V. B. Price

V. B. Price
V.B. Price and Cat Byron, photo by Gloria Graham, taken during the video taping of Add-Verse
Born	Vincent Barrett Price (1940-08-30) August 30, 1940 (age 77)
Occupation	Poet, columnist, editor, journalist, novelist, teacher
Education	University of New Mexico (B.A., 1962)
Genre	Poetry, journalism
Subject	Human rights, environment, architecture
Spouse	Rini (m. 1969)
Children	2
Relatives	Vincent Price (father) Edith Barrett (mother) Victoria Price (paternal half-sister)

V.B. (Vincent Barrett) Price (born August 30, 1940) is an American poet, human rights and environmental columnist, editor, reporter, publisher, and teacher.^[1] He is co-founder, with Benito Aragon, of New Mexico Mercury, an online platform featuring news, commentary and analysis from a variety of experts and writers around New Mexico. Since January 2017, MercMessenger.com has featured Price's online column of politics and the environment. Price has taught off and on since 1976 in the University of New Mexico's School of Architecture and Planning, and as continuing faculty in the UNM Honors College from 1986 to 2014. His seminars range from the Classics in translation to modern poetry, urban studies, and New Mexico's environmental history.

Biography[edit]

Price was born on August 30, 1940, in Los Angeles, California, the only son of actor Vincent Price (1911–1993) and his first wife, actress Edith Barrett (1907–1977). He moved to New Mexico in 1958 escaping Hollywood’s celebrity culture, and came to identify with the state, its isolation and eccentricity, its people, landscape, architecture, and traditional cultures. He graduated from the University of New Mexico in 1962 with a B.A. in anthropology.^[2] That same year he published his first poem and began a lifelong writing practice. He first visited Chaco Canyon in 1961 and published his seminal work of poetry Chaco Body with photographer Kirk Gittings in 1992. After graduate school he worked as a reporter and in 1971 he began a weekly column in New Mexico that has run almost continuously to the present. In 1969 Price married the artist Rini Price. They have lived in the same house and worked the same land in Albuquerque’s North Valley ever since. In 2007, Price’s selected poems from 1966 to 2006, Broken and Reset, were published by UNM Press. In 2016, he received an honorary degree, Doctor of Letters (Litt. D) from his alma mater.

Writing[edit]

He has been writing in New Mexico for over 53 years. Price's poetry and prose have been published in more than 70 national and international publications since 1962. He was the architecture editor for Artspace Magazine of Albuquerque and Los Angeles, and the former editor of New Mexico Magazine.^[3] Price was the city editor for the New Mexico Independent (print publication) and worked for the publication through the 1970s.^[4] He was the founding editor of Century Magazine, which ran from 1980–1983. He was architecture critic at the Albuquerque Journal in the mid 1980s. He wrote for the Albuquerque Tribune from 1978 till the paper closed in 2008, most notably as a weekly columnist. Price was an editorial contributor to the New Mexico Independent (online publication) from 2008-2009. He was the series editor of the Mary Burritt Poetry Series at the University of New Mexico Press from 2004 to 2012. As an editor, he has brought work of more than 500 New Mexican authors, poets, and scholars into print.

His latest book is an extended poetic sequence entitled Memoirs of the World in Ten Fragments, published in March 2018 by Wings Press of San Antonio, TX. What interests Price in Memoirs of the World, quoting his introduction, is not his own specific life but "what I have witnessed of the imagination in my practice as a poet, what I have witnessed of the world as a journalist and non-fiction writer, and what I have witnessed of the will to love and the will to destroy." Critic William Peterson writes, "Price has composed ... an impassioned memoir of the world, a scorched collective memory of our entire human aspiration — and our calamity."

In November 2011, UNM Press published Price's latest book, The Orphaned Land: New Mexico's Environment Since the Manhattan Project. In the book, Price analyzes fifty years of newspaper articles and government reports to reveal the environmental toll which New Mexico has paid for decades of military munitions testing, uranium mining, and population growth: unsustainable development, air and water pollution by multinational corporations and undue strain on the state's limited water supply, to name a few.^[5] Framing New Mexico as, "a microcosm of global ecological degradation," Price explores the impacts and systematic breaches of public trust by some of the pervading power structures affecting the environment around the world: the military-industrial complex, multinational corporation's impact on local natural resources, and the lack of consideration of long-term environmental consequences in development planning. Speaking with Gene Grant on KNME's, New Mexico In Focus, Price states that the Manhattan Project both transformed and deformed the American West. It elevated New Mexico into one of the intellectual and scientific epicenters for the Cold War, but it also resulted in 2,100 waste sites at Los Alamos National Laboratories in Northern New Mexico and 400 waste sites at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque.^[6] Marc Simmons of the Santa Fe New Mexican calls the book, "a stellar compendium focused on the state's slide toward ecological degradation."^[7]

Recognition[edit]

• 2016 – Honorary Degree, Doctor of Letters (Litt. D.), University of New Mexico
• 2016 – Paul Bartlett Ré Peace Prize of the University of New Mexico, Lifetime Achievement Award
• 2014 – Top of the Rockies Award, First Place, Environmental Enterprise Reporting Online
• 2006 – Bravo Award for Excellence in Literary Arts from the Arts Alliance.^[8]
• 2004 – Price's book, Albuquerque: A City At The End of the World, won the Fray Francisco Atanasio Dominguez Award for Historic Survey and *Research.^[9]
• 2003 – Citizen Planner of the Year award by the American Planning Association of New *Mexico.^[10]
• 2002 – Erna Furgusson Award, UNM Alumni, "for touching the minds of many and for service the University of New Mexico and to the greater community."^[11]
• 1999 – Humanist of the Year Award by the Humanist Society of New Mexico.^[12]
• 1996 – ACLU-NM First Amendment Award for excellence in journalism.^[13]
• 1989 – Friend of the Environment Award by the New Mexico Conservation Voters Alliance.
• 1989 – UNM Centennial Distinguished Alumni award.^[14]
• 1985 – Governor's Award for Historic Preservation in New Mexico.^[14]
• 1984 – Award of Merit from the New Mexico Society of Architects for architectural criticism.
• 1975 – Governor's Cultural Properties Review Committee's award for his, "penetrating provocative editorials in defense of New Mexico's cultural environment."^[13]

Books[edit]

• The Cyclops Garden (1969), San Marcos Press
• Semblances (1976), Sunstone Press
• Monsters, with Vincent Price (1982), Groset and Dunlap
• Chaco Body (1992), Photographs by Kirk Gittings, Artspace Press
• Albuquerque: A City at the End of the World (1995, 2003), UNM Press
• Anasazi Architecture and American Design (1996), co-edited with Baker Morrow, UNM Press
• The 7 Deadly Sins (1997), La Alameda Press
• Chaco Trilogy (1998), La Alameda Press
• The Oddity (2004), UNM Press
• Myth Waking: Homeric Hymns: A Modern Sequel (2004) St. Elizabeth Street Press, Brooklyn
• In Company: An Anthology of New Mexico Poetry Since 1960 (2004), (co-editor), UNM Press
• Canyon Gardens: The Ancient Pueblo Landscape of the American Southwest (2006), Edited by V.B. Price and Baker Morrow, UNM Press
• Broken and Reset: Selected Poems 1966–2006 (2007), UNM Press
• The University of New Mexico (2010), photographs by Robert Reck, UNM Press
• The Orphaned Land: New Mexico's Environment Since the Manhattan Project (2011), Photographs by Nell Farrell, UNM Press
• ROME MMI, Poems by V.B. Price and Photographs by Jan Schmitz, (2016) printed on demand
• Memoirs of the World in Ten Fragments, (2018), Wings Press

Television[edit]

• In the 1989 opening episode of KNME's Colores series, Price interviews Godfrey Reggio about the film Koyaanisqatsi.^[15]
• In a 1993 episode of KNME's Colores series, Price reads from his book, Albuquerque: A City at the End of the World, and expands on the past, present and future of the city in videotaped interviews.^[16] Price continued intermittently to host Colores episodes in the 1990s including an interview of architectural historian Rina Swentzell of Santa Clara Pueblo.
• In October 2011, Price was interviewed by Gene Grant for the KNME produced New Mexico In Focus. The interview revolved around Price's recently published book, The Orphaned Land: New Mexico's Environment Since the Manhattan Project.^[17]

Poetry readings[edit]

Price has a long history of poetry performances in New Mexico and the West, from 1969 at the Living Batch bookstore to 2018 at Bookworks, both in Albuquerque. He’s read at more than 100 venues, including St John’s College, Santa Fe, the University of Albuquerque, the University of New Mexico, Collected Works Book Store in Santa Fe, Tome on the Range in Las Vegas, New Mexico, Beyond Baroque in Venice, California, and in multiple bars, cantinas, classrooms, and public spaces. Price was part of a series of video readings shot by Allan and Gloria Graham from 2003 to 2005 called Add-Verse, which featured poets such as Robert Creeley, Anne Waldman, Diane di Prima, and Michael McClure reading poems while the camera focused only on their hands.

In March 2010, Price was videotaped while reading from a variety of his published and unpublished poems at Acequia Booksellers in Albuquerque's North Valley.^[18][19]

Personal life[edit]

Price was born in Los Angeles where he went to public schools in Santa Monica and West LA. He has lived in Albuquerque’s North Valley for over 50 years, running and walking the acequias, managing an acre and a half of trees, weeds, and gardens, and building a collection of rocks and shells and natural oddities. He has been married to artist Rini Price since 1969, and the two have collaborated since the early 1970s, with Rini creating the covers for the majority of his books of poetry.^[20] They have two sons, Jody Price who lives with his wife Amy in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Keir Price of Kinnelon, New Jersey, and two grandchildren, Ryan and Talia Price.^[13] The Prices travel frequently to what they call the “high alone” in Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana and the desert of southern New Mexico.

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• "Add-Verse" a poetry-photo-video project V.B. Price participated in