I’ve written haiku most of my life and studied poetry in college earning a BFA with a double major in art and literature. Writing about photography (technically and conceptually) for over twenty-five years, the creative writer in me grew increasingly hungry to escape the limits of those genres.

In 2019, during the first Youth Climate Strike, I saw a young poetess make a video presentation and have even more emotional impact than 45th vice-president Al Gore as he trained us to make effective presentations through his Climate Reality Leadership Corps. Her performance helped me understand that I didn’t need to change my social activism but rather intensify the ways my artworks are socially active.

In 2020 Covid-19 shut down my in-person digital printing workshop and made it possible for me to attend Richard Blanco’s chapbook workshop offered online the same week. I had a thirty-year bucket list item to write a series of love poems to the earth and I saw this as an opportunity to complete it. It became much more than that. I hadn’t planned to write a poem a day for a year – or be trained as a voice actor – but that is what happened. Poetry helped me survive and thrive during the Great Pause. Poetry has become a daily part of my spiritual practice and an integral part of the ecosystem of my creativity. For me, the visual and the verbal are inseparable.

In 2021, a year after the fifth inaugural poet Richard Blanco’s workshop, I learned the young woman who had impressed me so much would become the next inaugural poet Amanda Gorman.

Whether visual or verbal, my passion is ecopoetry (making art as a way of understanding earth) and ekphrasis (making art as a way of understanding art), though it may only be language itself that separates art from earth or us.