Valerie Martinez – författare

Count is a powerful book-length poem that reckons with the heartbreaking reality of climate change. Forty-three sections of myth-gathering, flora and fauna, accounts of climate devastation, personal narratives, witnessing, references to works of eco-art, and evocations of children unfold over the course of the book, creating a deeply nuanced image of the current climate crisis. Central to this vital work of ecopoetry is the idea of counting—counting down to the extinction of a species, counting the wonders of the natural world, counting our way back to the balance that is required to save ourselves from climate destruction. Filled with a sense of grief and sorrow for the current state of the planet, Count also offers a glimmering hope that future generations will restore our damaged environment.With sections that vary between poetry, science, Indigenous storytelling, numerical measurement, and narration, Valerie Martínez’s new work results in an epic panorama infused with the timely urgency of facing an apocalyptic future. This beautiful, tragic, and unusual poem is a testimonial, a warning, and a call to action that will captivate lovers of contemporary poetry and ecopoetry, environmentalists, and climate activists alike. Count skillfully calls on our collective desire to leave a livable world, filled with the potential for healing, as a legacy to the generations of children that come after us.

Open-Hearted Horizon: An Albuquerque Poetry Anthology invites you into a poetic conversation. The anthology includes a wide range of Albuquerque-based poets and poems that are inspired--directly, associatively, obliquely--by Albuquerque, New Mexico, as a place and as a community. Anthologies commonly celebrate a multitude of voices. Because this one is place-based, we hope you will feel drawn into a circle that deepens your sense of place and people, of contexts and cultures, whether you know Albuquerque or not. Because the Albuquerque poetry community is characterized not only by its support for individual writers but also by a strong impulse toward creative collaboration, Open-Hearted Horizon features poems in multiple voices. In addition to poems by individual poets, this collection also features collaborative works, including those by the EKCO collective and one that features a line from every poem in the anthology. Overall, the collection invites you to experience Albuquerque in its richness, diversity, and depth.

During her two-year tenure as Santa Fe’s Poet Laureate, award-winning poet Valerie Martínez appeared at over 50 public events—in schools, museums, cafés, galleries; in public parks and local banks and libraries; for children, youth, adults, and families. While traversing the city, she wrote about it—occasional poems, meditations, narratives, lyric poems that capture the present and past of the capital city and its people, all collected here, in this volume. The title poem imagines the creation of the land and its people and unfolds forward to the present. “Blue Winding, Blue Way” watches the Santa Fe River as it threads through the city. “History, Apology” tries to grapple with complex issues of history and race, and “Days Like This” captures the whimsy and resonance of the annual Pet Parade. There is a poem for everyone in this book, and those who love Santa Fe (residents and visitors, alike) will trace the city’s streets as they read, find themselves at familiar street corners and buildings, and navigate the historical, cultural and social issues that lie at the center of community life. Drawings by Linda Swanson (whose work is in the permanent collections of The Brooklyn Museum and The Newark Museum) accompany the poems and capture the tenderness and beauty of families. VALERIE MARTINEZ is the author of four books of poetry and one book of translations (selected poems of Uruguay’s Delmira Agustini). Her poems have appeared widely in journals, anthologies and magazines. She was the Poet Laureate for the City of Santa Fe from March 2008 to March 2010.

This book reports on and analyses the Integrated Language Learning & Social Awareness Project, a unique project in the field of Foreign Language Learning and Telecollaboration till now in the world. It takes the existing research on telecollaborative learning, content and language integrated learning and e-learning and combines them into one coherent concept in which language acquisition and enhancement takes place through task-led research on the specific issue of “Healthy Cities” by targeting language learners from around the world. The book delivers insights into the planning and the development of the project including collaborative task design and its underlying theoretical and research frameworks. It then goes on to reflect on how these underlying frameworks are developed further to broaden the existing paradigms of research in the field of telecollaborative language learning.