Lauren Camp served as the second New Mexico Poet Laureate from 2022-25, and spearheaded the New Mexico Epic Poem Project, a series of visits to rural communities that will result in broadsides, an exhibit and an anthology.
She is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently In Old Sky, which grew out of her experience as Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park.
Her book, Worn Smooth between Devourings, was featured on New Mexico PBS. The Columbia Daily Tribune said An Eye in Each Square is "perhaps the finest collection of the year." One Hundred Hungers was selected by David Wojahn for the Dorset Prize,[1] and went on to win finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award,[2] the Housatonic Book Award[3] and the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize.[4]
Work
According to Jacqueline Kolosov, "One of Camp’s gifts is her ability to conjure both the historical and the mythic past and the joint terrain they inhabit, with a vividness that, at its best, captures moments infused with both sorrow and joy."[5]
Writing in Poet Lore, Margaret Randall said, "Camp pulls together and makes full sense of the questions that have nudged and troubled her…the places claimed by remembering and forgetting, the ways in which gender inhabits time and place, the identity she holds…"
Publishers Weekly says of Camp's work, “There are smaller surprises that intertwine with this larger narrative… the ideas of loss and forgetting become more evident with each poem.”[6]
Electric Literature, in acknowledging One Hundred Hungers for "7 Books of Poetry by Arab American Women," wrote "Camp is a master of the luscious line... It is one of the most sensuous books you’ll ever read and characteristic of the gorgeousness of her work."[7] In its review of One Hundred Hungers, World Literature Today describes "the oddity of diaspora within diaspora through evocative imagery and diction […] and direct interrogation of political (and personal) drama.”[8]
Washington Independent Review of Books says of Took House, “It’s as if Camp is holding a magnifying glass in the light until the page beneath it catches fire,” and World Literature Today, in an "Editor’s Pick", states, “The ‘sinew and lava’ of both desire and loss pulse right beneath the surface of the poems…”
She is the subject of an episode of Grace Cavalieri'sThe Poet and the Poem for The Library of Congress[9] and a long-form interview by David Naimon on Between the Covers. She has presented her poems at the Mayo Clinic, the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities, The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and the International Studies Institute.
Camp is an inaugural Land Line Resident with Denver Botanic Gardens. She was a juror for the 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and was selected to be one of 100 international artists for 100 Offerings of Peace.
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