Perie Longo Gets Invested as the New Santa Barbara Poet Laureate

Supposedly, everyone is detached from everyone else by no more than six degrees of separation. If you live in Santa Barbara, though, you’re probably only one or two degrees from Perie Longo. The poet, teacher, therapist, and mentor was invested as the new Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara by the City Council during a ceremony on April 3. She has been active in the community for more than three decades, inspiring thousands of students through her work as a poet in the schools. Indeed, it is not uncommon to find teachers who fondly remember having had Longo as their own teacher when they were young.

In addition, Longo, who is the author of three books of poetry, has brought her work to many other community groups, doing poetry therapy with those in bereavement, with caregivers for Alzheimer’s patients, with psychiatric patients, and with cancer survivors. She taught speech and communication at Brooks Institute of Photography for more than a decade, has taught through both Adult Education and Antioch University, and is currently on the faculty of the Music and Arts Conservatory. Longo maintains a private practice as a therapist and for the last two years has been the head of the National Association for Poetry Therapy. She leads weeklong and weekend poetry workshops as part of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and the Santa Barbara Summer Poetry Workshop, and runs two biweekly poetry crafting groups. She has also given and organized numerous poetry readings, edited several anthologies, and mentored many Santa Barbara poets.

In other words, in keeping with her belief that “everyone is a poet and everyone has something to say,” Longo has touched as many people with the power of poetry in as many ways as one woman possibly could. She follows the much beloved Barry Spacks as Santa Barbara’s second poet laureate.