Grand Valley Audubon Society Presents: Before Words there were Birds

(Free to Audubon Members, $10 for non-members)

Before we named the rivers, mapped the mountains, or drew boundaries across the land, there were birds. They were among our first musicians, our first messengers, and perhaps our first poets.

The evening takes its inspiration from ravens and crows, owls and hawks, songbirds and migrating flocks—and from the ancient human impulse to listen closely to the more-than-human world. Poems and stories will mingle with breath, rhythm, flute song, humor, silence, and the elemental heartbeat of the drum.

Join us for an evening that is lively, flighty, earthy, and unexpected—a celebration of birds not simply as objects of observation, but as neighbors, teachers, fellow travelers, and wild presences that have accompanied human beings since before memory.

Books and booksignings by our performers available for sale at this event.

Wendy Videlock is an award winning poet living on the edge of a mesa in Western Colorado. Her work appears widely, most notably in O Magazine, The New York Times, Dark Horse, Poetry Magazine, Best American Poetry, Hudson Review and Rattle. Her syndicated newspaper column, Word From the West appears in newspapers and magazines across the four corner states. Her books are available wherever books are sold. Her newest book, Desert Kin: Speaking Animal in the American Southwest: Essays and Poems (Lithic Press) will be released in Sept of 2026.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer has 15 collections of poetry, and her work has appeared in O Magazine, A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, American Life in Poetry, on fences, in back alleys, on Carnegie Hall Stage and on hundreds of river rocks she leaves around town. Her poems have been used for choral works by composers Paul Fowler and Jeffrey Nytch and performed around America. Her 2020 collection, Hush, won the Halcyon prize. Naked for Tea was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. Other books include Even Now, The Less I Hold and If You Listen, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.

Daiva Chesonis is a fiercely proud Baltimore-born daughter of Lithuanian immigrants. After receiving a degree in Russian Studies in 1988, she started building chairlifts forTelluride’s gondola transportation system. Since then, she's been a snowboard instructor, Art Director, founder of the Telluride AIDS Benefit Fashion Show, co-founder of the Telluride Literary Arts Festival, and a traveling minstrel for Mountainfilm on Tour. In 2005, she earned an M.A. in Diplomacy and International Conflict Resolution. Spare time is spent paddleboarding, wandering local forests on the hunt for mushrooms, and wandering the canyon country near her home in Norwood, where she lives with her writer husband, Craig Childs.

Well into adulthood and despite decades of fighting it, Ellen Metrick began to accept that she was a relatively self-sufficient jane-of-many-trades. She has taught school, run rivers for a living, made and shoveled snow, lived in her truck and a tipi, built a straw bale home with her late husband and raised a lovely, thoughtful and creative human being. She's tried to fix her lawnmower. Poetry has been her lifeblood since before she can remember. Ellen has two published books of poetry: Poetisattva (2000) and Teasing out the Divine (2012). She dabbles in creative nonfiction, writes for local newspapers and magazines and is in love. Life is good for Ellen. Except for that lawnmower.