“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 her fellowship project.
Worn Smooth Between Devourings travels through fears of ecological devastation and national and global tragedy. The collection investigates a confessed gaze for contentment with the conviction of quiet rebellion. Through repeating distance, multiplying birds, and crisscrossing storylines, the poems offer a testament to land and lack, grief, long love, faith and endurance.
“Camp applies a tactile and inventive touch…”
An Eye in Each Square pushes back against our era’s barbed and shifting networks of power and atrocities. This collection is part social critique, part imaginative biography of enigmatic painter Agnes Martin, and part treatise on the multiplicities of the natural world. Through lyrical poems, An Eye in Each Square asks the reader to hold the conscience of the world, but also to claim what we might need most—the risky and urgent space of comfort.
Review at EcoTheo
“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
“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