Belle Turnbull and the Legacy of Colorado Poetry: A Symposium

Belle Turnbull (1881-1970) was the first strong poet to live in and write about the mountains and high mining towns of the Colorado Rockies. Well-known during her life but long out of print, Turnbull’s lyrics of sublime alpine wilderness and her narratives about the harsh and dangerous world of hard rock mining offer us a profoundly original vision of the American West that transcends the region.

“This book restores to Westerners a treasure we were foolish to misplace. In poems that are as consoling as they are unsettling, Belle Turnbull extracted and refined the meanings of mountains, miners, memory, and mortality. Now, nearly fifty years after her death, a team of gifted writers—serving as Turnbull’s latter-day friends in high places—joins together to rescue her work from our inattention, and return us to her company. “
—Patty Limerick, Faculty Director of The Center of the American West, University of Colorado, Boulder

Colorado poets, writers, and historians discussed the relevance of Belle Turnbull’s work today and how it could help us to understand the making of the contemporary American West.

Featuring: Art Goodtimes, Patty Limerick, Uche Ogbuji, David J. Rothman, Susan Spear, and Jeffrey R. Villines. 

Sponsored by: Center of the American West, Center for Humanities and Arts, Department of Writing and Rhetoric, CU History Department, Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, CU English Department, the CU Women and Gender Studies Department, and the Graduate Committee on the Arts and Humanities.