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Seventh generation Californian and basketry student of Indigenous Elder Mabel McKay, Art Goodtimes was born in San Francisco and was part of Kush’s Cloud House, Leslie Simon’s Poetry for the People and Jack Mueller’s Union of Street Poets during the decade of the Seventies. In 1979 he edited and published the Twin Peaks litzine in the Bay Area with Sharon Skolnick. Sleeping Gypsy Press did his first chapbooks, and Berkeley’s Homeward Press published his first book (Embracing the Earth, 1984).
Moving to Colorado, he served as executive director of the Telluride Arts Council (1981 and again 1995-96) and received a Creative Fellowship in Poetry from the Colorado Council on the Arts & Humanities (1989). He served five terms as the state’s only Green Party county commissioner (1996-2016) and one term as the Western Slope Poet Laureate (2011-13). Poetry editor emeritus for Earth First! Journal, Wild Earth and the Mountain Gazette, currently he’s poetry editor for Fungi magazine and co-editor with Lito Tejada-Flores of the online poetry anthology SageGreenJournal.org. His latest book is Dancing on Edge: The McRedeye Poems (Lithic Press, Fruita, Colorado, 2019) and his latest chapbooks Welcoming the Wilkinson (Telluride Arts, 2025) and Telluride Valley Floor co-authored with Daiva Chesonis (Turn Star Press, Telluride, 2019). In 2016 he co-edited MycoEpithalamia: Mushroom Wedding Poems (Fungi Press) and in 2023 Medicine for Minds & Hearts (Fungi Press). His poems appear in many publications, including The Dolphin’s Arc: Poems on Endangered Creatures in the Seas (SCOP Publications, 1989), Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, a book series from the Center for Humans and Nature in Chicago and the Pt. Reyes Bookstore in Marin County (2021) and Building Socialism Fighting Fascism, an anthology from the Revolutionary Poets Brigade (Kallatumba Press, San Francisco, 2021). Retired from political life, Art serves as trustee emeritus and founder/program director for the Telluride Institute’s Talking Gourds Poetry Program, which includes monthly virtual Bardic Trails zoom readings, Stories & Poems monthly live readings, the annual MycoLicious MycoLuscious MycoLogical Poetry Show at the Sheridan Opera House, the San Miguel County and Western Slope Poet Laureate projects, the statewide Karen Chamberlain Award and the national and state Fischer and Cantor poetry prize contests: <www.tellurideinstitute.org/talking-gourds> He has a primary role in the documentary Forever Wild about the preservation of Telluride’s Valley Floor https://www.pbs.org/show/forever-wild> For 45 summers, “Shroompa” has been poet-in-residence at the annual Telluride Mushroom Festival. He has a cameo in the film Fantastic Fungi and for 35 years has been poet/elder at the annual Headwaters Conference at Western Colorado University in Gunnison. His personal website is <goodtimespoet.blogspot.com>. 
Larry Felson moved to the Bay Area in the 1960s, where he was introduced to the realms of revolutionary politics and poetry. Along the way, he earned a BA and MA from San Francisco State University, where he received the Academy of American Poets Award, became a social justice activist, worked on the docks and shipyards, was a taxi driver, taught creative writing at Westmoor Adult School and the Oakland Juvenile Hall, and conducted writing workshops with Poetry in the Schools. He taught English at Oakland High School for several years, and creative writing and Greek Literature at the Hellenic International School of the Arts in Paros, Greece.
He moved from Oakland to the Mendocino coast 7 years ago where he now resides, surrounded by birds, trees, ocean, cliffs, and open space. “Living here, Pegasus arrives almost every day and night, and insists on taking me for a ride to places I’ve never been, where I discover new flora and fauna, real and imagined, and explore dimensions of reality, feeling, and thought beyond the limits of the ‘possible’ in the ‘known’ world. His most recent publications are Dawn Out of Order (2022), and The Engine of Light (2024). |
Devreaux Baker is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Mendocino County. She has published five books of poetry, won numerous national and international poetry awards, and is the current director of the Mendocino Open Mic Poetry Series at the Mendocino Art Center. She is the Editor-in-chief of Spirit of Place; Mendocino County Women Poets Anthology, and has taught poetry-in-the schools with a California Arts Council Grant.
"Blue Requiem" is Devreaux Baker's sixth book of poetry. This book celebrates wilderness and explores the personal worlds of loss, love, renewal and family, with poems that explore the power and importance of community. She will be reading her poem, "Writing Through These Days". Janferie Stone arrived in Caspar in 1971. Her experience of the coastal environment has shaped her poetic, scholastic, and yes, culinary adventures.
She will be reading her poem, "Fungamentally" 
Kirk Lumpkin is a poet, spoken word & performance artist, lyricist, environmentalist activist, and California state certified Naturalist; author of the poetry books, In Deep and Co-Hearing and three poetry/music CDs, The Word-Music Continuum, Sound Poems, and the soon to be released Wild Flowers of Collaboration. Before retiring to Mendocino County Kirk worked for over 20 plus years for the Ecology Center in Berkeley and was according to the Bay Area Poets Seasonal Review “ . . . an important part of the Bay Area (and beyond) poetry scene for years, hosting readings in San Francisco and Berkeley, helping to facilitate the Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival [with Poetry Flash & former U.S. Poet Laureate, Robert Hass], and hosting open mikes at Burning Man.…” Kirk and his wife, Lyn Talkovsky, currently live on a dirt road near Willits, California where he serves on the Board of the Willits Environmental Center.
Blake More, Point Arena Poet Laureate, is a teaching artist of multiple paths including performance, video, media arts, painting cars and teaching. She is a longtime Mendocino Area Coordinator and poetry teacher with California Poets in the Schools. She hosts the monthly Third Thursday Poetry & Jazz event in Point Arena. She also hosts Be More Now on KZYX&Z FM Mendocino County Public Broadcasting and Cartwheels on the Sky on KGUA FM Gualala. Her most recent book is Dystopia Unplugged: Please Talk Back. Learn more at bmoreyou.net.
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