V. B. Price earns New Mexico Literary Arts Gratitude Award

New Mexico Literary Arts is delighted to announce that V. B. Price, along with Art Goodtimes, have been awarded the 2021 New Mexico Literary Arts Gratitude Award for contributions to the life of the poetry community in New Mexico and the Southwest.

From the Literary Arts website:

V. B. (Barrett) Price is a passionate and prolific poet, writer and activist. Since 1971, he has published a column once a week, sometimes three times a week, in New Mexico Independent, Century, The Albuquerque Journal and the Albuquerque Tribune, as well as the on-line New Mexico Independent, the New Mexico Mercury and Mercury Messenger—nearly 3,000 essays, and counting.

Barrett is also a generous publisher and editor for other writers. In the 1980s, in Century Magazine and The New Mexico Mercury, he was instrumental in publishing more than 500 (mostly New Mexican) writers. In the 2000s, as editor of the Mary Burritt Christensen Poetry Series at UNM Press, he ushered twenty-eight books of poetry into print. As editor and friend he is generous and forthcoming; any writer who works with Barrett comes away with a better appreciation for what it is s/he does.

Barrett’s personal writing practice springs from a bountiful font. He has written a poem nearly every day since he began publishing in 1962. This November, a sequel to his selected poems 1966 to 2006 Broken and Reset will be published by Casa Urraca Press under the title Polishing the Mountain, Poems 2008 to 2020. Some of his other titles include Albuquerque: A City at the End of the World; The Orphaned Land: New Mexico’s Environment Since the Manhattan Project; Anasazi Architecture and American Design, edited with Baker Morrow; Chaco Body, with photographs by Kirk Giddings; Chaco Trilogy; the Seven Deadly Sins; Myth Waking: The Homeric Hymns, A Modern Sequel; Death Self, poems with paintings by Rini Price and Roma MMI, poems with photographs by Jan Schmitz.

To learn more about Barrett, please visit vbprice.com. You can also read his astute, urgent weekly reflections on politics, culture, human rights and the environment on-line in the Mercury Messenger.