Brian D'Ambrosio
Bio
Brian D'Ambrosio is a seasoned journalist and poet, writing for numerous publications, including for a trove of music publications. He is intently at work on a number of future books. He may be reached at [email protected]
Stories (40)
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William Rotsaert
By Brian D'Ambrosio From Bruges to Santa Fe, a painter translates memory, motion, and myth through color and curiosity. William Rotsaert paints in the language of color — heatwaves and highways, red-orange skies that shimmer with motion, and the flicker of gasoline flames under a 1957 Chevy Bel Air. His canvases pulse between abstraction and realism, fusing the discipline of the old Flemish masters with the freedom of the American West.
By Brian D'Ambrosio 24 days ago in Art
Estella Loretto:
By Brian D’Ambrosio, Estella Loretto has lived her 72 years with a sculptor’s patience, chiseling each moment slowly, shaping a life balanced between Pueblo ancestry and monumental artistic vision. Each breath, she says, is a grain of stone, a measure of time, and a spark of spirit.
By Brian D'Ambrosio 2 months ago in Art
Kelly Hunt:
By Brian D'Ambrosio There’s a certain alchemy that happens when Kelly Hunt holds a century-old instrument. “I feel very protective of that instrument,” she said of her original Depression-era tenor banjo, its leather head delicate with age, “because that leather is a thin band of leather that is over a hundred years old.” The banjo is more than a tool for music—it is a collaborator, a vessel of untold stories, and, as Hunt put it, fuel for her imagination.
By Brian D'Ambrosio 3 months ago in Beat
Samantha Crain
Language quenches Samantha Crain’s flaming fire. An exceptionally potent songwriter, Crain finds that her spirit, affections, desires, and disposition live and reign in language. Her nuanced writing is something that she sees as both a gift and a demand.
By Brian D'Ambrosio 3 months ago in Beat
Bill Hearne
Bill Hearne isn’t one to muse languidly. At 73, there is something rivetingly touching about the Santa Fe singer’s mulish willpower and the obvious love of music that has forever sustained him. Born with congenital cataracts at birth, Bill lost much of his sight by age 9. But his heartfelt vocals and personalized finger-picking guitar style of more than five decades stand as a permanent repudiation of the limits of his blindness.
By Brian D'Ambrosio 3 months ago in Beat
A Hard Fall and Good Bounce
Poetry, for me, has always been a way of gathering fragments—the daily objects, passing moods, and uneasy questions that won’t stay quiet. A poem begins with a small detail, then grows into something larger, a landscape where memory and imagination blur.
By Brian D'Ambrosio 4 months ago in BookClub
Sierra Hull interview
By Brian D’Ambrosio On Friday nights in Pickett County, Tennessee—the smallest county in the state, tucked up against the Kentucky border—you could find a young Sierra Hull squeezed into a crowded community center, mandolin in hand. The room smelled of hamburgers and hot dogs from the concession stand, and local bands played while neighbors filled the folding chairs. Hull, barely tall enough to see over the microphone stand, was already a fixture on stage.
By Brian D'Ambrosio 5 months ago in Beat
Brian D'Ambrosio interview
Driven To Keep Creating: A Life of William “Bear” Rinehart By Brian D'Ambrosio Son of a preacher, William Rinehart grew up in Seneca, South Carolina, at the high foothills of the Appalachians. His mother taught piano lessons. His father played the trumpet. Music was a mixture of gospel, rural hillbilly, bluegrass, and rock and roll, all slammed together. At age 13, his job on the weekends was to vacuum the old ugly carpet at the church and he liked it when the congregation left their instruments strewn about. In between spells of cleaning, he would pick up a guitar and study the sheet notes.
By Brian D'Ambrosio 5 months ago in Beat
