Billy Collins was U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003. No poet since Robert Frost has combined high critical acclaim with such broad popular appeal - his last three collections of poems have broken sales records for poetry. He has published nine collections of poetry, and his work has appeared in such periodicals as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, and The American Scholar. He is a Distinguished
Professor of English at Lehman College, City University of New York, where he has taught for the past thirty years. He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Mark Twain Award for humor in poetry, given by the Poetry Foundation.

Poetry with Billy Collins, Parts 1 AND 2 : Billy shares his insights, learned from decades of working at the art and craft of poetry. Billy will discuss tone, voice, rhythm, story, and verse form, all informed and inspired by his characteristic humor and conviviality. For aspiring poets, the workshops of a lifetime!

James Navé is a poet, performer, and educator based in Taos, NM, and Asheville, NC. He is the author of an illustrated book of poems, The Road. His work has appeared in The North Carolina Literary Review, The Asheville Literary Review, Summit Magazine, The Taos News, The Society of the Muse of the Southwest's literary journal Chokecherries (2000-03), and Heartstone Journal. In addition, he has memorized over 600 poems and brings more than twenty years of experience to the craft of writing and performing poetry. From 1995-2003, he co-taught creativity retreats with Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way. Nave holds an MFA in poetry from Vermont College.

In the Eye of the Storm: Using a combination of movement, brainstorming, and improvisation, you'll discover ways to energize your writing process by mining imagination, humor, and emotion.

Presenting Your Work: How do you capture an audience? Develop your own presentational and performance style by connecting spiritually, emotionally, physically, and intellectually with your work.

Diana Whitney, Ph.D., Founder and President of Corporation for Positive Change and a Founder of the Taos Institute, is an internationally recognized consultant, speaker, and educator on the subjects of Appreciative Inquiry, positive change, and spirituality at work. In addition to authoring five books and dozens of articles, she has lectured and taught at universities in the US, Europe and Asia; her corporate clients include British Airways, Hunter Douglas, Accenture, GTE-Verizon, Johnson & Johnson, and a number of US government departments. Diana serves as a consultant to the United Religions Initiative, a global interfaith organization dedicated to peace and cooperation among people of different religions, faiths, and spiritual traditions.

Appreciative Inquiry for Writers : Appreciative Inquiry was designed by Diana Whitney as a tool to connect people and businesses to their positive core. You'll learn to use the 4-D process – Discover, Dream, Design, Destiny – to identify your creative strengths and expand your artistic horizons. As Diana says, "Words create worlds."

With his profound knowledge of art history and and an alchemist's sense of the painting craft, Jack Smith has forged his own place amongst the most powerful of contemporary portraitists working in America. He recently received a prestigious Past Achievement Award from the Peter and Madeleine Martin Foundation for the Creative Arts, following a solo exhibition at the University of New Mexico's Harwood Museum of Art in Taos. Jack is currently working on a series of portraits of American poets, which will be the focus of a book to be published by Michigan State University Press.