Biographies
PETER RABBIT
Poet, author and performer “Peter Rabbit” was born in the oil region of Pennsylvania at the end of the Great Depression. He attended high school in Owensboro, Kentucky, and numerous colleges as a literature and writing major. Of those, Black Mountain College, where he was a student of Charles Olsen’s, was the most useful.
Writing and performing since his teens, Rabbit’s voice has been heard in American poetry and communitarian movements for over five decades. He has performed and lectured at universities, museums, bars, strip clubs, coffee shops and bookstores all over the U.S. and Canada. He has authored six books of poetry and nonfiction, including the underground classic, Drop City.
Rabbit was a co-founder of Drop City, the Southwest’s first commune and recipient of Bucky Fuller’s Dymaxion Award for poetically economic structural achievement. He also co-founded the Libre artist’s colony, the Taos Poetry Circus, SOMOS and the World Poetry Bout Association. Since the 60s he has lectured and published on alternate lifestyles, expanded states of consciousness, and appropriate technology and architecture. In 1972 he served as a technical advisor to Congress’ National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse. He is an ordained bishop in the Universal Life Church.
Claiming he wants to be remembered as “the Don King of Poetry,” he has relentlessly promoted poets and their work since the mid-50s, when he lived and wrote in Taos alongside local poets of that time, Judson Crews, Richard Duerden and Max Finstein. With his wife and partner Annie MacNaughton, also a poet and performer, he founded the jazz/poetry ensemble The Luminous Animal in 1983 and could be seen in his role as Master of Ceremonies at World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bouts during the 80s and 90s. He and MacNaughton received the New Mexico Literary Association’s 1st annual Appreciation Award, as well as Verse Converse Festival’s Eternal Flame Award for Lifetime of Dedication to Poetry.
Past jobs include work in public relations, sales and advertising, as book review editor for the Ft. Worth Star Telegram, travel writer for the St. Petersburg Times, and host of a poetry show on local radio. He has also been a merchant seaman, commercial fisherman, head chef, food and beverage manager, tutor, substance abuse counselor, house parent, census enumerator, organic farmer, bartender, book store clerk, desk clerk, pig farmer, fund raiser, horticulturist and much more. In other words he has lived in the Sangre de Cristo range of the southern Rocky Mountains for a long time, and knows how to do whatever it takes to make a living. Currently retired in Northern New Mexico, Peter Rabbit writes every day and cares for an organic garden.
Poet, author and performer PETER RABBIT passed away peacefully at his home in Taos, New Mexico, on Saturday morning, October 27, 2012.
Read more:
Peter Rabbit Obituary
ANNE MACNAUGHTON
Poet, performer, historian, editor, artist and part-time professor, Anne L. MacNaughton teaches creative writing and performance in schools and universities. Along with her partner Peter Rabbit she co-founded the Taos Poetry Circus in 1982. She and Rabbit are recipients of the New Mexico Literary Association’s 1st annual Appreciation Award, and of the 2009 Verse/Converse Festival’s Eternal Flame Award for Lifetime of Dedication to Poetry. An eponymous trophy, nicknamed “The Annie,” is awarded in her honor every year to the winning team at the Taos Invitational Youth Poetry Championship regional event. She is also an award-winning visual artist, an organic farmer, and co-founder of The Luminous Animal jazz-poetry performance ensemble.
Born in Arkansas and raised in Houston, MacNaughton worked briefly at the Texas State Library as state archivist for historical manuscripts before leaving graduate school and moving to Libre, an artists' community in Colorado where she started an alternative grade school. Relocating to northern New Mexico in the late 70s, she has worked as a desk clerk, librarian, prep cook, baker, paralegal, copyeditor, book designer, journalist, tutor, and for several years owned and operated an educational testing and tutoring service. Along the way she completed her MA in English with a concentration in poetry at the University of New Mexico.
She co-founded—along with half-dozen others including Peter Rabbit—the Society of the Muse of the Southwest (SOMOS) in 1982. Along with Rabbit she established the Taos Poetry Circus that year. Serving for several years as executive and program director of the World Poetry Bout Association, she was director of the annual Taos Poetry Circus for several years, and established the Poetry Education Project in 1994.
In 1995 she established the first statewide youth slam championship in the nation through PEP, giving athletic letters to members of her award-winning teams for a dozen years thereafter. With assistance from National Endowment of the Arts and the State of New Mexico, MacNaughton developed Speak Up! Curriculum ™, a poetry appreciation and writing curriculum that encourages the performance of teen poetry while supporting the standardized writing standards in several states.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Her work has been published in many journals and anthologies, including The Best Poetry of 1989 (Scribners 1990), Robert Bly’s The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart (HarperCollins 1992), and In Company: an Anthology of New Mexico Poets after 1960 (UNM Press 2004). The New Mexico Poetry Renaissance (Red Crane, 1994), The Ecstatic Moment: The Best of Libido (Dell 1997), Written with a Spoon (Sherman Asher); Thus Spake the Corpse: (Black Sparrow 2000); XY Files (Sherman Asher, 2001), Written with a Spoon (Sherman Asher, 1995) and The Hell with Love Poems to Mend a Broken Heart (Time-Warner, 2002) among others.
Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, small magazines and periodicals including several volumes of Adobe Walls, Blue Mesa Review, Exquisite Corpse, The Taos Review, Libido, Crosswinds, Ant Farm,
Esprit, la Ventana, ARTlines, Taos Magazine, Seen From Space, Alma, Wordworks, The Taos News, Albuquerque Poetry Festival Anthology, 51% Magazine, Desnudas del desierto, Venus Envy, Howl, and others.
PUBLICATIONS
“Poetry to the People: The Taos Poetry Circus, the World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bout, and the World of Contemporary American poetry,” Poetry Flash, May/June 1993. History of literature, spoken word.
Smugglin’ Blues, No Press 1993. Poetry chapbook.
“When the Soldiers Came: an Oral History of the Taos Pueblo Revolt of 1847.” Unpublished essay.
Editor, The Nineties: The Best Poetry and Photos of the Taos Poetry Circus, 1990-1999. Pennywhistle Press, 2000. Poetry, essays, photographs.
Editor, Calendar of the Claude Elliott Manuscript Collection. Texas State Library, Archives Division, 1970. Finding aid for historic papers collection.
Editor, Wordworks, Libre, Colorado, 1976-1980. Literary quarterly.
She has also written literary reviews and features for the Santa Fe Reporter, the Taos News, and Taos Magazine and was a correspondent for The New Mexican Pasatiempo in the early 1990s.
VISUAL ART
Although MacNaughton considers herself primarily self-taught, as a child she was able to study briefly under Lowell Collins on scholarship to what is now the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and in her youth she took classes now and then in various university art programs. She has participated in several group shows in Taos and her illustrations have been printed in publications from Baton Rouge to Taos. She has won several awards, including placing at Taos County Fairs in the 1980s and an honorable mention from the Museum of Fine Arts as a teenager.