Colette LaBouff

Colette LaBouff served as Executive Director of Taos Center for the Arts (TCA) in Taos, New Mexico, from 2018-2022. Under her leadership, TCA flourished as a vital arts organization, offering live and virtual programs, gallery exhibitions, film screenings, and theatrical performances, to engage the communities of Taos and New Mexico. During this time, she served for two years as a gubernatorial appointee board member at New Mexico Humanities Council. For ten years, Colette was Associate and then Acting Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation in the School of Humanities at University of California, Irvine. She has taught poetry, literary journalism and literature at UC Irvine, Pitzer College, Loyola Marymount University and elsewhere. The author of Mean (U. of Chicago Press, 2008), a book of prose poems, and “Holdings,” a text-object (Container Press, 2019), she was poetry curator at Zocalo Public Square for many years between 2009-2020. She holds a Ph.D. in English and an MFA in Poetry, both from UC Irvine. Colette is originally from southern California.