding, Provocateur and cunt. bomb. (Swimming With Elephants Publications). An Adjunct Instructor with the University of New Mexico Chicana and Chicano Studies

Department, Lopez also teaches Dual Enrollment Poetry courses at the Native American Community Academy High School through the Institute of American Indian Arts. A California born Chicana, Lopez resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A six-time member of the ABQ Champion Winning Slam Team and two-time champion of the ABQ Women of the World Poetry Slam, Lopez is a member of the Macondo Foundation, an association of socially-engaged writers working to advance creativity, foster generosity, and serve community which was founded in 1995 by Mexican-American writer Sandra Cisneros. Lopez was the John Trudell Featured Activist Poet awarded by the San Bernardino College and is the editor of the photo-poetic anthology, La Palabra: The Word is a Woman and Earthships: A New Mecca Poetry Collection. Her poetry, academic research and book reviews have been published widely both in print and online. Lopez continues to produce and host episodic art-based content for New Mexico PBS. Lopez is a mom to Mia Mia Sopapapilla and her beloved four-legged creature, Petit Bisou the Wonder Dawg. She loves to read and eat lime-flavored paletas.

Darci Meyers is a poet, Buddhist chaplain and somatic therapist living in the high-mountain desert of southern Colorado. Shaped by nearly 15 years of working in hospice and palliative care, and by her own encounters with loss, she accompanies others through the landscapes of grief. She recently published her first book, The Marvelous Contentment of Belonging: Poetry, Prose and Prompts for Navigating Grief, following the death of her husband in 2022. A meditation practitioner for more than thirty-five years, Darci’s writing is rooted in lived experience and in a deep relationship with the wild, animate world of the San Luis Valley.

Adrian H. Molina aka Mo Speaks is an artist, poet, master of ceremonies, and certified yoga instructor. Molina’s creative work has been shaped by Chicano art, Hip-Hop, and the natural world. Molina is an Us@250 Fellow with New America, a Westword Mastermind, and a room has been named for Molina at the Denver Foundation’s Casa Grande on Poet’s Row. Molina has a permanent installation at Meow Wolf Denver. He recently curated the Dreamscapes Lounge: Future Town 2045 exhibition along with a team of San Luis Valley co-curators. Future Town 2045 features over 100 artists across CO and NM, exhibiting in five community spaces in downtown Alamosa through Winter Solstice 2026.

Craig Nielson is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Record of Talus (Middle Creek Publishing and Audio, 2026), Worn Open Places (Kelsay Books, 2025), and Touch of Grace (Ghost Road Press, 2005). He is currently at work on a near-future climate fiction novel about water scarcity in the American West.

He is a founding member of River City Nomads, a performance poetry troupe, and co- organizer of the quarterly live poetry event Season of Words in Salida, Colorado. His work has appeared in Pilgrimage, Mountain Gazette, Colorado Central Magazine,

Central Avenue, and Madblood; the anthologies A Democracy of Poets, Open Windows 2005, and Telling It Real; and the chapbook On Stage: River City Nomads. He lives and writes in the Central Rockies of Colorado, where his work explores the intersections of landscape, loss, memory, and the changing American West.

Judith Oakland, MA, CHP is a graduate of Naropa’s Contemplative Psychothery Master’s program, a somatic therapist for 30+ years,  an explorer of 7 decades of life, a lover of silence and beauty, a practitioner of meditation, and a late bloomer to creative arts! Soul collage came into my life joyfully 10 years ago. Wild writing and soul collage have been pathways for a deeper inward dive….Carl Jung offers that midlife is the best time for individuation and transformation — I agree! and I look forward to sharing this process with you! 

Wendy Videlock lives on the edge of a mesa in Western Colorado. Her poems and essays appear in O Magazine, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Hudson Review, Rattle, Hopkins Review and other venues. Wendy is the two time recipient  of the Keats Soul Making Award, and the winner of the Cantor Poetry Prize, The Fischer Prize and the PbtS Sonnet Prize and a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. Wendy is a syndicated newspaper columnist for newspapers across the Four Corner States. Her newest book, Speaking Animal in the American Southwest, Essays and Poems, is newly released from Able Muse Press.

Kathleen Willard writes at the luminous intersection of landscape, spirit and ecology. Her poems shaped by the high-altitude of light of the Rockies and the deeper terrains of memory and myth, move with a quiet radiance through the natural world and the inner life. She is the author of Cirque & Sky, This Incendiary Season, The Next Noise is Our Hearts and A World on Fire, all works that trace geographies of desire, compassion and our fragile bonds with the earth.

A recipient of a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship to travel to India and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, Willard has carried her poetic inquiry across planets. She has been a part of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Disquiet International Literary Festival in Lisbon, Portugal and the Himalayan Literature Festival in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Willard holds degrees from Windham College, Middlebury College and Colorado State University. She also publishes Occasional Papers, an online newsletter that gathers reflections, essays and field notes from her life of poetry. 

Willard’s work continues to explore the places where the world opens up, glimmers, and becomes—if only for a moment—renewed.

Everett Wilson earned a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from SUNY-Binghamton in 1988. Since then he’s been a bank teller, legal secretary, adjunct writing instructor, lover, husband, grieving widower, Zen monk, waiter, baker, chef, poet, bookkeeper, editor, memoirist, tantrika, chef (again?!!!), a/v tech, baker (again?!!!) and husband all over again, because apparently once is just not enough. He’s been all of these things, but is none of them. Most recently, he finds himself meditating a lot more than is probably healthy, writing for the sake of his sanity, and working at the local library, where all the cool people hang out and talk about books.

Allison Wonderland: A natural born animist, artist and eco-queer activist exploring the mysteries of mythopoetic living. Spoken and written word have always been an essential part of my creative work informing the process and being integrated into performance art, ritual theater, and immersive installations. Since 2019, I have had the pleasure of participating in organizing the annual Crestone Poetry Festival.