This is part of a weekly series introducing readers to individuals who are passionate about our Mid-Valley community.

Emma Keen wants people to know she’s not really a sad person, at least not completely.

Keen, a high school junior at Oregon School for the Deaf in Salem, was recently crowned the state’s 2026 Poetry Out Loud champion.

She chose to recite “Low-Tide,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, “From One Who Stays” by Amy Lowell and “I am Like a Leaf” by Yone Noguchi.

“I picked the poems for one reason, which was that they’re mainly sad, and for some reason it’s just easier for me to perform sad poems,” she said. “Sadness is a part of me and Poetry Out Loud helps me express that in my way and in my deaf culture type of way.”

Keen, 16, received the top score at the competition, held March 7 in Salem, and now will represent Oregon at the Poetry Out Loud National Finals, April 27-29, in Washington, D.C.

“I definitely did not expect to be going to nationals,” she said. “I’ve never ever done something like this before, but I’m so glad I am able to.”

One of Keen’s teachers, Gayle Robertson, encouraged her to participate in Poetry Out Loud.

Keen was told she didn’t have to perform in-person for the school-level contest, she said.

“So, I thought why not, I’ll join just for fun,” she said. “I became more invested into poetry because I’m able to perform sad poems. I think it’s an interesting experience for me to practice with.”

During Poetry Out Loud, students recite works in a dynamic competition and performance.

They select poems from an anthology, memorize them and are judged on criteria such as physical presence, voice and articulation and dramatic appropriateness.

Deaf students translate the poems they’ve chosen from English into American Sign Language, which uses hands and facial expressions to communicate. During their performance, the audience receives a written version.

“I would say for me, it’s obviously more visual and I think if the judges can understand what I’m doing or signing about then that’s a good thing for me because it means I’m clear enough,” Keen said.

“For hearing people, they change their tone to match their story but for deaf people we change our face expressions to match our story,” she said. “I like being able to sign and stay silent and just let my hands and face do the work for me, you know?”

During the competition, Keen said, “I genuinely thought I was going to be focused on the audience and who was watching but all of that went away when I went on stage. After saying the title and I started signing, all that mattered to me in the moment was the poem and getting the right message out there and not forgetting my lines, which I almost did a few times, but we don’t need to talk about that.”

Keen is a lifelong Salem resident and has two brothers.

When she’s not practicing poetry, Keen participates in drama club and is the school’s student body president.

“I also take pictures for my yearbook class, and stay after school in the dorms to hang out with my lovely friends,” she said. “I always enjoy it.”

Keen plans to attend college after graduation, and hopes to become a photographer.

“I think that would be a nice job for me because I can be on the sidelines and seeing other people live their best lives and I get to take pictures of it,” she said.

Since 2005, more than 4.5 million high school students across the nation have participated in Poetry Out Loud. The program in Oregon is made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Oregon Arts Commission and jurisdictional arts agencies.

Amid the change of Kyle Whittingham stepping down and Morgan Scalley taking over as Utah football’s head coach last December, one question hung in the air: Would quarterback Devon Dampier come back to the program?

On Dec. 18, in the immediate aftermath of Whittingham stepping down, Dampier hinted that he was going to return to Utah.

“Y’all going to see. Y’all going to see, but it is great. I’m very happy to be here. Seriously,” Dampier said with a smile.

Though there were rumblings that Dampier had already signed a deal to stay in Salt Lake City, as time passed without an announcement from the man himself, more and more Ute fans started to wonder if their starting quarterback would return after all.

On Jan. 13, two weeks after Dampier dazzled in a Las Vegas Bowl win over Nebraska, the Utah quarterback posted a video on social media with his face superimposed over Leonardo DiCaprio’s in the famous “Wolf of Wall Street” clip.

“I’m not leaving.”

As Utah’s program underwent significant change — ushering in a new era under Scalley, losing offensive coordinator Jason Beck and five other assistant coaches to Michigan and dealing with departing players in the transfer portal — Dampier’s decision to come back was a stabilizing force for a program in flux.

Make no mistake, Dampier will be rewarded handsomely for staying at Utah, but in an age when the highest dollar almost always wins out in the transfer portal, there were a few other factors that weighed into the quarterback’s decision to return.

Loyalty, finishing what he’s started at Utah and playing in front of the fans at Rice-Eccles Stadium were all elements, but a gesture by Scalley and his coaching staff also made a big impression on Dampier.

“When I had surgery, I came back and our whole entire staff was waiting for me to get off the plane. That meant a lot to me,” Dampier told the Deseret News.

What sealed the deal for Dampier was a conversation with Scalley.

“Just us having this conversation about what he wanted out of me and just his background and my background, we just got on the same page and I love what he said. I love what I felt and I’m sticking to it,” Dampier said.

Despite Scalley being the defensive coordinator at the time, he was the person Dampier talked to the most during his initial recruiting visit in 2025. When Whittingham went to Michigan, there was no hesitation from Dampier to put his full trust in Scalley.

“For him to step into the head coaching job, I had full belief in it. No question. I think he’s worked hard to get to this position, and just as time goes on, it keeps reminding me that I picked the right decision just where things have been so far and I’m loving it,” Dampier said.

While this fall will be Scalley’s first full season as head coach, Dampier already got a taste of what he will be like at the helm.

The original plan was for Whittingham to cap off his Utah career in the Las Vegas Bowl, but when Michigan courted him for its open job and Whittingham accepted, that plan was scrapped.

Instead, Scalley abruptly took over as head coach of his alma mater just days ahead of the New Year’s Eve bowl game. Dampier described the time period of losing Whittingham and Beck as “a lot emotionally,” but as Scalley took the reins, the players rallied around him.

“Something that we live by at Utah is no one’s bigger than the team,” Dampier said. “No one’s bigger than the program, so when you lose one person, man, there’s so many other people in the building, we worked so hard to get to this point that one person doesn’t control our destiny.”

“So just sticking to that, sticking to our culture, and I mean, Scalley came with so much energy. It kind of lightened us up as players just to feel that energy going into a game and it all worked out obviously.”

It was as good of a head coaching debut as Scalley and the Utes could have asked for. Dampier threw for 310 yards and two touchdowns and rushed for 148 yards and three scores and was named the MVP of the Las Vegas Bowl and wore a huge chain with a Utah logo on it postgame.

The next day, Beck left for Michigan, along with five other coaches.

‘He’s going to be able to put me in the best situation every play’

Scalley wasted no time and quickly went to work building his staff, and a lot was on the line as he selected Utah’s new offensive coordinator.

Beck was the only offensive coordinator Dampier had known in college, and the pairing was highly successful. Dampier had excellent command of the offense, and in turn, Beck entrusted him with a lot of control.

In his first season with Utah after making the jump with Beck from New Mexico in 2025, Dampier threw for 2,490 yards and 24 touchdowns with five interceptions on 63.75% accuracy. He answered the two biggest knocks on him from 2024, improving his completion percentage while lowering his turnovers.

Utah went 11-2 including the bowl win, and Dampier helped guide the Utes to a new school rushing record, contributing 835 rushing yards and 10 touchdowns.

All of that production came while Dampier was fighting through injury through much of the year.

Dampier’s signature in the 2025 season came in a dramatic comeback win over Kansas State. On a night when Utah’s defense could not get a stop for much of the game, Dampier put the team on his back.

First, he threw a 20-yard touchdown to Larry Simmons to get Utah within three points, then led a two-minute drill that featured a 59-yard run from him on fourth-and-1 to set up a touchdown run from him to take the lead.

“That last score, it was surreal,” Whittingham said postgame. “It was just a moment that, like I said, you can’t even dream it up.”

Certainly, Dampier wasn’t perfect in 2025, but he elevated Utah’s offense and quarterback play — something sorely needed after the 2023 and 2024 seasons — and he also made an impact on the team with his leadership, often taking his teammates out to eat on his dime.

It’s no surprise that Dampier was named to the leadership council this spring, and he should be a captain for the Utes in the fall.

With Beck in Ann Arbor, Scalley needed to nail the offensive coordinator hire. Scalley, who has kept a running list of possible candidates for the last decade, turned to Utah State offensive coordinator Kevin McGiven.

Led by former Ute quarterback Bryson Barnes in 2025, the Aggies scored 30.9 points per game (No. 36 in the country) and averaged 409.5 yards per game (No. 39 in the country), and that’s with an offensive line that didn’t play up to par, to put it mildly, during most of the season.

At Utah State, McGiven utilized Barnes in the run-pass option to success, with the former Ute throwing for 2,803 yards and 18 touchdowns with five interceptions on 59.3% accuracy and rushing for 740 yards and 10 scores.

Utah State’s offense was explosive, a word multiple Utah players have used this spring when describing what it’s like to play in McGiven’s system.

One selling point for McGiven is that he has a lot of similar offensive concepts as Beck, and that should make the transition easier for Dampier. McGiven has also been willing to adopt the offensive language that the Utes used under Beck to help ease the transition.

McGiven has proved that he can tailor an offense to best utilize each team’s unique skillset, and that’s something that resonated with Dampier.

“You definitely don’t want to play under anyone that doesn’t utilize your skillsets,” Dampier said. “Coach McGiven made it an emphasis that he loves my skillset. He loves what I do.

“He’s going to be able to put me in the best situation every play, … he trusts me, gives me the freedom to do what I want to do every play.”

That trust is important for Dampier, and it’s stood out since his first meeting with Utah’s new OC.

“To have that, to hear that from the beginning, not even when we got to meet for a long time, it’s a different type of feeling that I got of trust and belief that he already had in me,” Dampier said.

“So every day we’re out here, it’s showing up more and more of his faith in me and how much we’re getting on the same page and we’re starting to learn what each other is thinking.”

When he met with Dampier, McGiven pointed to his track record of developing quarterbacks and laid out where the senior signal caller needs to improve in order to achieve his dream of playing in the NFL.

“It’s a goal of his to go to the NFL and so, OK, how do we need to develop you to get you to the next level?” McGiven said. “We need to get you more in tune with protection. We need to get you more in tune with certain types of reads, with certain types of concepts so that you can become more of a complete player.”

So far this spring, McGiven has emphasized the importance of film for Dampier and has coached him on decision making and being a smarter player.

“Developing the total quarterback, and I think the biggest thing with their development, probably with the system and schematics of the system, is just developing their decision making, developing their processes,” McGiven said.

“Reads, going from maybe where he’s got an object receiver, it’s like ‘throw to this guy’, and then all of a sudden you’re going through a full-field progression with certain concepts just because of what the system requires you to do.”

‘Just extra work and a lot of conversations’

Along with learning a new offensive system, Dampier is tasked with building chemistry with a number of new starters, beginning with the offensive line.

The Utes return veteran linemen with experience — Keith Olson (295 snaps last year), Alex Harrison (143 snaps) and Zereoue Williams (156 snaps) — and Solatoa Moea’i (335 snaps at “Y” tight end), but there are new faces such as five-star freshman tackle Kelvin Obot and Montana State transfer Cedric Jefferson.

All in all, it will be a completely new group of starters protecting Dampier.

“Obviously with the O-line as well, just me being involved in pass protection and things like that now, just having that authority, it feels great. I feel like I’m being tested as a leader and I’m embracing it,” Dampier said.

Dampier also has a lot of new pass-catchers — Utah State transfer Braden Pegan (926 receiving yards last year) and San Jose State transfer Kyri Shoels (768 yards) chief among them.

The work to build chemistry between Dampier and his new targets began in the winter and is continuing through the spring.

“Just extra work and a lot of conversations. We kind of have an unsaid rule where if a receiver comes up to me and says something, I’m going to listen to what they say and I’m going to respect what they say, and same way for them,” Dampier said.

“If I say something to them, they’re going to take it and we all know we’re having these conversations to get better. I think that puts us a step closer and closer to the same page on different situations the defense gives us.”

As Scalley heads into his inaugural season as head coach, a lot is riding on the performance of Dampier.

Last season showed that Utah’s offense can be dynamic with him in charge. With the return of Dampier, fellow quarterback Byrd Ficklin, running back Wayshawn Parker and the additions of Pegan and Shoels, there is a high ceiling on offense, but much of it will come down to offensive line and quarterback play.

As Scalley — who has been on the defensive side of the ball for his entire coaching career — shifts to command the entire team, he is focusing in on how to help Dampier become the best version of himself.

“He obviously wants me to get better as a passer, better as a decision maker, learn how to lead an offense fully, having the ability to be engaged with the O-line protections and just all of that,” Dampier said.

“He’s challenging me. He’s making me better. He’s preparing me the right way for the NFL and that’s all I want. The next goal is to get to the NFL, and with my senior year coming up, that’s a huge priority.”

ROCK SPRINGS — Retired Marine Corps Col. Brent Bien brought his second campaign for Wyoming governor to Sweetwater County April 1 and 2. He outlined a sweeping conservative platform that calls for eliminating residential property taxes, abandoning electronic voting machines, halting wind energy expansion and overhauling public education.

Bien, a University of Wyoming engineering graduate and combat veteran, told the crowd he first entered the race after Gov. Mark Gordon shut down the state during the COVID-19 pandemic and the legislature failed to act during a subsequent special election.

“This was never a bucket list thing for me,” Bien said. “But I do understand the value and worth of our freedom, an I am willing to go to the mat for it.”

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Taxes and Spending

Bien argued Wyoming has a spending problem, not a revenue problem, and called for the states first full budget audit since 1989. He proposed eliminating the residential property tax, cutting fuel tax, and reducing the sales tax by 1%. He estimated the total combined reduction at roughly $1.1 billion annually.

He said Wyoming’s approximately $34 billion in reserves generate nearly $1.9 billion in interest annually. Bien said that the interest alone is enough to cover essential services without touching the principal.

“Everybody in here deserves to know the final resting place of every tax dollar.” he said.

Energy

Bien is sharply critical of what he described as production restrictions under the current administration, saying Wyoming oil output has fallen between 65% and 70% and mining activity has dropped 18% under Gordon. He pledged to streamline permitting for oil, gas and coal development and said he would oppose all new wind energy projects in the state.

“My answer is unequivocally no,” he said of new wind proposals.”I’ll do everything to stop all that.”

He also called for eliminating carbon capture subsides and said he wants to reorient Wyoming’s energy policy back toward the industries he said build the state, coal, oil, gas and trona mining.

Elections

Bien said he would not vote to certify a Wyoming election so long as the state uses electronic tabulation machines. He said the official vote should be determined exclusively by hand tabulation of all cast paper ballots.

“It’s the government’s job to gain the trust of the citizenry, not the other way around,” he said.

Public Lands and Agriculture

Bien raised concerns over what he called the rewilding of Wyoming, describing biodiversity conservation contracts that pay ranchers to take land out of agricultural production under nondisclosure agreements. He identified Fremont County as a focal point of those efforts.

He said he would defend Wyoming’s water rights, oppose surrendering additional allocations under an expected renegotiation of the Colorado River Compact and push for wolves to be delisted so Wyoming hunters can manage predator populations without outside intervention.

Education

Bien said Wyoming spends roughly $22,000 per student annually, about twice neighboring Idaho, yet produces test scores he called unacceptable. He called for a full audit of education spending, reinstatement of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools by executive order and elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion curricula. He also said he wants daily physical education required through the senior year of high school.

“Until we’re number one in this nation, we should never accept anything less,” he said.