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LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – On Tuesday, April 7, the Lake County Board of Supervisors formally appointed Roy Arthur Blodgett as the 13th Poet Laureate of Lake County for 2026-2028.
Roy Arthur Blodgett is a naturalist and poet currently living in Jerusalem Valley, within the ancestral homeland of the Lake Miwok. He's a passionate advocate for poetry, wildlands, and celebrating the diversity within both human and wild communities.
His poetry flows downstream from a life dedicated to exploring the intersections of natural and cultural history, power and privilege, ancestry, memory, partnership and responsibility.
Lake County will celebrate Blodgett’s inauguration together in April.
All inauguration events are hosted by Brenda Marie Yeager, the 12th Lake County Poet Laureate, 2024-2026.
The following is a schedule of the planned events, all of which are free and open to the general public.
• All are welcome to join Blodgett for his first community workshop as Lake County Poet Laureate for the Spring edition of “Poetry On the Preserve” from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Saturday, April 11, at the Lake County Land Trust’s Rodman Preserve.
• In-person inauguration celebration: 1 to 3 p.m. Sunday, April 19, Fore Family Vineyards Tasting Room, 3924 Main St., Kelseyville. Visit the event page for more information.
• Virtual inauguration celebration: 5 to 7 p.m. Monday, April 20. Registration is required. Register in advance for this meeting here. After registering you will receive an email with the link to the event. Visit the event page for more information.
Blodgett’s intentions as Lake County Poet Laureate are deeply intertwined with his calling as a naturalist.
“My intention as Poet Laureate would be to nurture the literary community engagement, while exploring and celebrating the unique cultural and ecological communities of Lake County,” he said. “Over the past five years of my residency here, my experience of appreciation for the region has only deepened. I have grown to know and love the seasons of this place, and its many faces of expression – from the changing leaves of autumn on Cobb Mountain, to the meadows, wildflowers, and walnut orchards of Big Valley. There is much here worthy of greater recognition, and as an ecological and cultural educator, I’m always eager to assist the peoples of a place to better see and understand the natural communities with which we share it.”
He continued, “Moreover, as someone of working class background, having never taken creative writing classes, I have a grounded understanding and appreciation of the barriers that some express to poetry’s accessibility. My relationship to poetry is as a devotional practice and exploration of human expression, but also as a means by which some may better understand and metabolize the complicated experience of being human. Now, perhaps more than ever, I view poetry as a survival skill, which should be reachable and accessible to all.
He said his hope is that, as poet laureate, “I can leverage my gifts as an educator, mentor and organizer to offer quarterly outings and writing workshops throughout the county, alongside periodic community readings to invigorate wonder, curiosity, and literacy for this place, its peoples and its wild inhabitants.”
Yeager and Blodgett encourage anyone interested in participating in Lake County’s richly creative literary community to join the Lake County Poet Laureate Facebook group for announcements about ongoing events and opportunities.
For more information, email Brenda Marie Yeager at firebrand108@gmail.com.
