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/