Biography
Born in San Francisco from an immigrant Italian father and a sixth generation Californian, Art Goodtimes spent seven years in a Catholic seminary, earned a B.A. in English from San Francisco State University (1970), and got a lifetime teaching credential from U.C. Berkeley Extension (1978).
Currently he’s serving a fifth term on the San Miguel County Board of Commissioners as Colorado’s only Green Party partisan-elected official. He’s been an award-winning member of dozens of boards, commissions and committees on the local, regional, state and even national levels. He’s been connected with the Telluride Mushroom Festival in various capacities for over 30 years, and is an executive board member and former president of the Telluride Institute.
Twice director of the Telluride Council for the Arts & Humanities (1980-81, 1995-96), Art has worked as pre-school teacher and director, as well as a freelance writer and journalist/editor and he continues as a weekly columnist (1981-present) for the Telluride Watch and monthly for Cortez’s Four Corners Free Press (2004-present).
Art’s been the poetry editor of Twin Peaks (with Sharon Skolnick, San Francisco, 1979), Earth First! Journal (Tucson, 1981-91), Wild Earth (Vermont, 1992-2000), and the Mountain Gazette (2011-13). He’s currently poetry editor for Fungi magazine out of Wisconsin.
Founder of Talking Gourds, an ever-changing poetry feast, and the gourds circle tradition, he has performed alone and with others at bookstores, schools, libraries and coffeehouse venues all over the Southwest, as well as the Sparrows Poetry Festival in Salida, Café Nuba in Denver and the Festival of the Imagination in Del Norte, Colorado. Art has teamed up with David Feela of Cortez for a series of Word Shark readings. He’s a member of Jack Mueller’s Union of Street Poets gang. And he’s shared the stage as a performance poetry ensemble, EAR, with Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and Elle Metrick.
In 2010, he was named the first Western Slope Poet Laureate at the first annual Karen Chamberlain Poetry Festival in Carbondale.
Art’s last book was As If the World Really Mattered (La Alameda Press, Albuquerque, 2007), which received critical acclaim in Bloomsbury Review (Denver) and Poetry Flash (San Francisco). In 2013 Western Eye Press (Sedona, Arizona) will publish a chapbook, Looking South to Lone Cone.
