45th Telluride Mushroom Festival

Art Goodtimes is an Italian-American poet, activist, basketweaver, non-profit administrator and politician in Colorado, as well as a driving force of the Telluride Mushroom Festival since its beginnings in 1981.

He grew up in California where he was a member of the Mycological Society of San Francisco. He attended St. Joseph's Seminary for six years but graduated from San Francisco State University in 1970, doing post-graduate work at UC Berkeley Extension where he obtained a lifetime California teaching credential in early childhood education.

A reporter in Telluride starting in 1982, he went on to serve as an editor for five different local newspapers, writing a personal op-ed column, Up Bear Creek, for some 40+ years. A co-founder of Telluride's environmental group, Sheep Mountain Alliance, he served twice as a senator to the Western Colorado Congress (now the Western Colorado Alliance).

He has worked in various functions with the Telluride Institute since its inception, including several years as its president and presently as a director of the Talking Gourds Poetry Program and a member of its Board of Trustees.

Goodtimes was first elected to the San Miguel County Board of Commissioners in 1996 as a Democrat, switched to the Green Party of Colorado in 1998 when it obtained minor party status in Colorado, and was re-elected as Colorado's only partisan-elected Green official in 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012. He has served as co-chair of the Green Party of Colorado, vice-chair of Club 20, chair of the Public Lands Committee of Colorado Counties, Inc., and chair of the Gateway Subcommittee of the National Association of Counties.

He is a regionally prominent poet and author of several books, including As If the World Really Mattered (La Alameda Press,  Albuquerque, 2006), Looking South to Lone Cone: the Cloud Acre Poems (Western Eye Press, Sedona, 2013) and Dancing on Edge (Lithic Press, Fruita, 2019). He was honored in Carbondale as the first Western Slope Poet Laureate (2011-13) and received the Karen Chamberlain Award for Lifetime Achievement in Colorado Poetry at the Mountain Words Festival in Crested Butte (2020).

He was a co-editor of Wild Mushroom of Telluride (Fungophile, Denver, 1990), as well as co-editor of two mushroom anthologies from Fungi Press : MycoEpithalamia: Mushroom Wedding Poems (2016) and Medicine for Minds & Hearts (2023) . He currently serves as poetry editor for Britt Bunyard's FUNGI magazine and the online poetry anthology SageGreenJournal.org.

He was the operations director of the Telluride Mushroom Festival for its first 25 years and currently serves as steward, parade-master and poet-in-residence.