HUMBOLDT ARTIST COLLECTIVE
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Therese FitzMaurice

​SERVICES:
​Writing & Mindfulness Workshops, Spoken Word Performance, Mentoring, Event MC & Promotion, Ritual Creation (Blessing Way, Naming Ceremony, etc.)

BIO:
Mother. Wife. Poet. Teacher. Community Organizer. Art Activist. 
Website
for Sale

About Therese

​Therese Fitzmaurice recently published her fourth collection of poetry How to Love this Woman (Feb. 2016). Many poems in that collection are featured in her current recording project with musicians, Jesse Jonathon and Amy Day. Her work explores the inner landscape of a life lived contemplating the intersection of spirit & flesh, individual & tribe, offering & receiving.  She is currently utilizing her professional skills to create and sustain community events, rituals and workshops with the mindful intention to inspire participants to become fully present with the everyday miracle of being alive.  

Therese FitzMaurice, along with Vanessa Vrtiak, cofounded A Reason to Listen poetry collective in 2004.  They host the wildly popular, 10-year-strong, Humboldt Poetry, the first Thursday of the month at Siren’s Song Tavern in Eureka.  Together, they have a magnetic and magical presence on stage and off.  They have co-written and performed two full-length choreo-poems  (Excavating the HIstory of Love and Resuscitating the Sequence of Sacrifice), toured nationally and performed at notable poetry venues including the Nuyorican Café and the Apollo in NYC. They continue to perform and teach in high school and college classrooms, the Humboldt County jail, churches, baby showers, writing groups & conferences.

In addition to her work as a poet and performer, Therese has served the community for sixteen years as a professional educator as high school English teacher, preschool director and parent educator. After studying at University of San Francisco's Center for Teaching and Social Justice, Therese earned a teaching credential at Humboldt State University.  She has since closely studied the explosion of mindfulness research and its relevant application to education, family life and art. 

Therese’s daily life is tuned to the rhythm of life with her two children and husband on the rocky bluffs above the Baduwot River in McKinleyville, CA.  

Sample Work




great skies
by Therese FitzMaurice
Inspired by Pat Schneider’s poem
About, Among Other Things, God.

the archetypal housewife
clad in apron, home surrounded
by sycamores, pantry filled
with home made jam--

she calls to her children
come. come home
and those words pressed 
into the pulped fibers of our 
Grandmother’s lungs, rise
rise within me

like the dust of a midwestern mentality
suspended in the expansiveness
of great skies, where dreams
float like cumulus clouds
toward a heaven
                    imagined elsewhere.

there are no sycamores
on our corner lot
or even in our west coast
neighborhood, perched above
the pacific ocean

but the intimacy within 
the vast grandeur of
that archetypal poem

crawls onto my lap in the form 
of  a three-year-old girl
with delicate skin & golden strands
of divinity, soft & silky against my face.

how can heaven possibly be
anywhere but here
in her mother’s arms?
  • Home
  • Store
  • Artists
  • Featured
  • Contact
  • Directory
    • Matt Beard
    • John Chapman
    • Piet Dalmolen
    • Amy Day
    • Therese FitzMaurice
    • Anne Fricke
    • Jesse Jonathon
    • Eileen McGee
    • Vanessa Vrtiak
  • Events