“Lauren Camp is not only a talented poet of national renown, but a gifted teacher with exciting ideas about how to engage the people of New Mexico in the writing, reading, and overall enjoyment of poetry.”

— Michelle Laflamme-Childs
Executive Director, New Mexico Arts

Selected as a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow.

Hear Lauren talk about the New Mexico Epic Poem Project. Learn how to bring it to your community.

Look for the coloring and activity book Imagine Nature in libraries across New Mexico. A project of the Department of Cultural Affairs, featuring poems by Lauren Camp and illustrations by 15 artists from around the state.

Poet Lauren Camp was selected as the fourth Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. She spent a month in Grand Canyon exploring the Park‘s pristine natural darkness and night phenomena, as well as the vast power of the Canyon itself. In Old Sky grew out of that experience. This is the first poetry book published by Grand Canyon Conservancy. It includes color photos across and into the Canyon and out to the cosmos, as well as an epic poem assembled from hundreds of responses by visitors to Grand Canyon National Park during the month of Camp’s residency.

As Camp writes in “Arena,”

   The sky is out again, galloping on its inherited ribbon. It’s so easy
   to stand under it: the whole pulse

   of the world, the dead stars, clouds slinking around, thinking rain,
   thinking landless, then giving up on that

   and wandering slow with a thought of tomorrow.

“Lauren Camp was selected to explore through the written word the subtle emotions, aesthetic qualities, and complex thoughts we all feel under the vastness of the night skies. Grand Canyon Conservancy and the National Park Service are excited to facilitate one of the best poetic minds in the country towards Grand Canyon’s pristine natural darkness.”

—Rader Lane, Grand Canyon National Park
Dark Skies Coordinator / Park Ranger

“I’m fully focused on getting the poem exactly the way I need it to be, which is something different from perfection. I am looking for some kind of surprise. I feel a little giddy at the end of a poem. Not because it’s funny, but because it’s done something outside my knowing. ”

—Lauren Camp interviewed by Charlotte Jusinski