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 their creative potential, Rosemerry is the 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 also directed the Telluride Writers Guild for ten years and co-hosted Telluride’s Talking Gourds Poetry Club.

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 and the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN. Her TEDx talk explores changing our outdated metaphors.

She believes in the power of practice and has been writing a poem a day since 2006. Her daily poems can be found at https://ahundredfallingveils.com/. Favorite themes in her poems include parenting, gardening, ecology, love, science, thriving/failure, grief and daily life.

She has 12 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 Miracle Already Happening, The Less I Hold and If You Listen, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. In April 2023, Samara Press will release her next collection, All the Honey.

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 anthologized in Poetry of Presence, How to Love the World, The Path to Kindness, Send My Roots Rain, What Wildness Is This, Come Together: Imagine Peace 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’s now writing a novel. She earned her MA in English Language & Linguistics at UW-Madison. One-word mantra: Adjust. Three-word mantra: I’m still learning.