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Join panelists Kimberly M. Blaeser, Jennifer Elise Foerster, and Heid E. Erdrich, award-winning poets and contributing editors of the landmark anthology When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through, the first comprehensive anthology of Native Poetry, edited by U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. The collection includes the work of more than 160 poets, representing nearly 100 indigenous nations in the United States mainland, Alaska, and the Pacific Island territories. Because land is central to culture and identity, the poetry is organized into five geographical sections. The editors will discuss how the arc of history and time has shaped the concerns and poetics of indigenous peoples of the regions they represent (Northeast and Midwest, Southeast, Plains and Mountains) and they will read from their own poetry.  

Kimberly M. Blaeser, past Wisconsin Poet Laureate and founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets, is the author of five poetry collections including Copper Yearning, Apprenticed to Justice, and the bi-lingual Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance. Blaeser edited Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry and authored the monograph Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. An Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist from White Earth Reservation, she is a Professor at UW–Milwaukee and MFA faculty for the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her photographs, picto-poems, and ekphrastic pieces have appeared in exhibits such as “Ancient Light” and “Visualizing Sovereignty.” Blaeser splits her time between Lyons Township, Wisconsin and a water-access cabin near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota.

Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of three books of poetry, The Maybe-Bird (forthcoming 2022), Leaving Tulsa (2013) and Bright Raft in the Afterweather (2018). Jennifer currently teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop and is the Literary Assistant to the U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo. Her work has recently appeared in Cutthroat, Poetry London, and Georgia Review. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford. 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.

Heid E. Erdrich is the author of seven collections of poetry. Her newest book, Little Big Bully (Penguin, 2020), won a National Poetry Series award. Her writing has won fellowships and awards from the National Poetry Series, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Bush Foundation, Loft Literary Center, First People’s Fund, and other honors. She has twice won a Minnesota Book Award for poetry. Heid edited the 2018 anthology New Poets of Native Nations from Graywolf Press. Heid grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota and is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain.

This event is sponsored by the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library.