#LanguageBack Panel & Reading

Reading & panel with Kimberly Blaeser, Laura Tohe & Elise Paschen

Poetry Reading featuring Laura Tohe, current Navajo Nation Poet Laureate and author of Tseyí / Deep in the Rock (University of Arizona Press, 2005), KimberlyBlaeser, author of Ancient Light (University of Arizona Press, 2024), and Elise Paschen, author of Tallchief (Magic City Books, 2023). Presented as part of our series Native Writers in the 21st Century with support from the NEA.

Wednesday, April 24, 2024. 7:00 PM 9:00 PM CST

Laura Tohe is Diné, Sleepy-Rock People clan and born for the Bitter Water People clan. She is the current Navajo Nation Poet Laureate. Her books include No Parole Today, Making Friends with Water, Tséyi / Deep in the Rock, and Code Talker Stories. With Heid Erdrich, she edited the anthology Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers on Community, and her commissioned libretto, Enemy Slayer: A Navajo Oratorio and Nahasdzáán in the Glittering World, made its world premiere in France in 2008. Among her awards are the 2020 Academy of American Poetry Fellowship; 2019 American Indian Festival of Writers Award; Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers; the Joy Harjo & the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund Award; and the Arizona Book Association's Glyph Award for Best Poetry and Best Book. Tohe is Professor Emerita with Distinction from Arizona State University.

Kimberly Blaeser, past Wisconsin Poet Laureate and founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets, is the author of six poetry collections including Ancient Light, Copper Yearning, and the bilingual Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance. Her photographs, picto-poems, and ekphrastic pieces have appeared in exhibits such as “Visualizing Sovereignty,” and “No More Stolen Sisters.” An enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, she is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist. An MFA faculty member at the Institute of American Indian Arts and a Professor Emerita at UW–Milwaukee, Blaeser currently serves as a Vassar College Tatlock Fellow and the 2024 Mackey Chair in Creative Writing at Beloit College. Her accolades include a Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. She lives in rural Wisconsin and in a seasonal cabin near the BWCA wilderness.

Elise Paschen’s next book of poetry, Blood Wolf Moon, will be published in 2025. An enrolled member of the Osage Nation, she is the author of six poetry collections, most recently, Tallchief. As an undergraduate at Harvard, she received the Garrison Medal for poetry. She holds M.Phil. and D.Phil. degrees from Oxford University. Her poems have been published widely, including in Poetry, the New Yorker, A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, and Best American Poetry. She has edited or co-edited numerous anthologies, including The Eloquent Poem,and the New York Times bestseller, Poetry Speaks. Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Westminster Presents an evening of Native American poetry
with
Heid E. Erdrich, Marcie R. Rendon, and Louise K. Waakaa’igan. hosted by artist-in-residence Wendy Brown-Báez

Westminster Presbyterian Church
1200 Marquette Ave
Minneapolis, MN 55403

free and in person please RSVP
followed by reception, and book signing with Birchbark Books

Monday April 8th, 1:30 - 3:00 PM PST

Kicking off National Poetry Month this April with a Book Talk at UW Tacoma in Tacoma WA. Moderated by Dr. Tabitha Espina in collaboration with the AAPI Thrive cohort, Asian American Rhetorics and Native Women’s Literatures cohorts.

Friday, April 5, 2024. 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM CST

Ojibwe poet Kimberly Blaeser will deliver this year’s Mackey Keynote Poetry reading accompanied by two other Indigenous Nations Poets at Beloit College. Kimberly Blaeser is author of Ancient Light. The event is free and open to the public.

Reading will include poets: Kalehua Kim & Halee Kirkwood

A Reading with Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Peggy Shumaker, and Annie Wenstrup.

This class will discuss the art of poetic apostrophe and the idea of form as form, through the writing of love songs, odes, and your own inventions. We’ll look at how writerly intention meets or subverts textual convention in order to speak more deeply to our audiences, how we might expand upon shared and personal traditions to create new modes, and how to speak to big ideas through the veneration of small moments. Participants will also be given a series of writing prompts toward generating new poems and putting one’s heart on the page. ❤️🎶

Kenzie Allen is a Haudenosaunee poet and multimodal artist, and author of Cloud Missives (Tin House, 2024). She is a recipient of the James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets, a 92NY Discovery Prize, the 49th Parallel Award in Poetry, and fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Aspen Summer Words, and Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po). Kenzie’s work can be found in Poetry Magazine, Boston Review, Poets.org, The Paris Review’s Daily, The Rumpus, Best New Poets, and other venues. Born in West Texas, she is currently an Assistant Professor at York University in Toronto, where she teaches Creative Writing and Indigenous Literatures. She is a direct descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin.

Poetry Reading by Tatlock Chair Molly McGlennen and Tatlock Fellow Kim Blaeser

Tuesday February 27th at 5pm EST in OLB Lounge at Vassar College

Annie Wenstrup , Kimberly Blaeser , Kalehua Kim , Aimee Inglis, Cassandra Lopez

Native relationships with water involve complex cultural beliefs. Likewise, Indigenous Hydropoetics has many tributaries. This panel will begin with a collaborative video poem and then consider how cultural traditions and place-based experience influence poetic form and content. We will discuss our efforts to write with rather than about water—to enter into dialogue on the ways reciprocity informs our writing, living on and off the page, including as eco-activism and multi-media expressions.

Halee Kirkwood, Annie Wenstrup, Melanie Merle, Elise Paschen, Tacey Atsitty

Ekphrastic poetry places text in conversation with image and sound. In the practice, a dialogue emerges between the two and creates a third space, one that questions how embodied experience is intimately connected to witness and gaze. In this panel, five Indigenous poets will discuss how they employ that third space in their own poetics, complicating the underlying power dynamics between gaze and object, by sharing examples of their own work and engaging with the audience.

Simultaneous with the contemporary Land Back movement of Tribal Nations is an equally urgent call for Indigenous literary sovereignty. This focus on writing Indigenous includes a strong push for creators to employ tribal languages and their inherent structures—for Language Back. Poet contributors to The Diné Reader, Jake Skeets, Luci Tapahanso, and Esther Belin, will read recent work and discuss how their creative work maps itself at the intersections of tribal language, poetic form, and place.

Join IN-NA-PO Director Kimberly Blaeser for an information discussion on the IN-NA-PO 2024 Mni Sota Retreat.

Join IN-NA-PO Board Member Heid Erdrich for an information discussion on the IN-NA-PO 2024 Mni Sota Retreat.

Join us as we take part in Woodland Pattern's Poetry Marathon campaign, their event runs Saturday January 27th 10am - 10pm and Sunday January 28th 10am-10pm.

Saturday 4:30 pm - 5:15 pm, Indigenous Nations Poets (Curated By Kimberly Blaeser) presents "Poem for a Tattered Planet" (In-Na-Po in collaboration with the Overpass Light Brigade) featuring Kenzie Allen, Kimberly Blaeser, Jennifer Elise Foerster, Denise Low, and Melanie Merle. Sponsored by Scott Gelzer & Sherry Goldsmith.

Performance Santa Fe presents
The Aunties: Women of the White Shell Water Place

Directed by Kendra Potter
Andre Bouchard, Executive Producer
Sean Eve, Associate Producer
Featuring
Nora Naranjo Morse (Kha’p’o Owenge/Santa Clara Pueblo)
Deborah Taffa (Yuma Kwaa-Tsaan/Laguna Pueblo)
Laura Tohe (Diné)

The Aunties: Women of the White Shell Water Place is a multimedia storytelling experience conceived and created by Indigenous Performance Productions. Featuring three Native American matriarchs from northern New Mexico, The Auntiescultivates a space for these remarkable individuals to tell the stories of their lives. Join us as we celebrate these Aunties through an evening of shared storytelling, music, and multimedia arts, collectively reflecting on their pasts as we look towards the future.

This show includes a post-performance talkback with the featured performers presented by the School for Advanced Research (SAR). The talkback will be led by Tara Gatewood (Isleta Pueblo).

Presented in partnership with Indigenous Performance Productions, Institute of American Indian Arts, The Santa Fe Indigenous Center, and the School for Advanced Research

New Mexico debut performance

The Michener Center’s Spring 2024 Visiting Faculty members Jennifer Foerster and Manuel Muñozwill read their work at the Harry Ransom Center Prothro Theatre at 6pm on Thursday, January 18th, 2024. The reading is free and open to the public, and a reception will follow.

Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Maybe-Bird, and served as the Associate Editor of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. She is the recipient of a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford. Jennifer received her PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver, her MFA from the Vermont College of the Fine Arts, and is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). Jennifer teaches for the Rainier Writing Workshop and the Institute of American Indian Arts, and is the Literary Assistant to the 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo. Foerster grew up living internationally, is of European (German/Dutch) and Mvskoke descent, and is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma. She lives in San Francisco.

Manuel Muñoz is the author of a novel, What You See in the Dark, and the short-story collections Zigzagger and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, which was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.  He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has been recognized with a Whiting Writer’s Award, three O. Henry Awards, and two selections in Best American Short Stories, and was awarded the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. His most recent collection, The Consequences, was published by Graywolf Press and in the UK by The Indigo Press in October 2022.  It was a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and longlisted for the Story Prize.  It will be published in Italian by Edizioni Black Coffee and in Turkish by Livera Yayinevi. In October 2023, he was honored with a MacArthur Fellowship for “depicting with empathy and nuance the Mexican-American communities of California’s Central Valley.” His frequently anthologized work has appeared in The New York Times, Epoch, and Glimmer Train.  His most recent work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, ZYZZYVA, and Freeman’s. A native of Dinuba, California, and a first-generation college student, Manuel graduated from Harvard University and received his MFA in creative writing at Cornell University. He currently lives and works in Tucson, Arizona.

Friday, January 12, 4:30–6 pm (MST)

Reading and Q&A with Kim Blaeser (White Earth Nation) and Deborah Taffa (Quechan [Yuma] Nation and Laguna Pueblo)

IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA)

Join Heid E. Erdrich and the 2023 James Welch Prize winning poets J.K. Tsosie and Kalehua Kim for an in-person reading and celebration of their work. Presented in partnership with Poetry Northwest and In-Na-Po (Indigenous Nations Poets) with generous support from the Battery Park City Authority. Barrier-free entry for all, please RSVP below.

In-person event  |  Friday  |  Nov 17  |  6-8pm  |  Free

About the winners:

J.K. Tsosie is Diné—Bitter Water Clan and born for the Many Goats Clan. His work has appeared in the Yellow Medicine Review and the Indiana Review. He is the winner of the Oberon Herbert Poetry Prize, the James Hearst Poetry Prize, and the James Welch Poetry Prize. He is a former MFA student in the Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico (Tiwa Land) where he is completing an MD/PhD at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine.

Kalehua Kim is a Native Hawaiian poet living in the Seattle area. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Denver Quarterly, Calyx, and ‘Ōiwi, A Native Hawaiian Journal.

About the judge:

2023 judge Heid E. Erdrich is a writer from North Dakota who curates art exhibits, teaches, researches, and collaborates with other artists. She’s Ojibwe, enrolled at Turtle Mountain. Her most recent book of poems is Little Big Bully, 2020, winner of a National Poetry Series award and the Rebecca Johnson Bobbit prize from The Library of Congress. 

About the Prize:

Poetry Northwest’s James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets is awarded for two outstanding poems, each written by an Indigenous U.S. poet. The prize is named for Blackfeet and Gros Ventre writer James Welch, whose early poems were featured in Poetry Northwest and who went on to become one of the region’s most important writers.

Finalists selected by poets from the board and advisory committee of In-Na-Po (Indigenous Nations Poets) with the editors of Poetry Northwest:

Ibe Liebenberg | Annie Wenstrup | Tacey Atsitty | Cheyanne Lozano | Mary Leauna Christensen | Aimee Inglis | m.s. RedCherries | Nicole Wallace

Find the digital broadside featuring the winning poems here: