Cartwheels on the Sky features Gualala Poet Dana Teen Lomax. Dana is fourth-generation Californian, who has lived on the southern Mendocino Coast for nearly three years. She currently serves as the 2021-2022 Poet-in-Residence at the Gualala Arts Center.
The daughter of a painter and a builder, Lomax began writing poetry as a child and remembers melting crayons in her bedroom and drawing poems around the swirls of color as a way of dealing with her parents’ divorce. Early on, she knew that language had the ability to help people understand experience, help us sort, uncover, and/or complicate how we see the world. In high school, she borrowed a copy of e.e. cumming’s selected poems at the local library, and the possibilities on the page shifted tremendously for her. Lomax began to see poetry as a deep conversation with form, with the reader, with ways of directing experience and connecting with others in intimate ways.
A lecturer at San Francisco State University for over two decades, Lomax has taught writing in schools, prisons, libraries, hospitals, pubs, and farmers’ markets. She served as the Director of Small Press Traffic, the Human Rights and Equity Chair for her teacher’s union, and as a traveling poet-teacher with the Performing Arts Workshop, the William James Association, and California Poets in the Schools.
To date, Lomax has published three large scale editorial projects and three books of poetry as well as numerous other chapbooks, broadsides, and discreet poems. Her most recent anthology includes work from every US state, district, territory, and commonwealth and is entitled THE BEAUTIFUL: Poets Reimagine a Nation, published by Gualala Arts Center. Lomax also edited Kindergarde: Poems, Plays, Stories, and Songs for Children which received a Creative Work Fund Grant as well as the Lion and Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Literature from John Hopkins University Press. High points in Lomax’s career include when her book, Disclosure, was chosen by the Guerilla Girls as one of their favorite poetry books of the year, and the broadside printing of her poem “Lullaby” by Arion Press in San Francisco.
Her current project, -unnamed-relation-, considers the links and jumps between ideas, people, and ourselves in the world. Poems from this manuscript have been published in the American Poetry Review, The Elderly, and The Pi Review, among others. She is also working on completing a graphic novel with a former middle school student, Peyton Alexander, making poem-films, writing a musical with her identical twin sister, and completing a short documentary about inequity in California’s education system.
Find out more about Lomax’s work at danateenlomax.com
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Originally aired 7-7:30pm, Saturday, July 2 at 88.3, KGUA FM Gualala. Also streams live at https://kgua.org
