Albuquerque poet, author, editor, award-winning reporter, and University of New Mexico alumni V.B. Price will read his poems in a presentation called Death Self: A Collection of Paintings and Poems on Monday, March 9, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at George Pearl Hall on the UNM campus. The backdrop for the reading from his new book Death Self will be the projected paintings of his wife, artist Rini Price (1941-2019). Admission is free.
V.B. Price has been a teacher in the UNM Honors Program and College since l986 and has taught periodically in the UNM School of Architecture and Planning since 1976, focusing on poetry, urban issues, Greek and Roman Classics, the U.S. Constitution, and the environment. He received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from UNM in 2016.
Rini Price received her bachelor of Fine Arts degree from UNM in 1962. On her website, Rini Price said, “The way imagination operates in me is to just show up. I am present at a canvas or a piece of paper and make what I make. It is unexpected, unpredicted, and unbrandable. I have always been like this, devoted to what turns up. It is the ultimate creative freedom. If I go against this, I render myself banal.”
Death Self books will be available and a meet and greet with Price will precede the reading. Light refreshments will be served, thanks to the generous gift from UNM Alumni Association board president Alex Kerschner, and Los Poblanos executive director Matt Rembe. Additional readings will be by UNM Honors College assistant professor Amaris Ketcham, poet Don McIver, writer Margaret Randall, poet and assistant professor in Chicana and Chicano Studies Levi Romero, and UNM alumni and writer Mikaela Renz-Whitmore.
The event is sponsored by the UNM Honors College, School of Architecture and Planning, and the Department of English Language and Literature.
Everyone is invited to come and celebrate the life, work, and enduring love of V.B. and Rini Price.