On the Myth of the Middle Class Writer

Darryl Lorenzo Wellington was for two years the sixth poet laureate of Santa Fe. He also sold his plasma to get by.

I first met Wellington through the organization I co-founded, Economic Hardship Reporting Project, when I edited an essay about how he sold his blood so he could continue to be a writer. In his last volume, Wellington describes his writing in much the same way he talks about the place he lives: full of “riddles, tiny insidious lights, mysterious UFOs and mirages that beckon me.”