About

Carol Darnell Guerrero-Murphy TAAA DAAA

I post here as a lifetime lover of reading and all things language (including octopus and mycelium), and as author of Table Walking at Nighthawk (Ghost Road Press 2007, WILLA Award), Chained Dog Dreams (November 2019), and Bright Path, Dark River (October 2020). (for a selection, see The Missouri Review http://www.missourireview-digital.com/missourireview/fall_2019/?pg=135&pm=2&u1=friend

I am completing a hybrid manuscript written since the fire took all of our stuff, working title Fire and Quench. I hope to be announcing more in 2024.

Updated official biographical note January 2024:

Carol D Guerrero-Murphy has published 3 full length books of poetry:  Bright   Path   Dark   River (October 2020, Colorado Authors League Poetry Award); Chained Dog Dreams (2019 Finishing Line Press); and Table Walking at Nighthawk (Ghost Road Press, 2007, WILLA Award).  The two most recent books turned out to be carrying mild cases of Covid, which required them to be isolated right when they were ready to travel. She has had work in American Poetry Review, Missouri Review, Roanoke Review, Prairie Schooner, Ruah, Southwest Literary Review, Pilgrimmage, and many other journals. Her work earned 2 Pushcart Prize nominations. She returned to Denver in January 2022 after she fled the Marshall Fire in Superior with nothing but her cat and husband, which also impacted those books’ social activities. A long time teacher, coach, and editor for poets ages 3 to 93, in preschools to prisons, in classrooms, zooms, and letters. (PhD English, Denver University.)

         

More from me, first person: I am a professor emerite from Adams State University, Alamosa, after probably 40 years as a teacher from preschool to graduate school levels (please read on, young ‘uns, I am pro youth). I am curious about everything–you know, all the stuff I don’t know–and thrive on sharing ideas with friends virtual and magical, literary, and animal. I understand that surrealism is a school I swim with.

I am affiliate faculty in the Western Colorado University Graduate MFA Program in Creative Writing.

I have had many teachers, including humans, trees, cats, newts, and a profoundly wise mustang. This is a photo of where I used to live–Mt. Blanca is in the background, a massif in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains at the edge of the San Luis Valley. Since 2022, following losing our home in the Marshall Fire, I live in northwest of Denver with photographer David Diaz Guerrero whose photos I shamelessly steal (but you must not). After a life time spent in small towns and rural places I embrace whatever it is we are up to–too many people, all beloved. I hear that in third grade I wrote “Wandering in My Mind”, where I continue to wander, when I am not outdoors in gardens or rockslides or forests wandering or wondering in bookstores and galleries and dance halls and sing-along pubs. I have pretty strong recent diagnoses as having ADD, makes sense.

In more recent poems I am wandering in the grammar of animacy: exploring how to speak of the beings of the earth without objectifying.View all posts by carolgmpoetry.com