Performance & Language Arts By Guild Members
Lisa E. Baldwin, a fifth-generation native Oregonian, has lived in the Lower Applegate community of Jerome Prairie since 1966. She was educated in Josephine County schools and earned both her Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Southern Oregon. Baldwin taught English in Grants Pass for 30 years, serving 14 years at North Middle School and 16 years at Grants Pass High School, retiring in 2015. Currently, as owner of N8tive Run Enterprises, she works as a poet and freelance writer, an editor, a teacher and literary consultant. Baldwin is also a past-President of the Oregon Poetry Association and is an active member of the Southern Oregon poetry community.
The Guild Gallery & Art Center currently carries two of Lisa's poetry books: Truths and Consequences, the first book-length collection from Poet Lisa E Baldwin, explores the lived experiences of a common American woman, as a girl in rural Oregon, as a teenaged victim and abused young wife, as a single mother, and ultimately as a strong survivor. In poems that are both tender and brutal, funny and tragic, as well as stylistically diverse, Baldwin is an unflinching truth-teller, adding her clear, authentic voice to the canon of feminist literature.
Lisa E Baldwin’s second poetry collection, Jerome Prairie Creation Myths and other Farm Tales, comes from her experience as a lifelong rural Oregonian, and her love for the Lower Applegate Valley where she has lived since 1966. The poems here celebrate a deep love of the natural world–poems about trees, birds, rivers, skies, wind, seasons, Earth; and there are poems that grieve for the losses inflicted on our natural world by the climate crisis and on-going human exploitation of the planet. Some of the poems started as stories she told her young son, others are drawn from stories she was told as a child. All are connected and held together as a collection by a keen respect for our home planet.
