Jacqueline Murray Loring: “Renaissance Woman”

Jacqueline Murray Loring is a writer, poet, filmmaker, and screenwriter who currently crews as script and continuity supervisor for films written and directed by Antonio Weiss. She was the 2020 recipient of the Parris Award, SouthWest Writers’ most prestigious honor. She works as a ghost writer, book editor and teaches classes in memoir writing.

Loring’s first poetry collection, The History of Bearing Children, was published in Ireland in July 2012 by Doire Press. The book’s launch was in Galway. The History of Bearing Children was awarded 2nd place in the 2012 New Mexico Press Women competition. Her second collection is scheduled to be published in 2027. Recently her poems have been included in several anthologies including Holes in Our Hearts (2023) and in Unbreaking the Circle, Stories of Service, Voices of the Military, their Families & Caregivers (2025), both published by SouthWest Writers. In 2022 she was published in the City of Albuquerque anthology, One Albuquerque, One Hundred Poets, edited by ABQ Poet Laureate (2020-2022) Mary Oishi and in the New Mexico Poetry Anthology 2023 edited by Levi Romero and Michelle Otero. The anthology was published in collaboration with the New Mexico State Library Poetry Center, Museum of New Mexico Press, Santa Fe.

Loring’s nonfiction book, KiMo Theatre: Fact & Folklore, that was published in 2019 by SouthWest Writers came won 1st Place in the New Mexico branch of the National Federation of Press Women’s 2019/2020 Communications Contest. http://newmexicopresswomen.org/.

Once a month in 2026 she will present a PowerPoint presentation and a discussion of the 100^th anniversary of Route 66 and the significance of the KiMo Theatre in the history of Albuquerque.

In May of 2019 Vietnam Veterans Unbroken Conversations on Trauma and Resiliency was published by McFarland & Company Publishers.

Vietnam Veterans Unbroken: Conversations on Trauma and Resiliency won the 2021 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Politics and Current Events.

In 2018, Loring and her daughter, Kendra J. Loring shared two sides of a story focused on Kendra’s high school senior high school term paper. The mother/daughter stories were featured in War Child: Lessons Learned From Growing Up in War. Editors: Paul Zolbrod and Circe Olson Woessner published by the Museum of the American Military Family Press, Tijeras, New Mexico.

In 2012-2013, Loring was under contract to write a treatment for a movie company, but the film was not made.

Several of her stage plays have been stage-read and/or produced at the Provincetown Theater Company, Provincetown, Massachusetts, including, Reflections for a Warm Day, A Play in Two Acts that was staged-read in 2006 at the Provincetown Theater Company/Provincetown Players Festival and directed by Judith Paltrow to a full house. Fight for Right and Freedom, was directed by Nathan Butera as a part of the 2012 PTC’s Playwrights Lab’s 24 Hour Theater season.

After her move to Albuquerque, she joined the Albuquerque film community where she was a member of Friends of Film and is a member of New Mexico Women in Film and Video and has participated as a writer or co-writer on several short movies that were filmed in Albuquerque for the New Mexico 48 Hour Film Project.

Loring’s eight full-length screen plays have had many adventures and have been read by A-list actors. Several of them have done well in national competitions. ‘Deal Me In’ and ‘Wrinkles’ are stories based on the lives of real women. Wrinkles has morphed into Winkled, a TV sitcom. Bridge to Socorro, NOEL, and Deal Me In have been published as paperback books.

Since 2012, she has written/co-written eight short scripts that have been filmed in New Mexico. Trains, Tracks & Aliens produced by Karen Cunningham premiered at the 2017 Indie Q Film Festival in Albuquerque. In 2014, she co-wrote with Cliff Gracel, Sir Acheron’s Party. 5-minute film for the 48 Hour Film Project directed by Michael Miller.

In 2016 along with Winter Elyse, she wrote The Importance of Being aka The Prize. a 13-minute film directed by Brian Vanderhoof. Initially, this was an eight minute film submitted to the 2014 48 Hour Film Festival. In 2016, Loring wrote, produced and funded the ten minute short film and 40 second trailer titled A Quiet Mind directed by Brian Vanderhoof.

Loring crews for Paragweiss Films as script and continuity supervisor. She worked on both The House on Normal Street produced by Antonio Weiss that premiered at the Santa Fe Film Festival in 2017 and for his multi-awarded film, Symphony in C-Note.

Loring was a finalist in the 2017 New Mexico Film Foundation’s “Let’s Make a Western” contest for her movie treatment titled “Croquet Rules”, a story about Billy the Kid that is in preproduction. She is presently working on adapting (someone else’s) memoir into a screenplay.

Since her move to New Mexico in 2012, she co-edited the 2013 The Storyteller’s Anthology for the SouthWest Writers Group, (anthology: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, memoir, book excerpts) and has acted as a poetry judge for several of SWW’s writing contests.

In 2014, Loring participated in The Telling Project: Telling: Albuquerque. A military performance piece at the South Broadway Cultural Center, Albuquerque, New Mexico. She also participated in 4 Voices on the 4th, a military family collage performance piece for the Museum of the American Military Family held at the Museum of Nuclear History and Science and at the Albuquerque International Balloon Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

IN THE PAST

Loring moved from Cape Cod, Massachusetts to Albuquerque’s South Valley in 2012 to rescue horses and make film.

Loring was a long-time participant at the writer’s workshop at the University of Massachusetts

William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences. From the work of the participants at the workshops she compiled, co- edited (along with Preston H. Hood, Gary Raferty, Pauline Hebert, and Dorinda Foley Wegener and published in 2002 Summer Home Review: A Community of Words A Circle of Poets, an anthology of Selected Poems and Stories, AuthorHouse, publisher. This was followed in 2005 Summer Home Review Volume II: A Community of Words – A Circle of Writer, an anthology of Selected Poems, Prose, Plays and Translations, published by AuthorHouse.

In 1999 she was invited to read at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island by Facilitator. Elizabeth Taylor. Readers included: Yusef Komunyakaa, Laura Palmer, Tim O’Brien, Phil Caputo, Laura Palmer, Marilyn McMahon and Bruce Weigl, who was stuck at an airport.

One of her poems, “Curse the Rainbow”, was written as a wife’s response to the husband in Bruce Weigl’s poem, “Song of Napalm” that appeared in 1996 in From Both Sides Now: The Poetry of the Vietnam War and its Aftermath, Editor: Philip Mahony published by Scribner. The book is still considered one of the top 100 anthologies of war poetry.

For nine years, while she was the Executive Director of the Cape Cod Writer Center, Osterville, Massachusetts, Loring coordinated the Eventide Arts‘ New Plays-New Playwrights full-length play writing competition and Kaplan Prize. And during that decade, she facilitated the Cape Cod Screenwriters Group.

She has received professional development grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod, artist residencies at the Ragdale Foundation in Forest Lake, IL.

She was joined by Irish poet and novelist Geraldine Mills for a residency at the Heinrich Böll Foundation Cottage, Achill Island, County Mayo, Conversations with In-Country Vietnam Veterans, which became Vietnam Veterans Unbroken. The project is supported by the Cape & Islands Vietnam Veteran’s Out-Reach Center in Hyannis. Project Resiliency received a grant from the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod in 2012.

Jacqueline Murray Loring who has a Master of Management degree from Cambridge College, Cambridge Massachusetts, (1998), and a certificate in Non-Profit & Public Organization Management is a retired Labor & Delivery nurse, Maternal/Child Health Specialist and a certified Lamaze Educator. She is the past executive director of Visions Teen Home, a residential program for pregnant and parenting teens and the Cape Cod Writers Center. She is the past president of the Cape Cod Chapter of the National League of American Pen Women and treasurer of the Yucca Branch in Albuquerque. She is also a member of SouthWest Writers and New Mexico Women in Film.