Welcome to Rachel Chidester of Utah Poetry Slam

RACHEL CHIDESTER is a native of Utah who gained interest in poetry as a teenager in high school while looking for her voice. Poetry Coach Chris Atkin got her into the competitive scene. After graduating from The New York Institute of Art and Design, Rachel joined Utah Poetry Slam, Rocky Mountain Poets, and Utah State Poetry Society to pursue her love of poetry and competition. She will be representing Utah while competing on a national stage in the Blackberry Peach National Prizes for Poetry: Spoken and Heard this coming October in Daytona Beach, Florida. (For more info, see https://www.nfsps.com/BBP3Guidelines.html) 

Her first chatbook The Cost of Living in Utah is Good Poetry has been published and will be available at Amazon. Rachel is also a locally awarded Visual Artist & an awarded Civic Engagement Advocate. Welcome to our group.

 

HUMILITY by Rachel Chidester

                              Humility is the butterfly we catch as children

                              And crush its wings

                              In an effort to play.

                              But it's the only way

                              to metamorphose

                              into peaceful creatures. 

Meet Our New Poet Laureate of Utah

LISA BICKMORE was born in Dover, Delaware, and grew up living all over the United States and in Japan. She earned a B.A. and an M.A. from Brigham Young University and is Professor Emeritus of English at Salt Lake Community College, where she was the recipient of the SLCC Foundation Teaching Excellence Award in 2006. At SLCC, she taught writing of all sorts, as well as publication studies, and is one of the founders of the SLCC Publication Center. As of 2019, she is the founder of the new nonprofit Lightscatter Press, which published its first book in April of 2021. 

We give her a warm welcome as an honorary member of the Utah State Poetry Society! She is the author of three books of poems: Haste (Signature Books, 1994), flicker, which won the 2014 Antivenom Prize from Elixir Press, and Ephemerist (Red Mountain Press, June 2017).Read her published poem O Take and Seal It from the online journal Psaltery & Lyre. See https://psalteryandlyre.org/2021/04/12/o-take-and-seal-it/  

Meet Willy Palomo of Utah Slam Poetry Chapter

WILLY PALOMO (he/they/she) is the son of two immigrants from El Salvador. In 2018, he graduated with an MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and an MFA in Poetry from Indiana University. Writings can be found in Best New Poets 2018, Latino Rebels, Antologia de Posguerra, The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States, and more. He is a founding member of Plumas Colectiva, a literary and art collective of Latin creators in the 801. He is the Director of the Utah Humanities Book Festival and President of the newest UTSPS Chapter-UTAH POETRY SLAM. More info on how to join this group, see https://www.utahpoets.com/chapter-utah-poetry-slam/

   

                                    How I learned to read by Willy Palomo  

¿Are you mi Mama? 

beckoned the birdie in our favorite book. 

Cuddled and coddled, I want to brag, 

decirte that she read to me the most,

every night. Except if you ask Mama, it was 

faith, not education, not knowledge, but the Holy 

Ghost which gave her the power to understand the scriptures, when she,

humiliated, confessed to the missionaries she didn’t know how to read. 

It never occurred to me until 

just now that if her story is true, then she never actually read me anything as a 

kid. She must have looked at 

letters & saw nothing but another endless 

maze of streets & signs, another 

nameless map of New York, left to navigate

on pure faith and instinct. She’d interpret 

pictures the same way she’d memorize streets the same way she’d read

quiet gringos, smirking as she passed. In 1st grade, I made it my goal to teach her to

read. I took out all our books in front of guests, 

spilling a library of shame into the room. I’d correct her English 

the same way I’d correct her children’s stories the same way I now write her story 

under a language she will never call home. There’s not a word for her

verdad in English, no matter how many times I try 

write it down. From a country where poets are 

executed & literacy meant little more than signing away

your name next to an X, she taught me to walk without 

zapatos, to read without an alphabet shackling my tongue.

 

Steven Leitch UTSPS President graduates...

Sad news...too many of our poets are leaving us this year: our sweet energetic UTSPS president Steven Leitch graduated Jan 31, 2022. His leadership and enthusiasm will be greatly missed. Here's a blog about him. More details on his funeral, etc. soon.