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Art Goodtimes, Poet Laureate of the Western Slope and one of the originators of the Telluride Mushroom Festival, will share poetry and stories from his eclectic life's history and emcee readings by some of Mendocino County's finest poets.
Retired in 2016 after five terms as Colorado’s only Green Party county commissioner, Art Goodtimes has won numerous awards for his political activism including from the Dept. of Interior, the U.S. Forest Service, the Colorado Weed Managers Association and Club 20 of Grand Junction. In his political capacity, he served on several dozen boards and commissions on the local, regional, state and national levels. He co-founded the Sheep Mountain Alliance, Telluride’s local environmental group. A former newspaper editor, he had a 40+ year run writing weekly and monthly op-ed columns for print and online publications including the Telluride Times, the San Miguel Journal, the Telluride Times-Journal, the Watch, the Daily Planet, the MontroseMirror.com, and Colorado Poets Center. I currently write a monthly op-ed column “Looking South from Lone Cone” for the Cortez-based print publiccation the Four Corners Free Press. Art studied to be a Roman Catholic priest for seven years, and has continued to marry people as a Universal Life minister. A former poetry editor for Earth First! Journal, Wild Earth and the Mountain Gazette, he currently co-directs the Telluride Institute’s Talking Gourds poetry project, is poetry editor for Fungi magazine (fungimag.com), and co-hosts the Sage Green Journal online literary anthology (sagegreenjournal.org). Former president and current Trustee Emeritus, he was founder of the Institute’s Prospect Basin Fen Project and its Ute Reconciliation and Indigenous Peoples Day projects and remains on their advisory boards. Director of the Institute's Telluride Mushroom Festival for its first 25 years, he remains as Cultural Director and Poet-in-Residence. His poetry books include As If the World Really Mattered (La Alameda Press, Albuquerque, 2007) and Looking South to Lone Cone (Western Eye Press, Sedona, 2013). He was co-editor of the anthology MycoEpithalamia: Mushroom Wedding Poems (Fungi Press, CA, 2016). Turn Star Press of Telluride brought out a limited edition chapbook in 2019 that he co-authored called Telluride Valley Floor. Art’s latest book is Dancing on Edge: The McRedeye Poems (Lithic Press, Fruita, CO, 2019). 
Larry Felson 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-MA/Counseling, BS/Education- is a poet, therapist, and teacher. She is the first Poet Laureate of Mendocino County and a recipient of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry Award. Her poetry collections include Hungry Ghosts, Red Willow People, Out of the Bones of Earth, Beyond the Circumstance of Sight, and Light at the Edge. She has facilitated workshops and taught poetry and creative writing in many venues including public schools K-12 and directed national and international poetry workshops. Much of Baker’s work explores spirit of place and the healing power that is inherent in a reciprocal relationship with nature. Baker is the mother of three and lives on the Mendocino coast with her partner, the musician Barry Schrager. Website: www.devreauxbaker.org
Frej Barty, Mendocino County Youth Poet Laureate, is an aspiring filmmaker, cinematographer, and general multi-hyphenate storyteller who hates that neologism. Defined by finding and giving hope, he is an all around nerd with a love for anything analog— from the Mendocino High School Radio Station KAKX to pinball to his Mendocino County Youth Poet Laureateship. The bio just keeps shifting, though, because he is still finding a voice and a way of living.
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.
Joe Smith
Joe Smith's poems, stories, essays and translations have appeared in dozens of journals. His most recent book Sappho’s Island, published by Littoral Press in 2022, follows Chopsticks, published by Pygmy Forest Press. Smith believes that poetry hails from some Dodge City of the heart—before the Marshal arrives, when it’s still a wild frontier town. He is firmly convinced that if Hänsel and Gretel had dropped poems instead of pumpernickel along the path through the forest, they could easily have found their way back home from the gumdrop cottage of the witch. Much of his life has been passed abroad, in Germany, Greece, and Japan. Smith has worked at a variety of jobs, including taking care of a defunct monastery on an Aegean island, moving mummies for a travelling exhibit of Egyptian art, picking tobacco, and teaching English at the Fort Bragg branch of College of the Redwoods. Over the past thirty years he’s been steaming open letters posted by the plants, animals and minerals of the Mendocino coast to read the vital messages hidden inside. |
