Vincent Barrett Price (born August 30, 1940) is an American poet, human rights and environmental columnist, editor, reporter, publisher, and teacher. His most recent works include the poetry volumes Polishing the Mountain, or Catching Balance Just in Time: Selected Poems 2008–2020, Innocence Regained: Christmas Poems, and Memoirs of the World in Ten Fragments, and the nonfiction book The Orphaned Land: New Mexico's Environment Since the Manhattan Project. He is the co-founder, with Benito Aragon, of the New Mexico Mercury, an online platform featuring news, commentary and analysis from a variety of experts and writers around New Mexico. Since January 2017, the Mercury Messenger has featured Price's online column of politics and the environment. Price has taught off and on since 1976 in the University of New Mexico's School of Architecture and Planning, and as continuing faculty in the UNM Honors College from 1986 to 2014. His seminars range from the classics in translation to modern poetry, urban studies, and New Mexico's environmental history. He is currently an elected member of the Board of Directors for the Leopold Writing Program. In 2021, he received the New Mexico Literary Arts Gratitude Award "for contributions to the life of the poetry community in New Mexico and the Southwest."
Biography
Price was born on August 30, 1940, in Los Angeles, California, the only son of actor Vincent Price (1911–1993) and his first wife, actress Edith Barrett (1907–1977). He moved to New Mexico in 1958, escaping Hollywood's celebrity culture, and came to identify with the state, its isolation and eccentricity, and its people, landscape, architecture, and traditional cultures. He graduated from the University of New Mexico in 1962 with a B.A. in anthropology. That same year he published his first poem and began a lifelong writing practice. He first visited Chaco Canyon in 1961 and published his seminal work of poetry, Chaco Body, with photographer Kirk Gittings in 1992. After graduate school he worked as a reporter, and in 1971 he began a weekly column in New Mexico that has run almost continuously to the present. In 1969 Price married the artist Rini Price. They lived in the same house and worked the same land in Albuquerque's North Valley until Rini's death in 2019; Price still lives there today. In 2007, Price's selected poems from 1966 to 2006, Broken and Reset, were published by UNM Press. In 2016, he received an honorary degree, Doctor of Letters (Litt. D), from his alma mater. He continues to write poetry, nonfiction, and his ongoing weekly column about politics and the environment.
Writing
Price's poetry and prose have been published in more than 70 national and international publications since 1962. He was the architecture editor for Artspace Magazine of Albuquerque and Los Angeles, and the former editor of New Mexico Magazine. Price was the city editor for the New Mexico Independent (print publication) and worked for the publication through the 1970s. He was the founding editor of Century Magazine, which ran from 1980 to 1983. He was an architecture critic at the Albuquerque Journal in the mid-1980s. He was also weekly columnist and regular contributor to The Albuquerque Tribune from 1978 until the newspaper closed in 2008. Price was an editorial contributor to the New Mexico Independent (online publication) from 2008 to 2009. He was the series editor of the Mary Burritt Poetry Series at the University of New Mexico Press from 2004 to 2012. As an editor, he has brought the work of more than 500 New Mexican authors, poets, and scholars into print.