Originally from Boston, Renée Gregorio has lived in New Mexico since 1985. Her first home was in Taos where she moved after earning a Masters’ degree in creative writing from Antioch University, London. With a few like-minded others, she founded and edited The Taos Review, one of New Mexico’s foremost literary journals. She also organized reading series for the Taos Poetry Circus and SOMOS. At present, Renée is a co-founder of the publishing collective, Tres Chicas Books, alongside Joan Logghe and Miriam Sagan.
Beside publishing many volumes of poems over the past four decades, Renée has worked as a freelance literary editor, a proofreader and drafter for the state legislature, a writing teacher, and a somatic coach. She’s taught poetry around the state, served as a visiting professor at Colorado College, and, with her husband, John Brandi, led a course for San Juan College students in Chiapas, Mexico, on crafting poems from travel. Renée and John sometimes work on a poetic dialogue after traveling together— the Press at the Palace of the Governors published one such exchange in Road to the Cloud’s House, prose poems based on their observations in Chiapas, in a limited-edition letterpress volume.
Renée’s poetry is informed by the expansive landscape of northern New Mexico as well as by journeys to Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, India, Bali, the Himalayas, Italy, and Greece. In her work it is evident that she loves foreignness as well as form. Her long-time practice of the Japanese martial art aikido taught her what it means to occupy form through the body. Her poems emerge from the blood and heart of the everyday as much as from her travels.