"Talking Leaves Scrapbook" with Vivian Mary Carroll

All attendees will receive a free copy of Talking Leaves Scrapbook at this event, thanks to The Friends of the Santa Fe Public Library!

Talking Leaves Scrapbook with Vivian Mary Carroll

Reading, Q&A, and Book Signing

Talking Leaves Scrapbook - poems by Vivian Mary Carroll

In this collection of poems, Vivian Mary Carroll crafts keen expressions of a life lived deeply. "These are the poems of a life-long traveler" (James Thomas Stevens) with "brisk lines of pull-no-punches wit, her own beguiling logic, and always a touch of heart coupled with resistance" (Sawnie Morris).

Vivian Mary Carroll (Cherokee Nation) retired from the Superior Court of Sacramento County, relocated from California to New Mexico and enrolled in the Institute of American Indian Arts’ creative writing program. She received her BFA in 2018, with a minor in Performing Arts. She attended Idyllwild Arts Summer Writing Program and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetry at Naropa University for further studies. An Alpha Chi Honor Society member, she was the Class of 2018’s valedictorian. Carroll’s MFA mentors included Native poets Sherwin Bitsui, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Santee Frazier, and James Thomas Stevens. She served as poetry editor of the MFA online journal, Chapter House Journal, and represented the Class of 2020 as student speaker. She completed her MFA in 2020 at the age of 72.

Prior to employment with the courts, Carroll studied at the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts then worked at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Western Opera, Sacramento Music Circus, Alaska Rep, Syracuse Stage, GeVa Theatre and taught Clown College students to design and sew their own costumes. She performed in Jesus Christ Superstar at Salt City Playhouse and Madame Mao at California’s Original Theatre Company.

While working in theatre and the courts, she routinely wrote poetry and fiction but was rarely published. After meeting former Kansas Poet Laureate, Denise Lowe, at a Bookworks reading in Albuquerque, she joined Ms. Lowe’s online workshop and successfully submitted a workshop poem to Yellow Medicine Review. The Fall 2024 Issue of YMR contains a poem Carroll wrote in a workshop led by former Taos Poet Laureate, Sawnie Morris.

Carroll attended Tony Hillerman’s Writers Conference, winning an honorable mention. During a session of Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Writers Retreat, Baca asked Carroll for a poetry manuscript which he subsequently submitted to independent publisher and writer Zach Hively of Casa Urraca Press in Abiquiú. Talking Leaves Scrapbook (2024) is Carroll’s debut poetry collection. 

Carroll’s undergrad work in poetry, fiction, memoir, and playwriting can be found in past issues of IAIA’s student anthologies and in Tribal College Journal-Student. Her work also appears in Taos Journal of Poetry, New Limestone Review, New Mexico Poetry Anthology 2023, Non-White and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World, Pop Matters and elsewhere. Carroll is a featured reader in Taos Poetry in Motion, a short film by former Taos Poet Laureate, Joshua Concha. Carroll also reads on public radio KNAU’s website “Poetry Snaps!” She is currently working on a new poetry manuscript.

Praise for Talking Leaves Scrapbook:

“She uses her senses to extract the essence of her experiences and transforms them into images and metaphors that belong to her, that are unique, that suffice to recognize her being in the universe, alive, meaningful and filled with emotion. Her poems resonate with a deep belonging, they roam sniffing out the meaning of things, discovering the lived past still persist in everything her sensibilities languish in, plucking with words the spines of light that exist in memory and making them sparkle before her mind … and ours.”
- Jimmy Santiago Baca

“Talking Leaves Scrapbook delivers on its title by way of a ‘memory map’ of images, which Carroll’s peripatetic speaker travels through personal as well as collective history, unfurling story from the ground up.... Hers is a restless music, peppered by recollections of the burn- shocks of racism withstood and a grappling with the broken-treaty past, revealed and countered in brisk lines of pull-no-punches wit, her own beguiling logic, and always a touch of heart coupled with resistance.” 
- Sawnie Morris, author of Her, Infinite, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize

“These are the poems of a life-long traveler.... But a traveler who often strays from the map and admits repeatedly to ending up lost again. By collection’s end, we realize that Carroll has grasped the carousel’s ring, securing her firm footing in this whirling world and leaving us thankful for the Talking Leaves Scrapbook.” 
- James Thomas Stevens, author of The Golden Book

“Unlike a real scrapbook, preserving the past, Vivian Mary Carroll’s Talking Leaves Scrapbook reimagines and reinvigorates us into a vibrant present, where the past is still living and the future was already here.” 
- Ed Skoog, author of Run The Red Lights

“Talking Leaves Scrapbook is a continuous flash of luminous poetry. There is a contagious joy and appreciation present in this book that I find reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg and Sherwin Bitsui. The agency of the poet is rather astounding.” 
- Cedar Sigo, author of All This Time

Talking Leaves Scrapbook - poems by Vivian Mary Carroll is available for purchase through Casa Urraca Press

Library programs are made possible by the support from  Friends of the Santa Fe Public Library

Vivian Mary Carroll Headshot Photo Credit: Jason S. Ordaz, Chief Communications Officer at the Institute of American Indian Arts.