Summer Wood Joins Editorial Board
Prize-winning novelist and creative writing teacher Summer Wood has joined the editorial board of Voices from the American Land, effective August 1, 2010. In addition to editing chapbooks, Summer will direct program development activities for the organization. She is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, Arroyo (Chronicle Books). Her current novel, Wrecker, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in February 2011. Summer has taught creative writing at the University of New Mexico's Taos Summer Writing Conference, and has served as guest writer at the University of California, Davis. She has studied at Stanford University and the University of New Mexico, and has received many awards for her work, notably the $50,000 “Gift of Freedom” award from A Room of Her Own Foundation. Summer Wood lives in San Cristobal, New Mexico. With her partner Kathy Namba, she has raised three sons and served as a foster parent through New Mexico's Child Protection Services. For more, see her blog for readers and writers who care about place at www.thewhereofit.com. (Posted 7-22-10.)

A New Partner for Voices
In order to provide a corporate home and tax-exempt status for Voices from the American Land, the program's editorial board and the board of directors of The Center for the Study of Place, Inc.,  have agreed that the Center will become fiscal agent and corporate sponsor for Voices from the American Land effective immediately. New Mexico Literary Arts provided tax-exempt status on a temporary basis during the start-up period. The Center, which was co-founded by Voices editor Charles Little in 1990, operates retreat centers for authors; sponsors literary, art, and photography programs; conducts place-oriented research; and organizes forums and tours relating to landscape design and cultural geography. The Center's board includes its founder, George F. Thompson, a publisher and Voices advisor; Thomas C. Hunt, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Platteville; Lucy Lippard, an art critic and author from Galisteo, N.M.; Franklin T. Roberts, a principal in an accounting firm in Raleigh, N.C.; Martha A. Strawn, Professor Emerita, University of North Carolina, Charlotte; Joan Woodward, Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of California, Pomona; and William Wylie, Associate Professor of Art, University of Virginia, Charlotte. The Center, a 501(c)(3) organization, is incorporated in New Mexico, with offices in Santa Fe and Staunton, Virginia. (Posted 6-7-10.)

Challenge Grant
We are pleased to announce that Voices from the American Land has received its first major grant. The grant, from a large national foundation, provides matching funds for a much-needed part-time staff and the wherewithal to promote the Voices program to new audiences both locally and nationally. According to the terms of the grant, donations from “Voices Associates” (our member-supporters) as well from foundations and organizations can, in effect, be doubled. (Posted 2-12-10.)

Chapbooks on the Way
Two new chapbook projects are now in work. In the Driftless Area, in southwestern Wisconsin, Patricia Monaghan, a prize-winning poet who teaches at DePaul and has a small farm in Black Earth, is developing a suite of poems tentatively entitled “The Grace of Ancient Land.” Her chapbook will, she says, “deal with this nourishing landscape of small farms, wildling orchards, and hardy vineyards,” in a way that makes one of America's least-known magical landscapes come alive. The area is called “driftless” because 10,000 years ago the Wisconsin Glacier unaccountably parted, leaving the original landscape undrifted with glacial till and therefore characterized by deep gorges, fast rivers, tall trees, and soils suitable for small farms, but not industrial agriculture. Also on the way is a chapbook by the much-admired poet and historian of the Hispanic Southwest, E. A. (“Tony”) Mares. A former Voices editor, Tony Mares’s focus is on the Rio Grande, the great river that ties the natural and cultural history of New Mexico together. (Posted 2-12-10.)