Youths with a View

Senior students Neve Naktin from Santa Fe High School and Joycelyn Shroulote from the New Mexico School for the Arts (Diné, Hopi and Ohkay Owingeh), both poets and artists heavily involved in their local communities, have been named Santa Fe’s Youth Poets Laureate until April next year.

They replace outgoing youth poets Jesse Begay and Maia Hillok Katz.

Naktin and Shroulote will also have their work represented in Through Lines, the program’s first poetry anthology, which features poetry from 20 finalists and winners of the Santa Fe Youth Poet Laureate title from 2019 and 2024. The anthology comes out on May 5, and Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeehouse will host a celebration of the book’s publication that includes readings from seven of the poets featured, including Naktin and Shroulote.

Both Naktin and Shroulote heavily involve themselves in the Santa Fe and Española communities outside of their work in poetry. Naktin, for example, not only works at the nonprofit Assistance Dogs of the West as a volunteer service dog trainer, but is also president of their Youth Board.

While Naktin had a strong interest in writing from a young age, she discovered her love for poetry only a few years ago, and says the “creative flexibility” poetry provided her quickly made it a passion of hers.

“Joan Didion has a style of writing that introduced me to poetry because of her articulation, vocabulary and sentence structure, and that led me to discover authors like Arthur Sze, who is a naturalist poet,” Naktin tells SFR, adding that she also likes Sylvia Plath’s work. “That sort of style where it’s interacting with your surroundings and experiences in a very detailed manner really inspired me, and I wanted to sort of explore my own world in the way those authors do with their writing.”

Naktin describes the topics she features in her poetry and the style she writes through as “varying and fluid,” saying she focuses on how her inner feelings interact with the world around her. She doesn’t draw toward any specific rhythm or format, but she notes epistolary writing as one of her preferred styles of writing a poem.

“I write a lot about my femininity, the New Mexico landscape, that sort of home environment for me, things I feel passionate about and things I see in the news that I can’t not talk about,” she says.

One poem Naktin wrote that she describes as one of her favorites is about the infamous orca whale that carried its dead calf for 17 days and more than 1,000 miles in 2018.

“It’s stuff like that that touches a part of my brain or a part of my heart and it just really draws my attention to it, stuff I feel like can’t be ignored,” Naktin says. “And a lot of my work also surrounds sexual assault and violence against women, and some of that is more the fear I’ve experienced…but it’s also seeing stuff like that around me, knowing people who have had those experiences and listening to people talk about it. It motivates me to talk about it too.”

Naktin’s works, she says, also continue to change over time because she continues to edit them long after they’re completed, even when published.

“I might really love one specific word in a poem and know that is going to stay there consistently, but I think all of my written works…I can look back and say, “I wish I kept going on that,” or, “I’m going to make a change here,” so a lot of my pieces have multiple drafts,” she says.

Shroulote, who lives in Española, has also involved herself in her community through Tewa Women United, an Española-based nonprofit organization that hosts programs for environmental, reproductive and gender justice for Indigenous communities.

Shroulote first became interested in poetry as a middle-school student, citing Danez Smith’s poetry collection Homie and Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” as the works that inspired her most. Within her poetry, Shroulote primarily writes about topics such as land conservation, Española communities and her own history as an Indigenous person.

“I use poetry not just to give myself a voice, but to give other people a voice,” she tells SFR. “There’s a lot of things that I like bringing awareness to within my poetry, whether it be land conservation, history conservation or the environment…I also love writing poetry as a way to let me be vulnerable without being hurt, and be intimate with myself in a way that’s comfortable.”

Shroulote also combines her poetry with her other favorite art mediums, such as photography and graffiti, which she often posts together on her Instagram.

“I grew up around graffiti, and I really love it. I know a lot of people see it as vandalism, but it’s an art form and a way of expression, and I really love that graffiti can be a sign of protest as well,” she says. “And I love being in the moment, but I also love capturing it [with photography], because it’s not just something I was there to witness. I want other people to witness the joys of my life too.”

Outside of her work in poetry, Shroulote also dedicates a fair amount of time to the skating and underground music scene in Española and the wider Northern New Mexico area. In the spring of 2022, she even began a weekly zine that covers local skate events, music and art in Española, named What’s the Word.

“I have different sections, like “what’s the word on the street” is the things happening around the block, events you can attend… with “music on the street,” people can submit their own music,” Shroulote says. “It’s very community-oriented; I make sure the community has a voice within it. You can submit your favorite art works, submit your own artwork, submit songs, ask us to interview bands or put different events in the magazine.”

She describes the zine as taking inspiration from other outlets such as skateboarding news and event magazine Thrasher, and the punk rock DIY magazine Razorcake. She often interviews local bands under a section called “backstage pass” and attends skate events to cover.

“For the most part, I think it’s had a very positive impact. It’s been really fun and it’s amazing for the most part, but the other part of it is I’m a female skateboarder, so it is kind of weird sometimes because people don’t take it too seriously,” Shroulote says. “Sometimes, they’re like, ‘Oh, this chick skateboarding, like does she actually skate?’ but one thing I’ve noticed is if those people are the people judging you, then that’s not the audience you want to reach.”

Shroulote has also helped set up several events in Española and Santa Fe, including with Tewa Women United’s annual “Bounce Back” event that began in 2018, hosting live performances from local bands, skating demonstrations, a youth mural competition and other community workshops.

“I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot with the zine…it’s been very positive in my community, and I’m very happy I was able to help throughout high school,” Shroulote says. “The skate park is my number one community, and it is one place I will always go back to, because I see them as my family.”

Santa Fe Youth Poet Laureate Program: Through Lines: 4 pm Sunday, May 5. Free Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeehouse, 202 Galisteo St., (505) 988-4226.