AWP Offsite: IN-NA-PO’s Celebration of Indigenous Nations Poets

This celebratory reading will feature In-Na-Po Board members Heid Erdrich, Denise Low, Elise Paschen, Cedar Sigo, and In-Na-Po Poetry Fellows Kenzie Allen, Mary Leauna Christensen, Halee Kirkwood, Annie Wenstrup, and MC Kimberly Blaeser, the founder of In-Na-Po. Founded in 2020, In-Na-Po—Indigenous Nations Poets—is a national Indigenous poetry community committed to mentoring emerging writers, nurturing the growth of Indigenous poetic practices, and raising the visibility of all Native Writers past, present, and future. In-Na-Po recognizes the role of poetry in sustaining tribal sovereign nations and Native languages. Heid E. Erdrich is the author of seven collections of poetry, a non-fiction Indigenous foods memoir, and editor of two anthologies. Heid grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota and is Ojibwe, enrolled at Turtle Mountain. Elise Paschen, an enrolled member of the Osage Nation, is the author of The Nightlife, Bestiary, Infidelities, and Houses: Coasts. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker and Poetry, among other anthologies and magazines. She has edited many anthologies, including, most recently, The Eloquent Poem. Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Cedar Sigo was raised on the Suquamish Reservation in the Pacific Northwest and studied at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. He is the author of eight books and pamphlets of poetry, including Language Arts (Wave Books, 2014), Stranger in Town (City Lights, 2010), Expensive Magic (House Press, 2008), and two editions of Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003 and 2005). He has taught workshops at St. Mary’s College, Naropa University and University Press Books. He is currently a mentor in the low residency MFA program at The Institute of American Indian Arts. He lives in Lofall, Washington. Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate 2007-09, is winner of the Red Mountain Press Editor’s Choice Award for Shadow Light. Other recent books are a memoir, The Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival (U. of Nebraska) and Casino Bestiary: Poems (Spartan). Low has an MFA from Wichita State U. and Ph.D. from KU. Annie Wenstrup is a Dena’ina woman living in Fairbanks, AK. A 2022 Stonecoast graduate, she is also a Smithsonian Arctic Studies Fellow, an Inaugural Indigenous Nations Poetry Fellow, and a Storyknife Fireweed Fellow. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, The Ilanot Review, After, Palette, and Ran Off with the Star Bassoon. Mary Leauna Christensen, an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern Mississippi. Mary is Managing Editor of The Swamp Literary Magazine. Her work can be found in Cream City Review, the Laurel Review, Southern Humanities Review, Denver Quarterly, and the Gettysburg Review, among others. She was also named a 2022 Indigenous Nations Poets fellow. Kenzie Allen is poet and multimodal artist, and a descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. In 2021, she was the recipient of a 92Y Discovery Prize and an inaugural James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets. Born in West Texas, she now shares time between Toronto; Norway; and Green Bay, Wisconsin. Halee Kirkwood (they / them) is a direct descendant of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. They were a 2019-2020 Loft Mentor Series Fellow and received an MFA from Hamline University. They are a 2021 Minnesota State Arts Board grant recipient, executive editor of Runestone Journal, and a bookseller at Birchbark Books & Native Arts. Kimberly Blaeser, writer, photographer, and scholar, is a past Wisconsin Poet Laureate. She is the author of five poetry collections, most recently the bi-lingual Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance (2020), Copper Yearning (2019), and Apprenticed to Justice. Blaeser edited the anthology Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry, and her scholarly study, Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition, was the first native-authored book-length study of an Indigenous author. An Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, Blaeser is an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation and grew up on the reservation. A Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, she is also an MFA faculty member for the low residency program in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Blaeser serves on the editorial board for the “American Indian Lives” series of the University of Nebraska Press and for the “Native American Series” of Michigan State University Press. In 2021, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas. She lives in the woods and wetlands of Lyons Township, Wisconsin, and for portions of each year, in a water-access cabin near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota.

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