Two long time New Mexico residents, Georgia Santa Maria and Meriméa Moffit, read original poetry about their lives and experiences in the Land of Enchantment.
Georgia is currently working on The Miami, NM Hippie Mommy Cookbook, about her life on a ranch in Miami, New Mexico in the '70s and 80's, and a book about her experiences running her great-grandfather's "Abercrombie Store" in Anton Chico, New Mexico. a cookbook aka story of her life on the ranch in Miami, NM.. She will also read from her book, Dowsing, that won the Lummox Press chapbook prize in 2017.
She has been an active participant in the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Poetry Communities, reading as a featured poet regularly at open-mikes, and publishing in Malpais Review, Adobe Walls, Mas Tequila Review, and others. Her book of poetry, Lichen Kisses, was published last April, and includes some of her photographs.
She says about her work, "Writing is like stopping to take a photograph: a capture of the moment. An instant of thought or feeling. . . It is a way of leaving my footprints on the Universe. To share with others the basic experience of living - what it is to be alive."
Merimee Moffitt arrived in El Rito, New Mexico, in 1970 in a big shiny green Chrysler full of Vietnam vets, two dogs, their pot dealer, and another girl. She then lived in a cabin south of Vallecitos in the Ortega Mountains and a year later in Taos where her first job was teaching all the school kids from northern NM how to swim at the newly opened Taos community pool.
Many of her first experiences in NM are chronicled in her book of poems Making Little Edens and in her memoir Free Love, Free Fall: Scenes from the West Coast Sixties (also stories of NM). She earned her BA and MA in English from UNM, taught for 22 years in grades 8 through CNM (community college) and has been widely published in local and national journals and reviews.
Merimee is editing and adding to a collection of vignettes written by her younger brother before he died at the age of 49 during the height of the AIDS epidemic. She will also read some new poems and from her other books.
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