V. B. Price

Vincent Barrett Price (born August 30, 1940) is an American poet, human rights and environmental columnist, editor, reporter, publisher, and teacher.

Price was born on August 30, 1940, in Los Angeles, California, the only son of actor Vincent Price (1911–1993) and his first wife, actress Edith Barrett (1907–1977).

He moved to New Mexico in 1958, escaping Hollywood's celebrity culture, and came to identify with the state, its isolation and eccentricity, and its people, landscape, architecture, and traditional cultures.

He first visited Chaco Canyon in 1961 and published his seminal work of poetry, Chaco Body, with photographer Kirk Gittings in 1992.

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.

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.

In 1969 Price married the artist Rini Price.

Price was the city editor for the New Mexico Independent (print publication) and worked for the publication through the 1970s.

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.

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.

He is currently an elected member of the Board of Directors for the Leopold Writing Program.

In 2021, he received the New Mexico Literary Arts Gratitude Award "for contributions to the life of the poetry community in New Mexico and the Southwest."

He was also weekly columnist and regular contributor to The Albuquerque Tribune from 1978 until the newspaper closed in 2008.

He was the founding editor of Century Magazine, which ran from 1980 to 1983.

He was an architecture critic at the Albuquerque Journal in the mid-1980s.

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 the work of more than 500 New Mexican authors, poets, and scholars into print.

In 2007, Price's selected poems from 1966 to 2006, Broken and Reset, were published by UNM Press.

His most recent works include the poetry volumes Polishing the Mountain, or Catching Balance Just in Time: Selected Poems 2008–2020, Innocence Regained: Christmas Poems, and Memoirs of the World in Ten Fragments, and the nonfiction book The Orphaned Land: New Mexico's Environment Since the Manhattan Project.

He is the co-founder, with Benito Aragon, of the New Mexico Mercury, an online platform featuring news, commentary and analysis from a variety of experts and writers around New Mexico.

Price was an editorial contributor to the New Mexico Independent (online publication) from 2008 to 2009.

Casa Urraca Press of Abiquiú, New Mexico, published Price's second volume of selected poems, Polishing the Mountain, or Catching Balance Just in Time: Selected Poems 2008–2020 in 2021.

This volume compiles largely new and unpublished work, both individual poems (such as “Chaco Nights,” the latest of his Chaco poems) and large suites (such as Homeric America and the Museum Poems).

It also excerpts previously published work, including Memoirs of the World, Rome MMI, and Price’s Christmas poems.

In the Introduction, he writes, “The title of this book—Polishing the Mountain—comes from a prayer cycle I call Badger Ethics, a sequence of admonishments in answer to the plea ‘What do I do now?’ that has evolved into a daily and calming meditative recitation.

Trying to learn what to overlook, struggling to keep focused on what matters, catching myself when I fail to see purpose and order as the ‘refuge of now,’ and polishing away so I won’t forget to ‘worry not,’ as the Badger admonished, has been for me like rubbing a smooth stone endlessly all over the surface of the Sandia Mountains with no expectation of results.”

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-TV'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 of 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."

In 2016, he received an honorary degree, Doctor of Letters (Litt. D), from his alma mater.

He continues to write poetry, nonfiction, and his ongoing weekly column about politics and the environment.

Since January 2017, the Mercury Messenger has featured Price's online column of politics and the environment.

They lived in the same house and worked the same land in Albuquerque's North Valley until Rini's death in 2019; Price still lives there today.

Price also published the poetry collection Innocence Regained: Christmas Poems with Casa Urraca Press in 2020.