What is the Literary Salon

Howdy! We’re glad you’re here

Las Vegas Literary Salon hosted its first event Sunday, July 12, thanks to the Las Vegas Arts Council and the Las Vegas NM Community Foundation. The event was a delayed launch because of the pandemic. Originally, thanks to a Mustard Seed grant from the First United Presbyterian Church, the first event was to be a poetry workshop in April featuring Carolyn Martin.

After waiting for life to get back to normal, which clearly wasn’t happening soon enough for us, Patti Romero and I, founders of LVLS, decided to make use of Zoom technology to get LVLS up and running. With the encouragement and help of LVAC’s Susie Tsytee, we produced a Writers & Readers Roundtable featuring five authors. It was well attended for our first foray into the digital world and gave us much-needed encouragement to continue.

Thanks to our guests, author Ray John de Aragon, poet Joy Alesdatter, historian Tim Hagaman, poet Kathleen Lujan, and writer/performance artist Beth Urech, we saw the potential for more.

Since then we have had an event each month through November and will return to programming in January with Toby Smith, author of Crazy Fourth: How Jack Johnson Kept His Heavyweight Title and Put Las Vegas, New Mexico, on the Map.

This is the launch of our website, which is very much a work in progress. Click on Guest Roll for a brief bio and contact information for previous LVLS guests.

Going forward, we will continue with A Visit with the Author, and expand on workshops, like the one conducted by Carolyn Martin. We’re looking for ideas, so if you have a topic you would like us to explore, or a presenter who LVLS might invite, or suggestions for improvement to the site, please let us know by filling out the contact form below.

There is no cost for participants or audience members. We want to thank the LVNM Community Foundation and the Las Vegas Arts Council for their encouragement and support. And thanks to the First Presbyterian Church of Las Vegas for its Mustard Seed Grant, which allowed us to resubmit the grant request with revised deliverables. With the grant, we will purchase a one-year Zoom license and get this website off the ground. The remaining grant funds will be used to published a collection of short stories and poems by regional writers. But, that’s a story for another day.

LVLS events are generally held from 4-5 p.m., the fourth Sunday of the month. Registration is required so we may send you a Zoom invite specific to the featured guest or program. In the future, we hope to switch to in-person activities. Until then, our programming is digital.

Please share this post with your friends who love writing and reading. We’re excited about the future of Las Vegas Literary Salon. If you would like to become a member, click on the Contact tab and provide us with your email address. We will send you notifications of upcoming events. We also invite you to follow this website so you don’t miss any of our posts.

A special thanks to Jim Terr who has generously edited some of our videos. We appreciate the donation of his time and expertise.

The Las Vegas Literary Salon Team
Sharon Vander Meer
Patti Romero
Mary Rose Henssler