Judyth Hill is a stand-up poet and teacher of poetry, living in amazing and grateful beauty where the Rockies meets the Plains, near Las Vegas, NM. She is a recipient of a four-year Witter Bynner Foundation and a McCune Foundation grant to create and direct Poetry TeenWorks, a poetry/theatre program for Santa Fe teens, and has recently been selected as a New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities “Road Scholar”, touring her lecture, “Dharma Lineage of American Poetry”. Judyth conducts poetry workshops in conjunction with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, NM, teaching writing both on-site, and in their statewide O’Keeffe Outreach Program. She conducts poetry workshops for the International Museum of Folk Art in Santa Fe, presenting poetry workshops based on the exhibits, and producing poetry curricula for their web-site.

She also teaches Full Moon Writing, every month, at Way of the Mountain @ Rockmirth, an 111 acre Art Farm.

Her six published books of poetry, include Baker’s Baedeker, The Goddess Cafe, Hardwired For Love, Presence of Angels, Men Need Space, which is in its second printing, and Black Hollyhock, First Light.

She has recently completed a cookbook for the prestigious Geronimo Restaurant in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to be released in June 2004 from Ten Speed Press in Berkley, CA.

Judyth's next book, The Dharma of Baking, Recipes from the Chocolate Maven, a cookbook with poetry and essays, is forthcoming from Celestial Arts Press in Berkeley, CA.

Her poems are included in numerous anthologies. For seven years, she wrote a well-loved food column for the Albuquerque Journal, her art and travel writing have been widely published. Currently, she is a free-lance writer for the Santa Fean Magazine, the Pasatiempo section of the Santa Fe New Mexican, and writes frequently for the Albuquerque Journal Special Sections.

She is the author of the internationally acclaimed poem, Wage Peace, and was described by the St. Helena Examiner as, "Energy with skin”, and by the Denver Post as a “A tigress with a pen”.

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Judyth Hill: Career Narrative: Living The Writing Life

I often say that I'm from the "Everything Matters" school of writing.

I feel entirely blessed. I have the pleasure and privilege of devoting my time to making and performing poems, working with serious teen poets in an ongoing project funded by the Witter Bynner Poetry Foundation, free-lance journalism, teaching poetry in our museums, and generally making all the important, juicy mistakes of life.

I am dedicated to studying and teaching creative process as the next major phase in the development of the Future Human. All while living seriously rural, on a wild mountain, in a hand made post-and-beam home in the Strike Valleys between Las Vegas and Mora.
It's a life about passion, and choices. And having fun.

I chose New Mexico. Chose her above all others for beauty, for the possibility of preserving still-pristine landscape, air and waters, for her swirl of tangy cultures, and green chile and melted cheese on everything.

My writing, performing and teaching come from my faith in the delicate and intricate connection of our political, emotional, cognitive, spiritual, imaginational bodies, both within the self, and within the social web, to each other.

And all of this connected to our funny bone.

I am blessed; I love to write. I love the balancing of craft and passion, the work behind the work. And then, I love to read it to you.

Because that's what completes the circle of the creative act: it's not "whole and sole" without your presence.

So, Everything Matters:

Being a force for good in the world, keeping a sense of justice and a sense of humor. Knowing to fall in love with each other, good desserts, flocks of wild geese in flight. To notice the Rio when she's running high, the appearance of morning doves and grosbeaks in July, the line breaks in Williams, the melody in Yeats, the instress in Hopkins and the way the columbines and odd blue Western Dayflowers are so abundant in a year of bountiful monsoon season.

To use my mother’s good dishes because she never did, and my own gift with language, because if I don’t, who will?

Making love, dinner and connections. Getting the point. Listening deeply to the music of the ordinary, the wisdom of elders, infants and the night wind moving through Ponderosa pines from my front porch. And singing it back, as best my innate talents and acquired skills will grant me.
Making sure my best keeps getting better.

Admiring the plain, astonishing beauty everywhere present, and not losing sight of the fallen in our barrios, the Middle East, and the AIDS epidemic.

Remembering to show gratitude, forgiveness and a little leg.

Remembering that if it’s true that 90% of success is just showing up, 10% of every effort goes for glory.

So, here I am, ready, willing, able and going for gold.