Keeping the Affirming Flame Alive: an evening of Poetry, Music and Ceremony

Keeping the Affirming Flame Alive with Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Uche Ogbuji and More

Thursday, March 6

Doors: 6:30 pm

Performance: 7:00 pm

Join us for a unique and unforgettable evening with Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Rhythm and Beats with Uche Ogbuji, live music with singer songwriter Greg Luck, Chanting with Art Goodtimes , Jamie Colon-Orelup on drums, Invocation by Wendy Videlock, and the lighting of the affirming flame by The Triple Muse Yoginis.

The Curious Power of Words, a Tedx Talk by Wendy Videlock, poet laureate of Western Colorado. Wendy will deliver the invocation at this special event. Wendy lives at the foot of Thunder Mountain in Western Colorado. Her work appears widely, most notably in Best American Poetry, Poetry Magazine, The New York Times, Hudson Review, O Magazine, Hopkins Rattle and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Keats Soul Making Prize, the Cantor Prize and Fischer Poetry Prize, and the PTBS Sonnet Prize. Wendy directs several literacy programs across Colorado, advocating for the arts in public spaces. Her syndicated newspaper column, The BarefootLaureate, appears across the four corner states. Her books are available wherever books are sold. Wendy believes that language is the invisible influence informing our thoughts, our actions, our perceptions, our relationships and the ways we move in the world. Find out more HERE.

The Art of Changing Metaphors with beloved poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. Rosemerry will be our featured performer. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer lives with her husband and daughter in Placerville, Colorado.

Devoted to helping others explore creative practice, Rosemerry is co-host of Emerging Form, a podcast on creative process, co-founder of Secret Agents of Change (a surreptitious kindness cabal), and co-leader of Soul Writers Circle. She directed the Telluride Writers Guild for ten years and co-hosted Telluride’s Talking Gourds Poetry Club for another ten years.

She has 13 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.

Uche Ogbuji, more properly Úchèńnà Ogbújí, was born in Calabar, Nigeria. He'd lived, among other places, in Egypt and England, but never anywhere longer than 3 years in his life until he came to Colorado. Here he was instantly smitten by the mountain landscape and cultural flavor, and has now settled near Boulder with his wife and four children. Uche is a computer engineer and entrepreneur whose abiding passion is poetry. His chapbook of poems (Aldrich Press, 2013) is a Colorado Book Award Winner, and a Westword Award Winner ("Best Environmental Poetry"). His full-length book of poems Ńchéfù Road (forthcoming in 2020) is winner of the Christopher Smart Prize. Work published worldwide fuses Igbo culture, European classicism, American Mountain West setting, and Hip-Hop.

Art Goodtimes of Norwood will perform.. Art Goodtimes is an American poet, farmer and politician in Colorado. Goodtimes was first elected to the San Miguel County Board of Commissioners in 1996 as a Democrat. He switched to the Green Party of Colorado in 1998[1] and was re-elected in 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012, before retiring in 2016.[2] He is a noted poet and writer of several books[] and the poet laureate of the Telluride Mushroom Festival. He grew up in California and graduated from San Francisco State University in 1970.[3] He has also served as co-chair of the Green Party of Colorado.[4]

Sarah Hutchison.

Host or Publisher TR Presentations