Claire Blotter is a writer and director who performs poetry with movement, music and body percussion. She won the 1992 and 1993 San Francisco Performance Poetry Slams, placing second with her team in national competitions in Boston and Chicago. She has published three poetry chapbooks, and her work has appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and online videos. She received two Marin Arts Council Individual Artist Grants in Poetry, First Place Award in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Poetry Contest, and was a finalist for the Fischer Prize in Poetry.
She has taught writing and performance poetry at San Francisco State University, John F. Kennedy University, Dominican University, and the College of Marin. She also taught and performed poetry as Poet in Residence at Worcester State University in Massachusetts.
In 1981 she slipped through the veil to Bolinas where she lived for eleven years writing and directing three community theater productions with electronic music, text, and movement. She founded and directed the Bolinas Guerilla Theater Troupe and edited the Hearsay News. She curated a four-month art exhibit of life size sets/altars to the orishas Oya, Elegba, Oshun, and Yemaya/Olokun, inviting guests to move through the spaces sensing the unique powers of each archetype.
Her poetry videos were included in two Chicago Poetry Video Festivals and the Chicago Art Institute Archives. Her award-winning video documentary Wake-Up Call: Saving The Songbirds, about the decline of migratory songbirds, has been screened at eleven film festivals, including the Mill Valley Film Festival, the Hazel Wolf Environmental Film Festival and the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival.
She lives in Mill Valley, California, and teaches poetry writing and performing in the California Poets in the Schools and Poetry Out Loud Programs.
Paperback: 90 pages
Publisher: Kelsay Books (March 26, 2024)