Poets Georgia Santa Maria and Merimée Moffitt. Courtesy/Teatro Paraguas TEATRO PARAGUAS News:
Teatro Paraguas presents a poetry reading with Georgia Santa Maria and Merimée Moffitt Sunday, Jan. 27, at Teatro Paraguas, 3205 Calle Marie. Infomation at teatroparaguas.org, or call 505.424.1601.
Two long time New Mexico residents, Santa Maria and Moffit read original poetry about their lives and experiences in the Land of Enchantment.
Santa Maria is working on The Miami, NM Hippie Mommy Cookbook, about her life on a ranch in Miami, N.M. in the ‘70s and 80’s, and a book about her experiences running her great-grandfather’s “Abercrombie Store” in Anton Chico, N.M., a cookbook aka story of her life on the ranch in Miami, NM. She also will read from her book, Dowsing, that won the Lummox Press chapbook prize in 2017.
Santa Maria 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.
“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, she said. “To share with others the basic experience of living – what it is to be alive.”
Moffitt arrived in El Rito, 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 New Mexico how to swim at the newly opened Taos community pool.
Many of her first experiences in New Mexico 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 New Mexico).
Moffitt earned her BA and MA in English from UNM, taught for 22 years in grades 8 through community college and has been widely published in local and national journals and reviews. She 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 also will read some new poems and from her other books.
