For five weeks, we'll immerse ourselves in mindfulness poems from the recently published collection Poetry of Presence (Grayson Books, 2017).

Poets in the collection include Mary Oliver, Naomi Shihab Nye, Wendell Berry, Li-Young Lee, Raymond Carver, Ellen Bass, Lucille Clifton, Octavio Paz, Nikki Giovanni, Kahlil Gibran, Rumi, Billy Collins, Charles Bukowski, Marge Piercy, and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. As the editors say, these are poems that "inspire us to live better, and to make our world better; at the same time, they grant us a taste of being good enough, just as we are, in this world, just as it is."

Each week, we'll read and discuss these writings that, according to Fr. Richard Rohr, invite us to live undefended, poems that lead us into a deeper communion with the world.

Participants will need to purchase a book prior to the class, available for $21.95 online at poetryofpresencebook.com or through Amazon.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer lives with her husband and two children in Placerville, Colorado, on the banks of the wild and undammed San Miguel River. She served as San Miguel County’s first poet laureate (2007-2011) and as Western Slope Poet Laureate (2015-2017).

Devoted to helping others explore their creative potential, Rosemerry is the co-host of Emerging Form, a podcast on creative process (with Christie Aschwanden), co-director of Telluride’s Talking Gourds Poetry Club (with Art Goodtimes) and co-founder of Secret Agents of Change (with Sherry Richert Belul). She also directed the Telluride Writers Guild for ten years.

She teaches and performs poetry for addiction recovery programs, hospice, mindfulness retreats, women’s retreats, teachers and more. Past clients include Camp Coca Cola, Craig Hospital, Business & Professional Women, Deepak Chopra, Think 360, Ah Haa School for the Arts, Desert Dharma, Wilkinson Public Library, Telluride Literary Burlesque and Mesa State University.

She performs as a storyteller, including shows in Aspen at the Wheeler Opera House, at the Taos Storytelling Festival and the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN. Her TEDx talk explores changing our outdated metaphors. She believes in the power of practice and has been writing a poem a day since 2006. Her daily poems can be found at https://ahundredfallingveils.com/.

Favorite themes in her poems include parenting, gardening, the natural world, love, science, thriving/failure and daily life. She has twelve poetry collections, and her work has appeared in O Magazine and on A Prairie Home Companion, on fences in back alleys 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 by the Ars Nova Singers.

Her most recent collection, Hush, won the Halcyon prize and comes out in spring 2020. Naked for Tea was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. Other books include Even Now, The Miracle Already Happening, The Less I Hold (a finalist for the Colorado Book Award) and If You Listen (winner of the EVVY Award). She’s won the Fischer Prize, Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge (four times), the Dwell Press Solstice Prize, the Writer’s Studio Literary Contest (twice), The Blackberry Peach Prize, and has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize.

Since 1994, she’s been singing with Telluride’s 8-member female acapella group Heartbeat, performing jazz, folk, bluegrass and pop songs around the Four Corners region. She also sings nightly while making dinner. Favorite activities: Trail running, Nordic skiing, recovering from trail running, camping, baking, knitting, reading, gardening. She’s been an organic fruit grower, a newspaper and magazine editor, and a parent educator for Parents as Teachers. She’s now writing a novel. She earned her MA in English Language & Linguistics at UW-Madison. One-word mantra: Adjust. Three-word mantra: I’m still learning. www.wordwoman.com