Cartwheels on the Sky with Gualala Poet Dana Teen Lomax

<p>Cartwheels on the Sky features Gualala Poet Dana Teen Lomax. Dana is fourth-generation &nbsp;Californian, who has lived on the southern Mendocino Coast for nearly &nbsp;three years. She currently serves as the 2021-2022 Poet-in-Residence at &nbsp;the Gualala Arts Center.</p> <p>The &nbsp;daughter of a painter and a builder, Lomax began writing poetry as a &nbsp;child and remembers melting crayons in her bedroom and drawing poems &nbsp;around the swirls of color as a way of dealing with her parents’ &nbsp;divorce. Early on, she knew that language had the ability to help people &nbsp;understand experience, help us sort, uncover, and/or complicate how we &nbsp;see the world. In high school, she borrowed a copy of e.e. cumming’s &nbsp;selected poems at the local library, and the possibilities on the page &nbsp;shifted tremendously for her. Lomax began to see poetry as a deep &nbsp;conversation with form, with the reader, with ways of directing &nbsp;experience and connecting with others in intimate ways.</p> <p>A &nbsp;lecturer at San Francisco State University for over two decades, Lomax &nbsp;has taught writing in schools, prisons, libraries, hospitals, pubs, and &nbsp;farmers’ markets. She served as the Director of Small Press Traffic, the &nbsp;Human Rights and Equity Chair for her teacher’s union, and as a &nbsp;traveling poet-teacher with the Performing Arts Workshop, the William &nbsp;James Association, and California Poets in the Schools.</p> <p>To &nbsp;date, Lomax has published three large scale editorial projects and &nbsp;three books of poetry as well as numerous&nbsp;other chapbooks, broadsides, &nbsp;and discreet poems. Her most recent anthology includes work from every &nbsp;US state, district, territory, and commonwealth and is entitled <em>THE BEAUTIFUL: Poets Reimagine a Nation</em>, published by Gualala Arts Center<em>.</em> Lomax also edited <em>Kindergarde: Poems, Plays, Stories, and Songs for Children </em>which &nbsp;received a Creative Work Fund Grant as well as the Lion and Unicorn &nbsp;A