Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer co-hosts Emerging Form (a podcast on creative process), Secret Agents of Change (a surreptitious kindness cabal) and Soul Writer’s Circle. Her poetry has appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, on Carnegie Hall stage, and on river rocks she leaves around town. Her collection Hush won the Halcyon Prize. Naked for Tea was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award.

Rosemerry has been writing and sharing a poem a day since 2006—a practice that especially nourished her after the death of her teenage son in 2021. Find her daily poems on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils or a curated version (with optional prompts) on her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, available on your phone with the Ritual app. She is the author of Exploring Poetry of Presence II: Prompts to deepen your writing practice, and her poetry album, Dark Praise, explores “endarkenment,” available anywhere you listen to music. Her most recent collection is All the Honey. In January 2024, she became the first poet laureate for Evermore, and is helping others explore grief, bereavement, wonder and love through poetry.

She teaches and performs poetry for recovery programs, hospice, mindfulness retreats, women’s retreats, teachers and more. Past clients include Camp Coca Cola, Craig Hospital, Business & Professional Women, Women's Dermatological Society, Think 360, Ah Haa School for the Arts, Desert Dharma, Wilkinson Public Library, Telluride Literary Burlesque and 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 Her TEDx talk explores changing our outdated metaphors.

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.

She has 13 collections of poetry, and her work has appeared in O Magazine, on A Prairie Home Companion, in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, on fences in back alleys and on hundreds of river rocks she leaves around town. Her poems have been used for choral works by composers Paul Fowler and Jeffrey Nytch and performed by the Ars Nova Singers. Her most recent collection is All the Honey. Hush, won the Halcyon prize. Naked for Tea was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. Other books include Even Now, The Miracle Already Happening, The Less I Hold and If You Listen, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. She’s won the Fischer Prize, Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge (thrice), the Dwell Press Solstice Prize, the Writer’s Studio Literary Contest (twice), The Blackberry Peach Prize, and has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize.

Since 1994, she’s been singing with Telluride’s 8-member female acapella group Heartbeat, performing jazz, folk, bluegrass and pop songs around the Four Corners region. She also sings nightly while making dinner.

Favorite activities: Trail running, Nordic skiing, camping, baking, knitting, reading, gardening. She’s been an organic fruit grower, a newspaper and magazine editor, and a parent educator for Parents as Teachers. 

She earned her MA in English Language & Linguistics at UW-Madison. One-word mantra: Adjust. Three-word mantra: I’m still learning. www.wordwoman.com