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Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
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Meet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer lives with her husband and daughter in Placerville, Colorado, on the banks of the wild and undammed San Miguel River. She served as San Miguel County’s first poet laureate (2007-2011) and as Western Slope Poet Laureate (2015-2017) and was a finalist for Colorado Poet Laureate in 2019.

Devoted to helping others explore creative practice, Rosemerry is co-host of Emerging Form, a podcast on creative process, co-founder of Secret Agents of Change (a surreptitious kindness cabal), and co-leader of Soul Writers Circle. She directed the Telluride Writers Guild for ten years and co-hosted Telluride’s Talking Gourds Poetry Club for another ten years.

She teaches and performs poetry for mindfulness retreats, women’s retreats, teachers, addiction recovery programs, scientists, hospice, literary burlesque and more. Clients include Camp Coca Cola, Craig Hospital, Business & Professional Women, Deepak Chopra, Think 360, Ah Haa School, Desert Dharma, Well for the Journey, and the Women’s Dermatological Society.

She performs as a storyteller, including shows in Aspen at the Wheeler Opera House, at the Taos Storytelling Festival, Page Storytelling Festival and the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN. Her TEDx talk explores changing our outdated metaphors. For five years, she performed in the Telluride Literary Burlesque.

She has been writing a poem a day since 2006, posting them since 2011 on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils. In 2023, her poems can be heard daily on the Ritual app, The Poetic Path. Favorite themes include parenting, gardening, ecology, love, science, thriving/failure, grief and daily life.

She has 13 collections of poetry, and her work has appeared in O Magazine, A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, American Life in Poetry, on fences, in back alleys, on Carnegie Hall Stage and on hundreds of river rocks she leaves around town. Her poems have been used for choral works by composers Paul Fowler and Jeffrey Nytch and performed around America. Her most recent collection, Hush, won the Halcyon prize. Naked for Tea was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. Other books include Even Now, The Less I Hold and If You Listen, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. In 2023 she released All the Honey; Beneath All Appearances an Unwavering Peace (a book for grieving parents with artist Rashani Réa); a book of writing prompts, Exploring Poetry of Presence II; and Dark Praise, a spoken word album with Steve Law.

She’s won the Fischer Prize, Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge (thrice), the Dwell Press Solstice Prize, the Writer’s Studio Literary Contest (twice) and The Blackberry Peach Prize. She’s widely anthologized including Poetry of Presence, How to Love the World, The Path to Kindness, Send My Roots Rain, Come Together: Imagine Peace, Dawn Songs, and To Love One Another.

She’s been an organic fruit grower, a newspaper and magazine editor, and a parent educator for Parents as Teachers. She earned her MA in English Language & Linguistics at UW-Madison. One-word mantra: Adjust. Three-word mantra: I’m still learning.

Living into All the Honey: Embracing Grief & Joy “What do joy and grief have in common?” asks poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. “…The ability to evoke feeling that pushes us and opens us and helps us to be compassionate and helps us fall in love.” In this 10-minute video, she reads poems that span grief and joy from her new collection All the Honey. She speaks of what she knows now about grief she didn’t before her son died, of spaciousness and silliness, and how her new collection came to be. Featuring: “For When People Ask,” “Simple Tools” and “Untamed.”

Featuring beautiful videography and editing by Jennifer Kent. This video, shot in September 2023, was made by The University of Nevada–Reno as part of their speaker series for their Lake Tahoe campus.

PRESS KIT

BIOS (pdf)

  • 2025 Bio 
  • Short, Medium & Long Bios (50/100/262 words)

RESUME

Resume – Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

HEADSHOTS

Click the images below to download a full resolution version. Please credit Joanie Schwarz.

PRESS

PRINT INTERVIEWS

  • Interview on Process and Daily Poems with Bill Pearse
  • On Inspiration, Egg Sacs & the Communion of Poets: interview with Kaye Lynne Booth.
  • A Conversation on Envy and Creativity with Christie Aschwanden
  • A Little More on Yes: 3 Good Books
  • An article on the poets of San Miguel County, Telluride Magazine

AUDIO INTERVIEWS

  • Interview with Laurie Wagner on daily inspiration and imperfectionism
  • Poet Erika Gordon talks about Rosemerry and recites Rosemerry’s poems
  • Interview and reading on Rattlecast
  • Interview on Poetry Voice Podcast
  • How to Unknow Something on KSJD

VIDEO

  • SHYFT in Perspective: A 40-minute poetry prompt class on resilience
  • Stubborn Praise: A reading with Rosemerry, James Crews and Danusha Laméris
  • Gateway to the Unknown: A free 40-minute poetry prompt class
  • On Play, Daily Poeming, Metaphor & More: An interview & reading on Rattlecast
  • It’s About Time for a Good Time: A reading and conversation with poet Jack Ridl
  • How Shall We Live Now? Here I read with authors Amy Irvine and Craig Childs
  • Pandemic Poems? Here I share three.
  • What Is the Role of Poetry in the Pandemic? On April 3, 2020, I did an online reading with Albert Flynn DeSilver and explored this.
  • Prompts for Writing in the Pandemic? I did a live class for the Ah Haa School, and here you can watch the recording.
  • Poetry Off the Page: I am a big fan of performance poems, and it was a thrill to win the Live Performance at BlackBerry Peach Performance Poetry Prize this year … the video of the award ceremony (and performances) is now available on You Tube.
  • Change Your Metaphor, Change Your Life: Alan Wartes and Issa Forrest have the most remarkable radio/video show, Interview on Metaphors and Creative Process on Think Radio, and here they interview me about metaphors and showing up vulnerably.
  • Interview on Poetry and Living in Telluride on Telluride TV: I was recently interviewed on Telluride TV by Elissa Dickson, and we talked of how I came to live in this remote town and how poetry shapes my life here.
  • Live Performance at Wellspring of Imagination 2017
  • Live performance in collaboration with dancers, cello, piano, poets, musicians
  • Live performance at Ziggies in Denver, reading from The Miracle Already Happening
  • Live ½ Hour Poetry Performance on Comcast Channel 54
  • Five-minute excerpt from Poets Co-op TV Show
  • Poetry discussion with Catalyst High School
  • Rosemerry Choreographs a Spontaneous Production of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”

Praise for Rosemerry

Rosemerry, thank you.

For the first time in a long time I was moved to be creative and to use writing as a tool for healing. I could feel my stagnation begin to melt away in the Light that was presented today. I’ve been freeing up some space lately and asking that it be filled with people and things that inspire me to be the best version of myself and that is exactly what happened today.

—Jackie
workshop participant

An amazing talent to open up people’s creative minds.

There is some kind of magic in your smile, your encouraging energy, and amazing talent to open up people’s creative minds. You have facilitated a bit of a renaissance in our building. I have felt warm, enthusiastic vibes from even some of our more reserved teachers today. Of course, the students have it now and are exuding the joy of words big time.

—Vicki Phelps
4th and 6th grade science teacher, Naturita Elementary School

Revel in your own creativity.

To participate in one of Rosemerry’s poetry playshops, or to listen to one of her beautiful presentations, is an invitation to revel in your own creativity. She welcomes her audience into a landscape of words with a generous and irrepressible spirit, and speaks with a boundless compassion. Her love of poetry reaches out and connects with her listeners, opening a space with her audience that invites them to consider themselves, and their art, and their world, in new ways. To hear Rosemerry share her poetry is a felt gift. Her listeners cannot escape being touched.

—Melissa Stacey
co-founder and organizer, Writers and Scribblers Literary Retreat

Wow, what a great response to both your reading and workshop.

Almost with tears in their eyes. Really. I have to tell you what was most mentioned as your fans applauded you; your family life, your reactions and theirs; it felt and sounded so real and most all of us have children so we all could relate. Unforgettable, you are.

—Kathy Berg
Cortez Public Library, Poetry Corner Presents

An extraordinary teacher and gifted poet.

Rosemerry’s talents have helped me achieve my dream of more publication. But what is most important to me is that I have learned to write with more confidence and understand more about how to craft deeper poems about deeper subjects. I have experienced healing, safety, trust, and fun in working with Rosemerry. When I bring a poem to her, I know she will continue to find ways to help me expand my creative potential. She never runs out of great ideas.

—Phyllis Klein

Upcoming Events

Jun 26 2025
6:00 pm - 7:00 pm

Essential Vulnerability: A Poetry Thoughtshop Celebrating our Humanness

Zoom
Jul 02 2025
5:00 pm - 7:00 pm

The Mystery of Grief: Writing into the Loss

Zoom
Jul 22 2025
5:00 pm - 7:00 pm

The Big Reframe: Poetry as a Tool for Re-Seeing the World

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Poem a Day

RSS A Hundred Falling Veils

  • U PICK June 22, 2025
      STRAWBERRIES, said the roadside sign,big red letters on a white-washed board.We followed the signs to the farmer’s fieldand wandered into long green rows,one stiff blue carton my hands. Such blessingto kneel on the ground and gatherripe red sweetness with our fingertips,to pull the small fruits into our mouthsand hum as their sun-warmed flesh turnedto juice […]

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Contact

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

P.O. Box 86, Placerville
Colorado  81430

970-729-1838

rosemerry@wordwoman.com

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Word Woman
  • BIO
  • BOOKS
  • AUDIO
    • Podcast
    • Phone App
    • Albums
  • POEM A DAY
  • WORKSHOPS & READINGS
  • TEACHING RESOURCES
  • HIRE ME
    • One-on-One Creative Consulting
    • Keynotes & Presentations
  • NEWS
  • CONTACT

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