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Scott Wiggerman's Poetry Pages

H o m e  
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I am a poet, teacher, editor, artist, and retired librarian who, after 35 years in Austin, Texas, resettled to a new home in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 2015 with
my husband, David Meischen, where we both continue to thrive as writers and publishers (Dos Gatos Press) 
Some highlights of my personal writing career: My first Pushcart nomination, in 2008, was for "Playing GI Joes," nominated by HeartLodge."Egret Sonnet" was nominated by Hobble Creek Review for the 2011 Sundress Best of the Net, as well as a Pushcart! "Formations," another sonnet, was nominated for a 2012 Pushcart by the very same Hobble Creek Review. I received two Pushcart nominations (2021 and 2020) from San Pedro River Review--for "Monsoon Season" and "Another Four in the Morning." My most recent Pushcart nomination (2025) is from Cold Moon Journal for "closed clinic." In 2023 I received my first Touchstone Award nomination, for "yellow to red" in Poetry Pea, and in 2024 I received my second, for the monoku "one hit wondering how it came to this" in Prune Juice. Another monoku in 2024 ("the chilly silence of snow angels") won third place in the Maya Lyubenova International Haiku contest. In 2025 I received three more Touchstone nominations, one from Drifting Sands for the haibun "Straightforward," one from Sense & Sensibility for "paper cranes," and one from Circle of Salt for the monoku "rusted fence how we bleed without knowing".
Leaf and Beak: Sonnets, my third book, was one of three Finalists for the Texas Institute of Letters'
Helen C. Smith Memorial Award! And in 2021 I was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters, along with two other poets, Kevin Prufer and Allison Hedge Coke.
In March 2020, "Johnsburg" was featured in American Life in Poetry chosen by Poet Laureate Ted Kooser. It is also featured now on the esteemed Poetry Foundation website. "Reveries While Walking the Mesa on the Hottest Day of the Year" earned a Laureates' Choice Award in the 2020 Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest, the second time in five years I placed a sonnet in the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest (the first was for "Birding in Fog" in 2015). And in other sonnet news, my sonnet “Tracks” placed as Second Honorable Mention (5th place) in the Modern Sonnet category of the 2021 Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest. In 2022, I made the Long List for the Penrose Poetry Prize, and one of my haibun, "To Get There" was included in the annual Red Moon anthology of best English-language haibun for 2022 (it's on my Anthologies page), my third time making one of the esteemed anthologies. In 2023, during the month of April, I was the guest editor for the Haiku Foundation’s Haiku of the Day feature. All of the haiku I selected are related to the topic of LGBTQ+. Two cheribun (cherita & prose) placed in the 2024 MacQueen's Quinterly Cheribun Contest, "Brothers in Blood" (short listed) and "The Things I Do for Porn" (long listed); in 2025, two more, "Voices From Each Side of a Triangle" (short listed) and “When I Knew: Second Grade” (long listed).
I have also been studying art the past few years here in Albuquerque. Art is something I've always been interested but have not had much formal training in, but I have produced enough to create a small portfolio, recently updated and sorted by media, if you're interested in seeing another side my work: Scott Wiggerman Art Portfolio. Most work is available; make me an offer I can't refuse! And in the past couple of years, my art has graced the cover of four books of poetry (by poets Lyman Grant, Gayle Lauradunn, and David Meischen, as well as the 2023 Haiku Society of America's annual members anthology, Fractured by Cattails). In addition, one of my art pieces was featured in 2023 at Rattle as the source for their ekphrastic poetry challenge, six of my pieces were featured with accompanying haiku in Cholla Needles, and one of my collages made it into the 2025 Sonic Boom e-book for World Collage Day (only 16 artists were selected). It's delightful to combine my love of poetry and art in such projects. One more cover in 2025, the Dos Gatos Press Anthology, Notes of Light and Dark: Aubades and Nocturnes, and the following "preview" coming up in early 2026 from Casa Urraca Press, my art on my new book!
  
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Presale pricing until March 2026 publication!
Click on the cover to order from Casa Urraca !
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Lauren Camp, New Mexico State Poet Laureate, 2022-2025, writes: "The book feels like a treasure hunt—plunging from Dickinson’s familiar lines into rhythms and questions edged by the chosen form. The poems are taut, personal investigations into new understandings of love. 'You can outline a shore, but perilous to map the soul,' the author writes—and yet this collection bravely does just that.”
Hilda Raz, author of Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been: New and Collected Poems, says: "Poet and artist Scott Wiggerman is known for his attraction to and use of constraints, formal connections of one thing to another. He is brilliant and evasive, playful and deeply engaged and he teaches his fans – I am one of many -- to appreciate and trust his work. His exquisite new book leans on two poetic forms, one old and the other from the 21st century, the golden shovel and the ghazal, both of which pay homage to others, and lines by another poet, Emily Dickinson, the 19th century progenitor of contemporary American poetry. Wiggerman weaves the language of many into his own ingenious and beautiful lines. And he uses the forms with aplomb and genius."
Nickole Brown, President of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets workshops and annual Festival asks: "What is it not just to read a poet’s work but to take them in so deeply that their being becomes a part of yours? Scott Wiggerman’s Beginning and Ending with Emily is, by far, the best example I’ve found of such a deep and abiding study, making together with Emily Dickinson a great quilt crafted in the sleepless hours of the night. As such, each of his poems backstitch into hers, taking the scraps of the heart to form a book wild but ordered, held fast by the constraint for which she is known but following the pull of a queer golden thread luminous and striking. The result is not just conversation but co-creation, an achievement of measure, candor, and above all, love—or, as he writes, ‘Emily’s now me, and I’m now her: so begins the soul.’"
Brian Turner, author of Here, Bullet and The Wild Delight of Wild Things, states: "Scott Wiggerman’s latest collection brings us the great sweep of questions which linger in our lives and in our bodies, questions which plumb the intimate and the spiritual, the mundane and the sublime. Here we are given the 'secret thoughts I harbor deep within this inner room' alongside moments of tenderness so fine the music lifts off the page, as it does when '[a] hummingbird quivers in the cup of their red hands.' Gorgeous, nuanced, jeweled in the poet’s craft—the ghazals and golden shovels drafted by Wiggerman’s pen have 'mouthed the words from memory' as they 'sing the scars of my naked self.'”
Ed Madden, professor of English and Director of the women’s and gender studies program at the University of South Carolina, declares: "When Scott Wiggerman describes 'the controlled permutations of go' in “Calendar of Love,” it’s a window into the book. Control and urge, and the ways those drives inflect and transform each other. On the one hand, we have a calendar, the form through which we experience time; on the other, love, that malleable word that stretches the self and takes into its ambit the anxious escapades of youth, difficult relations with parents, a long-term commitment to a partner, and all the memories and aspirations that wrap and warp and weave those loves. There’s a wry self-awareness of his poetic constraints—as he says in “Self-Portrait as Emily,” 'I always have a line'—but the energy of this book burns in how his words push and pull against and through hers."
cover image by Scott Wiggerman
cover design by Zach Hively
Casa Urraca Press, 2026
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Finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters'
Helen C. Smith Memorial Award!
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Michelle Newby, from a review in Texas Book Lover: "I am reminded of Robert Frost and James Audubon. What a relief and refreshingly free of irony – classical, lyrical, romantic sonnets."
Joanna Weston, author of Summer Father: "I've just finished Scott Wiggerman's book, Leaf and Beak: Sonnets, which I absolutely love. He has a real gift for observing the minutiae of the world around him as he goes on his daily run round Mueller Lake. His ability with slant and half rhyme is phenomenal, so much so that the rhyme is almost unnoticed. I'm going to read it again, it's such a joy."
Justin Evans, author of Sailing This Nameless Ship: "I have for many years been a fan of Scott Wiggerman's sonnets, and I would not hesitate to side him with the likes of Ernest Hilbert and Steven Nightingale as a master of this particular craft. I am even more fond of these sonnets because of their subject matter, which make me see the natural world in a whole new way each time I pick them up and read."
Larry D. Thomas, author of As If Light Actually Matters: New & Selected Poems: "These sonnets are exquisite. They are as good as any I have read by contemporary American poets.”
Ann Howells, editor of Illya's Honey: "I read the book and was particularly impressed by the beginning and ending sonnet series! If you haven't read the book, do it soon!"
Watch the book trailer on YouTube: Leaf and Beak Trailer
cover photo by Paul Licce Photography
cover design by Steven Schroeder
interior design by Forget Gutenberg
ISBN: 9780944048658
Purple Flag, 2015
$15.00
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Sarah Cortez, Texas Institute of Letters author of How to Undress a Cop, writes in Texas Books in Review, "One of the remarkable feats of this collection is the dual tasks the poet has accomplished: the precise communication of a fully realized life with its world of luminous revelations and the artful, effective claiming of so much inherently difficult territory—that of anger and that of eroticism, sometimes interwoven. If Scott Wiggerman isn’t already one of your favorite Texas poets, he will be after you read this book."
Laurie Kutchins, Pulitzer-nominated author of The Night Path, says, "Presence evokes the elements--palpable qualities of air, earth, water and fire, and more--the difficult-to-render textures of familial love, lovers, loss, renewal, memory, and what one needs to stay present to the elemental world. So many moments in Wiggerman's poems 'evaporate like broth into essence,' allowing us to feel absence become presence. And as the poet wisely notes, 'the juxtaposition is seamless." Cyrus Cassells, Lambda award-winning author of Beautiful Signor states, "In Presence, Scott Wiggerman uses an intransigent stain as an emblem of buoyant integrity in the face of intolerance and exclusion. In this new book, nimbly arranged by the elements, the poet, brandishing his trademark sass, humor, and candor, glories in local nature and limns the joys and trials of being a lovingly irreverent Texas gadfly, a proud and forthright gay man." Larry D. Thomas, Texas Poet Laureate, writes, "Scott Wiggerman has achieved a noteworthy reputation as a widely-published poet, editor, and poetry workshop facilitator. Presence, his long-awaited second book-length collection of poems, certainly solidifies his standing as a contemporary poet of seriousness and distinction. Presence is an ambitious, significant, and memorable collection of poetry. I give it my highest recommendation."
Anne McCrady, author of the Eakin Book Award-winning Along Greathouse Road, writes in a review in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, "These poems are honest and personal: a dialogue about the conflicted need we all have to be present in a family, present with a lover, present in our our bodies, present in the natural world, present as ourselves. These are substantial poems of longing to belong and of the pain of exclusion."
And Robert McDowell, author of the best-selling Poetry as Spiritual Practice, writes, "In Presence, we meet, in the poet's own words, 'the drumming of a buoyant heart.' It is a sound that will not defer to injustice. It is an intelligent and artful yawp that won't go quietly. It is a witnessing we need to hear in a world so full of babbling and duplicity. It's the sound of truth itself . . . . Through it all, Wiggerman's marvelous craft gives shape to his versatility and poignant insight. He is a must-read American poet. Share him with everyone you know who cares about words and the truth."
cover photo by Carol King
ISBN: 9781931247955
Pecan Grove Press, 2011
$15.00
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Judith Minty, distinguished author of Walking with the Bear says, "These well-wrought poems emerge from the physical garden of today and now. They are like the food of contemporary America in their wide range that satisfies the palate. From painful moments of childhood to silky erotica to delightful bursts of humor, Scott Wiggerman's faith in the power of human love and caring prevails to make Vegetables and Other Relationships a true feast."
Ric Williams, Austin Chronicle critic, says, "Wiggerman's poems are like depth charges shot into the churning seas of the cultural wars: some explore softly and deceptively near the surface; others plunge deep, sending seismic shock waves through complacent souls too long sleeping in the mud of declension; all are well crafted implements of personal and political disruption."
cover by Scott Wiggerman
ISBN: 1891386131
Plain View Press, 2000
Only $10.00
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 My
husband and I took over the publishing of the Texas
Poetry Calendar beginning with the 2006 edition. To do so,
we started a new press, Dos Gatos
Press. While we no longer publish the calendar, we continue to produce books. Please take a look at the link
to this site; better yet, help us
out by purchasing a copy of one of our books,
as we are a non-profit organization. We have released numerous books, including: an anthology called Big Land, Big Sky, Big Hair: Best of the Texas Poetry Calendar's First Decade; Karla K. Morton's Redefining Beauty, winner of a 2010 Next Generation Indie Book Award, Wingbeats: Exercises and Practice in Poetry, Anne McCrady's Letting Myself In, the anthology Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku & Haiga, and Wingbeats II, Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems, Weaving the Terrain: 100-Word Southwestern Poems,Bruce Noll's Circumference of Light, Greg Candela's Shallow-Rooted Heart, and 22 Poems & a Prayer for El Paso, Unknotting the Line: The Poetry in Prose, as well as the recent Notes of Light and Dark: Southwestern Aubades and Nocturnes. All Dos Gatos Press books are available on the Dos Gatos
Press website, as well as through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ingram's, and Follett's. David and I also run a monthly series of Wingbeats workshops at Books on the Bosque in Albuquerque, the second Tuesday of the month (odd months at the store, even months on Zoom).
I encourage you to email me your comments at my email address:
swiggerman (at) comcast (dot) net
Thanks for stopping by!
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