2022-2024 Poet Laureate Inauguration: Elizabeth Herron

282 South High Street,Sebastopol CA 95472

30 July, 2022

Description

The Sonoma County Poet Laureate Selection Committee is proud to announce that Elizabeth C. Herron has been named Sonoma County Poet Laureate 2022-2024 from a field of gifted and well-qualified finalists. Her term runs from August 2022 through July 2024. Every Poet Laureate is a Sonoma County resident whose poetry manifests a high degree of excellence, who has produced a critically acclaimed body of work, and who has demonstrated a commitment to the literary arts in Sonoma County. After attending the University of Hawaii, Elizabeth earned a Masters in Counseling at San Francisco State University. She studied the origin of aesthetic behavior, and received a PhD in Psychology from the University for Integrative Learning, a fleeting distance-learning program founded by graduates of the Harvard School of Education. She joined the Counseling Center at Sonoma State University and subsequently moved to a faculty position, teaching Creative Writing, Creativity and Contemplative Practice, and Ecological Identity. Elizabeth writes poetry and articles on art and ecology, the role of art in society, and the importance of natural systems and biodiversity in the physical and spiritual well being of individuals, communities, and the planet. The theme of her tenure as Sonoma county poet laureate is Being Brave. Herron’s artistic work includes collaboration with other poets, musicians and visual artists for performances and print projects. She writes essays as well as poetry, and her work appears in literary journals and magazines including Reflections, West Marin Review, Free State Review, Silk Road, Orion, Parabola, Ions, Comstock Review, Eco-Citizen and Jung Journal. Her poetry shaped itself into four full-length manuscripts, nine books, as well as various chapbooks. Insistent Grace, published a year and a half ago by Fernwood Press brings together poems of the natural world –largely watershed poems. Her forthcoming book (also from Fernwood) is a gathering of poems written about the ramifications of climate change and presented in a somewhat chronological arrangement, going back to a log of Pacific Coast environmental data begun over a decade ago and completed in a long poem titled Report (previously published by dPress as a chapbook). Her current manuscript under-construction brings together more personal poems that have to do with family and domestic life as well as how those are impacted by global events such as the war in Ukraine The Sebastopol Center for the Arts, along with the Poet Laureate Selection Committee, invites the public to a reception on July, 2022 at 4PM. We’ll be honoring our outgoing Poet Laureate, Phyllis Meshulam, our new Laureate, Elizabeth. Register for the reception by RSVPing here.