Private Mentorship with Kim Noriega

BIO

Kim Noriega is the author of the poetry collection, Name Me published by Fortunate Daughter Press. Her poems have appeared in textbooks, journals, and anthologies including: American Life in Poetry, Paris-Atlantic, Split Lip, and The Tishman Review. She was the winner of the San Miguel Literary Sala’s Flash Nonfiction Prize and a finalist for the Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize, the Joy Harjo Prize in Poetry, and the James Baker-Hall Memorial Poetry Prize. Kim was selected as one of thirty international poets to participate in the 2018 Visible Poetry Project. She won the Urban Library Council’s Innovator Prize and was one of eight finalists for the Toyota National Family Teacher of the Year Award.

ARTIST & TEACHING STATEMENT

When I was a teenager, I’d write angst-ridden poetry in English class, then cut my other classes and go to the public library. 

That’s a pretty good description of me—the girl who cuts class to go to the library. Funny how we instinctively find our niche. I’ve had other jobs, but I really found my groove working at the library. After 29 years, I still love walking through the stacks after closing, brushing my fingers along rows of neatly faced spines, breathing in book-scent. 

The library is where I discovered my passion for teaching, literacy, social justice, and intellectual freedom. For the past twelve years, I’ve run San Diego Public Library’s family literacy program which helps low-literate adults break the cycle of illiteracy. I’ve become quite close with the families in our program. I’ve seen their lives transformed by literacy. 

What else should you know about me? I taught writing to newly sober women in a recovery home for seven years. I love teaching adults online through Poetry Barn and I’m absolutely smitten with my students in the Barn’s new online high-school-level workshop. Helping people grow into their full potential is magical. Teaching is the essential counterbalance in my life to the heavy weight of the state of our world. 

As for my own writing process, sometimes I write in fits and starts, others, like a woman possessed. I have a gorgeous antique writing desk, but I usually write stretched out on the couch with my cat trying to bite my pen. While I may not write every day, I am a daily reader. (Same couch, happier cat.)  I can’t imagine a day without reading—or coffee. 

I make a kick-ass cup of coffee! And, thanks to my friend Sarah, a superb curry. Also, feral cats have broken my heart wide open, I love the color red, and taking voice lessons has made me a better writer. I speak a little Spanish and a little more French. My daughter thinks I’m the world’s greatest mom. I’m trying to live by Mary Oliver’s directive in her poem, “Sometimes”: 

Instructions for living a life:/Pay attention./Be amazed./Tell about it. 

STACKED BESIDE READING COUCH

• M Train by Patti Smith

• Upstream by Mary Oliver

• Blessing the Boats by Lucille Clifton

• Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón

• The Golden Shovel Anthology edited by Peter Kahn, Ravi Shankar, Patricia Smith

• Morris Mickelwhite and the Tangerine Dress by Christine Baldacchino

SPECIAL INTERESTS

Hybrid-genres, the long poem, diction, white space & lineation, recommended reading, poems that deal with highly-charged or personally-challenging subject matter.

INFLUENCES

Lucille Clifton, Terrance Hayes, Wendell Berry, H.D., Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Ellen Bass, Natasha Trethewey 

TESTIMONIALS

“I am honored and delighted to have worked with Kim Noriega, whom, as mentor and coach, helped shape an unruly batch of poems into a coherent manuscript of what I hope will become my second published poetry collection. Having taken a workshop from her at the Poetry Barn, I intuited we'd be a great fit, and boy was I correct. She's smart, direct, funny, and empathetic. She knows poetry in a very broad sense and was able to understand my work with all its quirks and multiplicity of styles, while at the same time gently noting where things might have, shall we say, gone astray.  If you're on the prowl for a mentor, Kim is a terrific option.”

Kim Peter Kovac, Author of Border Sounds: Poems & Dispatches from Other Timezones