V.B. Price

V.B. Price (born August 30, 1940) is an American poet, historian, author, editor, teacher and long time political and environmental columnist.

Life
Price was born in Los Angeles, the son of the late actor, art critic and renaissance man Vincent L. Price. He has lived in Albuquerque's North Valley for over 40 years. He has been married to artist Rini Price since 1969 and the two have collaborated since the early 1970s with Rini creating artwork for the majority of Price's books of poetry. The Price's have two sons and two grandchildren.

He is a member of the faculty at the University of New Mexico's University Honors Program and is an adjunct associate professor at UNM's School of Architecture and Planning.

Writing Career
Price graduated from the University of New Mexico in 1962 with a B.A. in Anthropology and has been writing in New Mexico for over 40 years. Price's writing has appeared in over 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 and was the founding editor of Century Magazine which ran from 1980–1983. He wrote for the Albuquerque Tribune from 1978 till the paper closed in 2008, most notably as a weekly columnist. Price was most recently an editorial contributor to the New Mexico Independent (online publication). He is currently working on a book covering the environmental history of New Mexico and the complexities of human impact on our natural setting. The book will touch on the state's record of mining, agriculture, ranching, urban growth, water usage and water pollution.

Recent Work
In November of 2011, UNM Press published Price's latest book, The Orphaned Land: New Mexico's Environment Since the Manhattan Project. In the book, Price wades through fifty years of newspaper articles and government reports to reveal the environmental toll New Mexico has paid for decades of military munitions testing, uranium mining, population growth and unsustainable development, air and water pollution by multinational corporations and undue strain on the state's limited water supply, to name a few. Framing New Mexico as, "a microcosm of global ecological degradation," Price offers New Mexico natives and interested outsiders a case study of the impacts and systematic breaches of public trust by some of the pervading power structures affecting the environment around the world: the military-industrial complex, multinational corporation's impact on local natural resources and the lack of consideration of long-term environmental consequences in development planning. Speaking with Gene Grant on KNME's, New Mexico In Focus, Price states that the Manhattan Project both transformed and deformed the American West by elevating New Mexico into one of the intellectual and scientific epicenters for the Cold War but also resulting in 2,100 waste sites at Los Alamos National Laboratories in Northern New Mexico and 400 waste sites at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. Marc Simmons of the Santa Fe New Mexican calls the book, "a stellar compendium focused on the state's slide toward ecological degradation."

Recognition

 * 2003 – Citizen Planner of the Year award by the American Planning Association of New *Mexico.
 * 2004 – Price's book, Albuquerque: A City At The End of the World, won the Fray Francisco Atanasio Dominguez Award for Historic Survey and *Research.
 * 1999 – Humanist of the Year Award by the Humanist Society of New Mexico.
 * 1996 – ACLU-NM First Amendment Award for excellence in journalism.
 * 1989 – Friend of the Environment Award by the New Mexico Conservation Voters Alliance.
 * 1984 – Award of Merit from the New Mexico Society of Architects for architectural criticism.
 * 1975 – Governor's Cultural Properties Review Committee's award for his, "penetrating provocative editorials in defense of New Mexico's cultural environment."

Books

 * Chaco Body (1992), Photographs by Kirk Gittings, Artspace Press
 * Albuquerque: A City at the End of the World (1995, 2003), UNM Press
 * Anasazi Architecture and American Design (1996), co-edited with Baker Morrow, UNM Press
 * The 7 Deadly Sins (1997), La Alameda Press
 * Chaco Trilogy (1998), La Alameda Press
 * The Oddity, UNM Press (2004)
 * In Company: An Anthology of New Mexico Poetry Since 1960 (2004), (co-editor), UNM Press
 * Canyon Gardens: The Ancient Pueblo Landscape of the American Southwest (2006), Edited by V.B. Price and Baker Morrow, UNM Press
 * Broken and Reset: Selected Poems 1966–2006 (2007), UNM Press
 * The Orphaned Land: New Mexico's Environment Since the Manhattan Project (2011), Photographs by Nell Farrell, UNM Press