Jim Hornsby Moreno
San Diego, California
Jim Hornsby Moreno has a B.A. from the University of Florida and a Masters from Sonoma State University. He co-edited with Mary Kowit and Joseph D. Milosch, Poems that Speak to Us: Selected Poems of Steve Kowit (Garden Oak Press, 2021). Moreno authored Dancing in Dissent: Poetry For Activism (Dolphin Calling Press, 2007), countering racism and war. He co-edited An Activists' Poetry Anthology: Selected Poems for Good Trouble (Garden Oak Press, 2022) with Joe Milosch. He is published in various anthologies.
Jim is the co-ordinator of the San Diego/Tijuana ReEvolutionary Poets Brigade, a binational, bilingual poetry group that performs original poetry on both sides of the border. The Brigade models friendship and respect that secures borders and not militarization. He is on the Institute for Poetic Medicine's (IPM) advisory board. Mr. Moreno is a poetry teaching artist with Mid City Community Music where he teaches poetry at the Juvenile Court and Community Schools. Jim teaches adults at San Diego Writers, Ink and was the Residency Teaching Artist of the Year in 2016-2017 at Arts Education Connection, San Diego.
In the beginning of the summer of 2008 he approached the clinical coordinator of Project Star, a women’s recovery home in southeast San Diego and offered to facilitate poetry workshops once a month for women in early recovery from chemical dependency. After 25 years of clinical work in chemical dependency, Jim found working with women in recovery to be most challenging and most rewarding. The women were also in transition from prison to parole. He received a grant from IPM to teach poetry to women in Project Star the summer of 2009.
Jim will be teaching a six-week poetry course for IPM in 2023. The course is for veterans and will be online in April's National Poetry Month entitled The Way We Say It.
Jim was adopted into the Smuwich Chumash tribe by the Moreno family in 1995. He has been heavily influenced by teachings of Native elders and traditional Native songs. He follows Native American spirituality and Buddhist principles to transform suffering with spoken word.
Moreno said, “You teach poetry by making beginning poets feel safe. You let them know that writing in community is different than writing in solitude; a consciousness of respect is shared that increases inspiration, motivation, imagination, and contagion. You enjoy facilitating poetry writing classes that allow confidence to catch up to natural talent. We are all born storytellers. Eduardo Galeano, the great poet of Uruguay said, 'the world is not made up of atoms, it's made up of stories.'”