V. B. Price


V. B. Price is an American poet, human rights and environmental columnist, editor, reporter, publisher, and teacher. He is co-founder, with Benito Aragon, of New Mexico Mercury, an online platform featuring news, commentary and analysis from a variety of experts and writers around New Mexico. Since January 2017, has featured Price's online column of politics and the environment. Price has taught off and on since 1976 in the University of New Mexico's School of Architecture and Planning, and as continuing faculty in the UNM Honors College from 1986 to 2014. His seminars range from the classics in translation to modern poetry, urban studies, and New Mexico's environmental history.

Biography

Price was born on August 30, 1940, in Los Angeles, California, the only son of actor Vincent Price and his first wife, actress Edith Barrett. He moved to New Mexico in 1958 escaping Hollywood's celebrity culture, and came to identify with the state, its isolation and eccentricity, its people, landscape, architecture, and traditional cultures. He graduated from the University of New Mexico in 1962 with a B.A. in anthropology. That same year he published his first poem and began a lifelong writing practice. He first visited Chaco Canyon in 1961 and published his seminal work of poetry Chaco Body with photographer Kirk Gittings in 1992. After graduate school he worked as a reporter and in 1971 he began a weekly column in New Mexico that has run almost continuously to the present. In 1969 Price married the artist . They have lived in the same house and worked the same land in Albuquerque's North Valley ever since. In 2007, Price's selected poems from 1966 to 2006, Broken and Reset, were published by UNM Press. In 2016, he received an honorary degree, Doctor of Letters from his alma mater.

Writing

Price's poetry and prose have been published in more than 70 national and international publications since 1962. He was the architecture editor for Artspace Magazine of Albuquerque and Los Angeles, and the former editor of New Mexico Magazine. Price was the city editor for the New Mexico Independent and worked for the publication through the 1970s. He was the founding editor of Century Magazine, which ran from 1980–1983. He was architecture critic at the Albuquerque Journal in the mid 1980s. A contributor to The Albuquerque Tribune from 1978 until the newspaper closed in 2008, he was a weekly columnist for the paper. Price was an editorial contributor to the New Mexico Independent from 2008-2009. He was the series editor of the Mary Burritt Poetry Series at the University of New Mexico Press from 2004 to 2012. As an editor, he has brought work of more than 500 New Mexican authors, poets, and scholars into print.
In November 2011, UNM Press published Price's book, The Orphaned Land: New Mexico's Environment Since the Manhattan Project. In the book, Price analyzes fifty years of newspaper articles and government reports to reveal the environmental toll which New Mexico has paid for decades of military munitions testing, uranium mining, and population growth: unsustainable development, air and water pollution by multinational corporations and undue strain on the state's limited water supply, to name a few. Framing New Mexico as, "a microcosm of global ecological degradation," Price explores the impacts and systematic breaches of public trust by some of the pervading power structures affecting the environment around the world: the military-industrial complex, multinational corporation's impact on local natural resources, and the lack of consideration of long-term environmental consequences in development planning. Speaking with Gene Grant on KNME's, New Mexico In Focus, Price states that the Manhattan Project both transformed and deformed the American West. It elevated New Mexico into one of the intellectual and scientific epicenters for the Cold War, but it also resulted in 2,100 waste sites at Los Alamos National Laboratories in Northern New Mexico and 400 waste sites at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. Marc Simmons of the Santa Fe New Mexican calls the book, "a stellar compendium focused on the state's slide toward ecological degradation."
Price's extended poetic sequence, entitled , was published in March 2018 by Wings Press of San Antonio, TX. What interests Price in Memoirs of the World, quoting his introduction, is not his own specific life but "what I have witnessed of the imagination in my practice as a poet, what I have witnessed of the world as a journalist and non-fiction writer, and what I have witnessed of the will to love and the will to destroy." Critic William Peterson writes, "Price has composed... an impassioned memoir of the world, a scorched collective memory of our entire human aspiration — and our calamity."

Recognition

Price has a long history of poetry performances in New Mexico and the West, from 1969 at the Living Batch bookstore to 2018 at Bookworks, both in Albuquerque. He has read at more than 100 venues, including St John's College, Santa Fe, the University of Albuquerque, the University of New Mexico, Collected Works Book Store in Santa Fe, Tome on the Range in Las Vegas, New Mexico, Beyond Baroque in Venice, California, and in multiple bars, cantinas, classrooms, and public spaces. Price was part of a series of video readings shot by Allan and Gloria Graham from 2003 to 2005 called Add-Verse, which featured poets such as Robert Creeley, Anne Waldman, Diane di Prima, and Michael McClure reading poems while the camera focused only on their hands.
In March 2010, Price was videotaped while reading from a variety of his published and unpublished poems at Acequia Booksellers in Albuquerque's North Valley.

Personal life

Price was born in Los Angeles where he went to public schools in Santa Monica and West LA. He has lived in Albuquerque's North Valley for over 50 years, running and walking the acequias, managing an acre and a half of trees, weeds, and gardens, and building a collection of rocks and shells and natural oddities. He has been married to artist Rini Price since 1969, and the couple have collaborated since the early 1970s, with Rini creating the covers for the majority of his books of poetry. They have two sons, Jody Price who lives with his wife Amy in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Keir Price of Kinnelon, New Jersey, and two grandchildren, Ryan and Talia Price. The Prices travel frequently to what they call the “high alone” in Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana and the desert of southern New Mexico. Rini Price died in 2018.