NMSPS Annual Meeting & State Convention
Saturday, April 22, 2023, 8:00am to 5:00pm
NMSPS Annual General Meeting
9:00 – 10:00 a.m.
Open to NMSPS Members in Good Standing only.
No admission fee…more
NMSPS State Convention Program
Theme: Full Steam Ahead
10:00 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.
Brief Convention Schedule (Expanded Version Here)
Activities will run 9-5, but the HLA and courtyard will be accessible 8-8 for setup and cleanup.
8:00 a.m. Salon Ortega (ballroom) Arrival and set up at HLA
8:30 a.m. Coffee and Chat Portico outside Salon Ortega.
9:00 -10:00 a.m. NMSPS Annual Meeting and Election in Salon.
10:00- 11:00 a.m. Poesía en Nuevo México in the Salon
11:15 – 12:45 Haiku/Hang Ten Slam on Fountain Courtyard Stage
11:30a.m.-3:00 p.m. Food Trucks stationed in Circle Drive parking lot.
1:00 – 2:30 p.m. Poetry & Art of Nature Walk and Workshop. Meet at Circle Drive.
2:30 p.m. Poet Tree Installation (Hanging of children’s art near HLA).
1:00-2:15 p.m. “Keystone Species: Guardians of the Eco-verse” workshop. Salon
3:00-4:00 p.m. Free Time to roam, rest, recite, or rehearse
4:00-5:00 p.m. Youth Slam Finals on Courtyard Stage
5:00-6:00 p.m. Conclusion of Youth Slam, Cleanup
📄 Download a PDF of the brief schedule.
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🔔 Click to Register and Pay by midnight April 20! 🔔
Convention Schedule – Expanded
8:00 a.m.
Warm up with a hot cuppa at the Courtyard Coffee Cart (Portico)
9:00 a.m.
NMSPS General Meeting: Election results, awards and plans in the works for the next two years.
10:00 a.m.
Celebrity Panel with ABQ Poet Laureate Anna Martinez, Poet prodigy Sarita Sol Gonzalez, and all-ages poetry excursion guide JC Wayne. Hear their poetry “herstories” and adventures. Moderated by NHCC Director of History & Literary Arts, Dr./Ms. Carson Morris.
11:15 a.m.
Haiku/Hang 10 Slam, emceed by Marcial Delgado, last year’s NMSPS delegate to the NFSPS’ inaugural BlackBerry Peach National Slam in Daytona, FL. Round up all those old haiku that never saw daylight (or those that did), plus the ten-words-or-less tiny poems you wrote for the Poets’ Picnics, and enter this informal, fun-filled Slam on the Courtyard Stage. Scott Wiggerman says it’s okay to recycle your Poets’ Picnic entries. Classical haiku welcome, but so are the weird or funny, like cryptid haiku. Bring lots of poems. It takes 5 poems for one round. Why the “Hang 10” moniker? We may hang them in the Courtyard’s catalpa grove.
12:00 Noon
Choose your own adventure! Stick around for the Haiku/Hang 10 Slam; check out the free exhibits offered by the NHCC’s Día de Familia, which starts at 11:00 a.m.; get lunch from one of the Food Trucks scheduled to be there and join friends on the HLA outdoor patio; or bring your own picnic and gather for small read-arounds or open mics in the many nooks and crannies or grassy parks on the grounds of the NHCC campus. Just be sure that by 1:00p.m. you have made your choice as to which of two concurrent events you will attend next. Will it be …
1:00 p.m. to 2:15 p.m.
Ekphrastic workshop on “Keystone Species: Guardians of the Eco-verse,” facilitated by RGV chair Kuan Tikkun in Salon Ortega (ballroom). This workshop will start with a short Power Point introduction to six keystone species, those organisms that keep an ecosystem sustainable and balanced. It will then break into work groups for discussion and poetry/art production for each of the species; and will conclude with sharing of art, poetry or insights generated by workshop participants. Or, if you are ambulatory and wore your walking shoes, will you choose…
1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.
Guided Poetry and Art of Nature adventure walk. JC Wayne will lead a multigenerational group that will gather at the Circle Drive, then take a short stroll into the adjacent Bosque Park, a designated Albuquerque Open Space area. During the walk, she will guide a playful, interactive discovery of art in the nature and creatures encountered by the group. Poems may be created during or after the walk, and they will probably be transformed into art for outdoor display. They will come back to the Education Building on the NHCC campus to create that art.
2:30 p.m.
Children will hang their biodegradable poetry/art in the Poet-Tree Grove between the Education Bldg. and the HLA Bldg, where it will remain to charm future visitors to the Center.
3:00 p.m.
NHCC-presented film in the Performing Arts Bldg. Open to all. Or, relax, rehearse or read-around while you get ready for the…
4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
NMSPS Youth Slam Poetry Finals to pick the Society’s delegate to win the title of National Youth Slam Champion at the NFSPS BlackBerry Peach National SLAM/Youth Mini-Festival in Des Moines, IA, June 23, 2023. Albuquerque Poet Laureate (2016-18) Manny Gonzalez will perform his own poetry on the Courtyard Stage of the HLA Bidg, and will then emcee the Youth Slam. This group will likely have a good proportion of young children in it, and JC welcomes adult volunteers to help keep the children safely “corralled.”
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ABQ Poet Laureate Anna Martinez
About the 2022-2024 Poet Laureate: Anna Martinez
For Anna C. Martinez, poetry matters because it is the most accessible and resonant form of art politic and history, requiring nothing more than pen, paper, and the vision of the poet. Anyone at any age and from any economic background can impact the discourse in their own community and beyond through the activism of poetry. “It is the vehicle that transported me from a curious child raised in Española (the alleged heroin capital of the world) to the Roundhouse at the NM State legislature as a constitutional attorney and legal analyst. Poetry matters because it is the infrastructure of my life,” Anna says.
Anna is a civil rights attorney, legislative analyst, poet, mother, and grandmother. She was born in Los Angeles to a seamstress and an artist activist at the height of the civil rights movement. She grew up in her parents’ hometown of Española, NM, the undisputed lowrider capital of the world.
Anna was first published in 2014 in anthologies La Palabra: the Word is Woman with Albuquerque Poet Laureate Emeritus Jessica Helen Lopez, and Lowriting: Shots, Rides and Stories from the Chicano Soul with artists such as Lalo Alcaraz, and Gustavo Arellano. Her first book of poetry, Pura Puta, A Poetic Memoir, (Casa Urraca Press), is available on Amazon.
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Sarita Sol Gonzalez
Photo credit: Joel Wigelsworth
Sarita Gonzalez, a.k.a. La Burquenita, has been published in various poetry anthologies. In 2016, she published Burquenita (Swimming With Elephants Publications). She was a featured speaker at Albuquerque TEDxYouth 2015 and a featured performer at TEDxABQ Main Event in 2018. In April of 2016, Sarita was invited by US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera to perform with him at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Sarita was awarded the Albuquerque Hispano Chamber of Commerce 2016 President’s Award for her accomplishments in poetry. She won a 2018 Albuquerque Creative Bravos Award for using her poetry in community outreach. Sarita currently manages and hosts WOC: Women of Color Open Mic at El Chante: Casa de Cultura in Albuquerque. WOC is a monthly poetry open mic plus a featured poet, where the priority is on WOC voices.
She is a senior at the New Mexico School for the Arts and will graduate later this spring.
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JC Wayne
NMSPS Youth Chair
I’m JC Wayne (she/they/lover of friendly first-person bios). As a cartographer of the unseen through poetry, visual art, outdoor creativity adventures and books, I founded The Poartry Project, whose mission is building loving worlds through loving words and art with a focus on inclusively fostering and sharing beauty, perception, insight and discovery. I find particular meaning as a poetry and art play mentor to grades 1-3 youth and to elders as a Certified Creative Aging Teaching Artist. I have a special love of ekphrastic poetry as a visual artist, poet and creator of handmade illustrated Golden Threads of Good Books for Children. I distribute my time among Vermont, Chicago and now New Mexico. I can be found at poartry.org.
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Carson Morris
Dr. Carson Morris, Director of History and Literary Arts, NHCC
Carson Morris has rich experience in the fields of education, history, and cultural diversity gained both at home and abroad; specifically, England, Argentina, and Chile. Before coming to the NHCC, she was Director of Programs at the New Mexico Holocaust Museum and Gellert Center for Education, located next to Albuquerque’s historic El Rey Theater.
Carson has extensive experience in teaching history and languages, developing curriculum, translating, and interpreting at the elementary, middle, and high school levels and at the University of New Mexico. She has served as a juror for multiple book and article prizes for the Latin American Studies Association and on the Committee on LGBT History for the American Historical Association.
Born and reared in Atlanta, Georgia, Carson has resided in Albuquerque since 2004 and now considers it her home. She holds a BA in Spanish; an interdisciplinary MA in Latin American Studies; and a PhD in Latin American and Comparative Gender History, with a specialization in Race and Ethnicity. Her doctoral research in Santiago, Chile, included collecting oral histories as well as working with museums, libraries, and archives.
Carson currently serves as a reviewer for the Journal of Latin American Studies at Oxford University and on the Teacher Advisory Committee for UNM’s Latin American and Iberian Institute. She enjoys reading, dancing, and spending time with her Chilean-American son, and says that she is absolutely thrilled to be working at the NHCC!
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Kuan Tikkun
Kuan Tikkun is a Californian born, reared and educated in her home state. After receiving two degrees in Speech Communications (University of California/Berkeley and San Francisco State) and teaching in California community colleges, she relocated to Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas, She taught there for seven years, becoming a tenured professor. She subsequently moved to the Pacific Northwest, where she worked as a management trainer in California’s Bay Area in the semiconductor and insurance industries and in Spokane, where she opened her own training company. Her specialty is nonviolent communication.
Persistent health issues and Spokane’s polluted environment resulted in Kuan’s becoming disabled and retiring to New Mexico in 1994, She is a charter member of the Rio Grande Valencia (RGV) Poets, which became a chapter of NMSPS in 2006. She currently serves as RGV chair. Kuan lives in Rio Communities, about 35 miles south of Albuquerque in Valencia County.
Kuan specialized in haiku/senryu for many years then branched out into prose poems, limericks, and free form. Still, haiku is her first love, Hafiz and Rumi her go-to poets. Kuan has poems in several regional anthologies.
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Marcial Delgado
Poet, devoted husband and construction worker, Marcial Delgado hosts and organizes the vibrant and welcoming space Voices of the Barrio Open Mic Poetry at El Chante Casa de Cultura in Albuquerque. A modest man, even in publicity releases Marcial calls himself “just a vato from the barrio who fell in love with writing and poetry.”
In 2017, Delgado won the distinction of Albuquerque Slams City Champion. The same year, he and his Albuquerque slam team traveled to Laredo, Texas, where they won the Group Piece Championship at the Southwest Shootout. As a member of Albuquerque’s Mindwell Slam Team, he has competed in tourneys in North Carolina and New York. He was selected by the New Mexico State Poetry Society to be its delegate to the October 2022 NFSPS BlackBerry Peach National Slam Competition in Florida in, where he placed 16th in the nation in a highly competitive field.
The Albuquerque Journal and La Bloga featured the poet and his book Sell Me Insanity (Swimming With Elephants Press), published in 2019.
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Manny Gonzalez
Photo credit: Bob Godwin
About the 2016-2018 Poet Laureate: Manuel González
Born and raised in Albuquerque, Manuel González is a proud Burqueño who began his career in slam poetry, representing his hometown four times nationally as a member of its poetry slam team. Years of experience in Albuquerque’s poetry community prompted Manuel to use slam poetry to help local youth find positive, constructive ways to deal with life’s pressures. He has taught workshops on self-expression through poetry in high schools and at youth detention centers, and he has facilitated art therapy programs to help at-risk and incarcerated youth. In 2014, Manuel started Lowriting at El Chante, a free bi-monthly writer’s group open to all members of the community.
Manuel spent his 2-year term as ABQ Poet Laureate performing at the Albuquerque Museum and bringing a poetry slam program into high schools. Meanwhile, he continued programs to help others heal through poetry. Manuel has appeared on the PBS show, ¡COLORES! and has published several collections of his poetry, including …but my friends call me Burque and Om Boy (Swimming with Elephants Press), as well as Duende de Burque: Albuquerque Poems and Musings (UNM Press). Manuel is currently a teacher/consultant for UNM’s Chicana/Chicano Studies program.
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NMSPS Annual General Meeting
April 22, 2023, 9:00 – 10:00 a.m.
All NMSPS Members are encouraged to attend the Annual General Meeting. There is no registration required and no fee to attend, but you must be a Member in Good Standing, with current dues either paid (for Adult Poets and Lifetime Members) or waived (for Young Adult Poets, Youth Poets, and Complimentary).
If you aren’t sure whether you are a Member in Good Standing, please log into your account by clicking on “Log In” in the top menu on any nmpoetry.com page. If you don’t know your log in info, you can click on “Lost Password” in the bottom right of the “Log In” page and reset your password. If you have any trouble, contact the NMSPS Webmaster. You can also reach us through the Contact Us form.
Please note that the General Meeting is free to members, but the Convention is $20 for members. Click on the little turquoise train at the top right of any page to register for the Convention!
Click to view/download the Annual General Meeting agenda.
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Last updated on April 25, 2023