Colorado names Crisosto Apache poet laureate

By Steven Law
For the Navajo Times

PAGE – “To serve as Poet Laureate of Colorado is to write from a landscape that teaches us how to listen. Listen to mountains that hold silence like an old wisdom, to rivers that speak in silver tongues of time, to plains that remind us of breath, distance, and belonging.

My vision begins there: in honoring the geography that shapes us, and the communities who give it meaning. I would seek to amplify the voices of those whose stories are rooted in the soil and sky of this state – Indigenous, immigrant, rural, urban, young, and old – so that poetry becomes not an ornament but a shared language of presence and possibility.”

That was the statement of Crisosto Apache after he learned he had been named Colorado’s 11th poet laureate. Apache learned of his new position on Jan. 22, 2026.

“I’ve always been drawn to poetry,” Apache said. “My whole life I’ve enjoyed reading it. Even as an adolescent I read a lot of the classics.”

To read the full article, please see the Feb. 5, 2026, edition of the Navajo Times.

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