MENDOCINO CO., 6/12/25 — Twenty-seven years ago, three women put together an anthology of poetry by Mendocino County women poets called “Wood, Water, Air and Fire“. One of the members of that team, Devreaux Baker, is now the poet laureate of Mendocino County. Baker has now realized her dream of producing a second volume of poems by women, “Spirit of Place.”
The new anthology, edited by Baker, Kate Dougherty, Maureen Eppstein, Georgina Marie Guardado, Karen Lewis, and Blake More, features nearly 100 women poets. For many, this is the first time their writing has been published.
“I wanted to be able to include those voices,” Baker said. “This was a very grassroots project.”
Baker and her team put out a call to any woman in the county to contribute up to three poems. The editing group then selected the poems to be included.
The grassroots approach extended to funding, with the costs of publishing the book raised through benefit readings and donations.
The finished product conveys that sense of place that Baker was looking for. Whales, crabs, rivers, blowholes, wine and seagulls all appear on the book’s pages. As Linda Noel, poet laureate emerita of Ukiah and a member of the Koyungkowi Tribe, wrote in the foreword: “The editors have garnered pieces that illustrate the region’s natural beauty, while delving deeper into what Mendocino County means to those who are life-long residents and others, who came for the beauty or sometimes personal and random reasons and stayed.”
In addition to new contributors, well-established poets whose work appeared in the first volume are included.
A celebration and readings by contributing poets will be held in the Main Gallery of the Mendocino Art Center on June 28 from 4-6 p.m. Gallery Books will be on hand to sell copies of the book. The event is free and open to the public.