On Tuesday, May 13, the Sedona City Council formally crowned Poet Laureate Gary Every and Youth Poet Laureate Anya Blue Lior.

The process to establish these two positions began two years ago when Sedona poet Rex Arrasmith suggested it to Community Library Sedona Executive Director Judy Poe and Sedona Arts and Culture Coordinator Nancy Lattanzi.

As the longtime host of the Sedona Poetry Slam, Poe and Arrasmith asked me to participate in selecting the poets. The process stalled for about a year until council moved forward with the proposal in January. The initial selection committee consisted of Arrasmith, Poe, Lattanzi, Sedona Finance Director Barbara Whitehorn and me, who met in February to set up the parameters and define the process to select for the positions.

We decided the poets could not be from Sedona proper only, as that would exclude about a third of the students who attend Sedona Red Rock High School but live in the Village of Oak Creek, the Red Rock Loop area, Elmersville and Oak Creek Canyon and, to a lesser extent, Cornville and Cottonwood. So we set the parameters as being inside the Sedona-Oak Creek School District boundaries, which was encompassing enough to include all the students at SRRHS but also students at Verde Valley School as well as the residents who don’t live in the city itself but consider themselves to be culturally part of Sedona’s civic life.

We asked potential candidates to submit up to 10 pages of poetry. To avoid favoritism, CLS Assistant Director Tasha Spuches anonymized the submissions, removing names and identifying details.

During a poetry slam, poets are clocked on stage from the moment they “engage” with the audience, so there’s no banter, explanation or biography presented. The 3:10 countdown begins when the poet starts speaking and the poems must stand on their own. Likewise, we on the committee were presented simply with the poets’ works.

To evaluate the 11 submissions, we judges each had our own rating system. When we met in March, in spite of our diverse backgrounds and reading preferences, we independently found we had a rough consensus, and picked the top five finalists: Martha Entin, Gary Every Clint Frakes, Camille LeFevre and Tee Pace.

We only had two submissions for Youth Poet Laureate — Felicia Elisabeth Grace Foldes and Anya Blue Lior — but having read and heard a lot of high school-age poetry, both would have been finalists if we had had a wider field from which to select.

The seven finalists first presented their poetry at council’s Moment of Art on April 8. The actual competition began with a reading at Community Library Sedona on April 16, when we added as judges Sedona City Councilwoman Kathy Kinsella and former councilwoman Jessica Williamson, who had attended lots of Sedona Poetry Slams in years past. The second reading took place at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre on April 21, and the third and final performance on April 28 at Tlaquepaque’s Patio de las Campanas.

I hosted all three events, given that MC-ing poetry competitions is my bailiwick.

We thank Poe, Sedona International Film Festival Executive Director Patrick Schweiss and Tlaquepaque General Manager and Resident Partner Wendy Lippman for providing their venues, stages and gear so Sedona residents could hear for free the work of these poet laureate finalists.

As judges, we did not discuss our rankings after the individual readings, only finally doing so over drinks on the evening of April 28, after the last event. While all the poets had great work and got more comfortable as the events went on, Every and Lior emerged as the clear front-runners.

Every and Lior were formally crowned with laurel wreaths on May 13. That was my silly suggestion, which the committee all thought was a great idea; Whitehorn bought the laurels almost immediately.

Every has been doing poetry in the Sedona area for the last 20 years and is a regular participant at the Sedona Poetry Slam. He often goes over time, incurring time penalties that affect his score, but doesn’t mind. His consistent judges’ scores over the years show that the audience enjoys his conversational style of work and he’s a favorite among the other competitors, too — a poet’s poet. His work showed a range of topics and themes, making him flexible for writing poems for events as the position requires. He hosts a poetry radio show with invited guests and has hosted poetry readings all over the Verde Valley. If he wasn’t selected as Sedona’s poet laureate, he would still be doing this work bringing poetry to audiences and listeners. Of all the poets in Sedona, he was and is the ideal choice.

I didn’t know Lior before this competition, but her parents previously owned a former West Sedona coffeeshop known for welcoming artists, Java Love Café, about which she spoke in her final poem at Tlaquepaque. We hope that in working with Every, Poe and Lattanzi, Sedona will get to know her and encourage more young people to express themselves through poetry.

This was a great process to celebrate poetry in general and poetry specific to Sedona in particular.

We hope Sedona residents appreciate that we now have two poets, Every and Lior, who formally and officially represent our city.