New Lake County Poet Laureate selected for 2024-2026
LAKEPORT >> Local poet, Brenda Yeager, has been selected as the 12th Poet Laureate of Lake County for 2024-2026.
The role of a Poet Laureate is to represent and promote poetry and literacy in the community they represent. This is a volunteer position with a two-year term.
The current and 11th Poet Laureate of Lake County for 2020-2024, Georgina Marie Guardado, served two consecutive terms after being re-appointed for a second term during the COVID pandemic, a first in the local laureate lineage. Her tenor will continue through the end of this month, March 2024, before passing her laurel to Brenda Yeager.
Officiated by the Lake County Board of Supervisors, the Lake County Poet Laureate role was inducted in 1998 by inaugural Poet Laureate Jim Lyle. Between 1998 and 2023, a total of 11 Poets Laureate have been appointed in Lake County with diverse backgrounds and visions for this role.
The selection committee consisted of six Lake County Poets Laureate emeriti: Georgina Marie Guardado 2020-2024, Richard Schmidt 2018— 2020, Casey Carney 2014— 2016, Elaine Watt 2012— 2013, Russell Reza-Khaliq Gonzaga, 2010—2011, and Carolyn Wing-Greenlee, 2004—2005. The committee is grateful to this year's finalists for the Poet Laureate role, Mimi Whittaker and Roy Arthur Blodgett, for their impressive applications and meaningful work. The committee encourages the local literary community to follow the work and events of these two poets.
About the new Lake County Poet Laureate for 2024-2026:
Brenda Yeager is a poet writing from the meeting point of the ancestral lands of the Pomo, Wappo and Lake Miwok at the edge of Big Canyon. Her poetry and memoir have won several prizes, including as a finalist for the 2022 Jane Underwood Poetry Prize judged by Sharan Strange. Her work has been published online in Noyo Review and The Bloom and in print in the RESTORE and RESILIENCE group chapbooks.
With Georgina Marie Guardado, Lake County Poet Laureate 2020-2024, she co-hosts New Darlings, a monthly Friday night online conversation about contemporary poets (please join us, all are invited!). She had the privilege of teaching poetry at Upper Lake High School through the Lake County Art Council's Poetry, Poets & Poetry Program funded by the California Arts Council and serves the county's Poetry Out Loud competition. She also served as coeditor for the RESTORE chapbook collection of literary and visual art, published by Middletown Art Center and funded by the California Arts Council.
Sharing her poetry live, both in person and online is one of her great joys. Currently, she is listening as her first full-length poetry manuscript unfolds, working title: Torch Song//Transcendental. And she also finds herself deep in the second draft of her memoir about true refuge entitled A Revolution of Petals in the Heart.
“I am deeply honored to be chosen to serve as Lake County's Twelfth Poet Laureate for 2024-2026. As the selection committee met with me to offer the appointment, I felt lit from within by a warmth and joy that is the heart of poetry to me. And so a torch is passed. I am so excited to share that gift in the years ahead with Lake County's inspirational literary community and with everyone in our beautiful county who longs for the light of shared truth that poetry can ignite in our lives,” said Yaeger. “Thank you so much to the Poets Laureate Emeriti Selection Committee for entrusting me with this bright flame. May I serve our county well.”
Yeager will be officiated by the Lake County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday April 2, 2024. More details will be released soon for inperson and virtual inauguration celebrations scheduled for March 30 and April 1.