By Victoria (Tori) Martinez What is a poet? This is a question I’ve asked myself many times over the years. What I discovered is that the answer to that question is different for everyone. So, I gathered lines of poetry, music, and quotes from some of the greats throughout history and used them to create a poem about what I think a poet is. The poem below is included in my upcoming poetry collection “World of the Chronic.” I hope you look up some of the poets I refer to. A POET [i]Poets...

By Victoria (Tori) Martinez We've come to the end of National Poetry Month. I want to give myself time to reflect on what I wrote, what I edited, and most of all time spent with community around poetry. I invite you to take some time and reflect on your own experiences as well. It never ceases to amaze me how much I learn from young people. Their passion and excitement are contagious. And that includes youth from the age of five years old, to young adults. This past month I had the...

By Victoria (Tori) Martinez At the start of my journey doing community work in rural Colorado I didn't set out to write about it. In fact, I wasn't sure where this journey was going to lead me. After over a decade of listening, here's what I learned. The work started out about trying to make rural communities better, but the longer I did the work the more I came to realize it was about something more. It was about connecting rural communities and the people in those communities. Those very...