Mountain Words Literary Festival: “Belle Turnbull: On the Life & Work of an American Master.” Close reading & lecture with David Rothman
Thursday, May 26
2:30 – 4 pm
As part of your festival pass, or $25
Belle Turnbull (1881-1970) may be the greatest poet ever to come out of Colorado. She attended Vassar (Class of 1904) and then spent her career teaching English at the Colorado Springs High School. She retired in 1937, and then, with her partner the novelist Helen Rich, moved first to Frisco and then shortly thereafter to Breckenridge when it was a declining mining town. It was here that she found her subject and voice, becoming our first great lyrical poet of the Rocky Mountain alpine sublime, along with the first great narrative poet of the region, creating, in her book-length poem Goldboat, a story about mining that feels as gritty, beautiful and complex as life itself. Join us as we explore the work of a Colorado poet who deserves to be in the Library of America.
Long-time Crested Butte resident David J. Rothman has won a Pushcart prize in poetry, served as Poet Laureate of Colorado’s Western Slope and as Resident Poet of Colorado Public Radio, and been a finalist for the Colorado Book Award in Poetry twice. The author of many books and the former director of Western’s MFA in Creative Writing, he is the author, with Jeffrey R. Villines, of Belle Turnbull: On the Life & Work of an American Master, a volume in the Unsung Masters Series from Pleiades Press and Gulf Coast.