Photo: Acting Interim President Jack Crocker reads his poetry to the audience at the WNMU National Poetry Month Celebration.
SILVER CITY, NM—Western New Mexico University celebrated National Poetry Month with a gathering in J. Cloyd Miller Library, April 10, 2025.
Co-hosted by Miller Library and the Department of Humanities, the celebration included readings by published and student poets, as well as the announcement of this year’s winners of the Creative Writing Award.
Library Director Samantha Johnson welcomed attendees to the event. National Poetry Month, she said, “gives us a framework to think about what a poem is for.” Audience members shared their own impressions of the purpose of poetry, mentioning expression, communication and exploration.
WNMU Writer-in-Residence JJ Amaworo Wilson also spoke at the event. “Poetry stops time,” he said. “The poet pauses to linger on something worth looking at closely.”
“Poetry for me has always been a consolation for life’s woes,” Wilson added.
WNMU Provost and Executive Vice President Jack Crocker was the first poet to read at the event. The first poem he read, “Yard Art,” explored nature’s tendency toward entropy, despite humans’ attempts to impose order on it.
Crocker was followed by Assistant Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Kate Oubre, who announced the Creative Writing Award Winners: Anais Orantez Middleton and Katie Ortiz y Pino, who won for prose, and Arielle Certosimo and Natalee Drissell, who won for poetry. Orantez, Certosimo and Drissell all read excerpts from their award-winning works.
Other readers at the event included students in Associate Professor Heather Frankland’s English 099 class, Assistant Professor Gregory Robinson-Guerra, and Robinson-Guerra’s students, who read in both English and Spanish. Frankland, who serves as Silver City and Grant County Poet Laureate, read from her chapbook, Midwest Musings.
The audience also heard from two Grant County poets, Cindy McCain and Cheryl Howard, and from students from Aldo Leopold Charter School.