Eleanor Stewart

Eleanor Stewart passed away on December 22nd, 2020, at the age of 84. Eleanor was a poet and an educator, and she lived life to the fullest. She ’shook poems from her sleeves’ as a fellow poet put it. As a teen, she worked herself out of a West Virginian accent using the radio and studied theater in college so she could perform Shakespeare in the Park in New York. Then she fell in love with Santa Fe; and spent a lifetime teaching literary arts and ESL. She traveled the world not as a tourist but as a short-term working resident, absorbing culture as ever deeply she could -- Japan, Australia, France, Native America. She published two volumes of poetry and one about her years working in a UN Vietnamese refugee camp in the Philippines. Political, well read, and astute, she fiercely defended her students and friends--and was sharp-tongued with both. She loved late nights out, all kinds of fine and performing arts, animals, and honest conversation. She knew her values and spent time nurturing those, not suffering the rest. We are going to miss her.