FACULTY
Tucker Szymkowicz – Executive Director
Garrett Smith, PhD – Chief Scientist & Watershed Education Program Director
Pam Lifton-Zoline – Clute Science Fiction Library Program Director
Dr. Britt Bunyard – Telluride Mushroom Festival Program Director
Ashley Smith – Telluride Mushroom Festival Operations Manager
Mandy White – Ute Reconciliation Program Director
Art Goodtimes – Talking Gourds Program Director
Dr. Galaxy Stardancer – Talking Gourds Program Administrator
Rosemerry Trommer – Talking Gourds Co-Director
Dr. Dan Collins – Chief Investigator SCAPE

Tucker looks forward to helping Telluride Institute continue to address critical issues facing people, place and planet.





Over the next month I started fundraising and gathering donations to help protect the water and to defend the treaty rights of the Lakota. I attended a ceremony in San Miguel County, Colorado, of the official apology to the Ute People, the Nuchu, for our terrible shared history. The Ute tribes were removed from their homelands to make way for the mining industry. During the ceremony, I became aware of the grace of an accepted apology. The moment of shared acknowledgement of the harm done, the deep regret, the sadness, the vulnerability of all present, opened my heart to the silent presence of possibility. That we must join together, hand in hand into the future. After returning from Standing Rock, I started volunteering for Telluride Institute’s Ute Reconciliation Program. Our apology with the Ute People is an ongoing process that requires apt attention to building relationships between our communities. This program is an important part of our nations healing and I am honored to help.

Former Institute president and long-time trustee, Art helps run the Telluride Mushroom Festival as advisor to the director and poet-in-residence (1981-present). Currently he is involved as director of three Institute initiatives: the Talking Gourds poetry program, which includes a monthly Poetry Club, an annual Telluride Literary Arts Festival, and the national Fischer Prize for poetry; the Ute Reconciliation program, which includes the annual Indigenous Peoples Day and cultural outreach to the Western Slope’s dispossessed owners, the Ute Nation; and the Fen Advisory project — to continue a longitudinal study by Colorado State University’s Dr. David Cooper in the Prospect Basin fens within the Telluride ski area. Former poetry editor for Twin Peaks, Earth First! Journal, Wild Earth, Mountain Gazette, and other zines, he currently is poetry editor for Fungi magazine and the on-line Sage Green Journal. He served as the first Western Slope Poet Laureate (2011-12). His latest poetry books are As If the World Really Mattered (La Alameda Press, Albuquerque, 2007) and Looking South to Lone Cone (Western Eye Press, Sedona, 2013). He performs his poetry widely in the region.


Devoted to helping others explore their creative potential, Rosemerry is the co-host of Emerging Form, a podcast on creative process (with Christie Aschwanden), co-director of Telluride’s Talking Gourds Poetry Club (with Art Goodtimes) and co-founder of Secret Agents of Change (with Sherry Richert Belul). She also directed the Telluride Writers Guild for ten years.
She teaches and performs poetry for addiction recovery programs, hospice, mindfulness retreats, women’s retreats, teachers and more. Past clients include Camp Coca Cola, Craig Hospital, Business & Professional Women, Deepak Chopra, Think 360, Ah Haa School for the Arts, Desert Dharma, Wilkinson Public Library, Telluride Literary Burlesque and Colorado Mesa State University.
She performs as a storyteller, including shows in Aspen at the Wheeler Opera House, at the Taos Storytelling Festival and the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN. Her TEDx talk explores changing our outdated metaphors.
She believes in the power of practice and has been writing a poem a day since 2006. Her daily poems can be found at https://ahundredfallingveils.com/. Favorite themes in her poems include parenting, gardening, the natural world, love, science, thriving/failure and daily life.

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