St. Paul – An Evening of Haiku and Anishinaabe Song with Kimberly Blaeser, Gordon Henry, Jr., and Gerald Vizenor.

Join us for a very special evening of poetry and music with esteemed poets and writers, Kimberly Blaeser, Gordon Henry, Jr., and Gerald Vizenor. Our guests will share haiku, Anishinaabe dream songs, music, as well as conversation with one another and the audience on their work and inspirations. In the spirit of nourishing our bodies and our minds, prior to the event, we invite you to join us for a complimentary community meal, during which we will be joined by special musical guest, Phil Fried.

Books by Blaeser, Henry, and Vizenor will be available for purchase at the event through Birchbark Books, and book signing will take place after event activities have ended.

This event is presented in partnership with Indigenous Nations Poets (IN-NA-PO), 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.

About our guests:

Kimberly Blaeser, past Wisconsin Poet Laureate and founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets, is a poet, photographer, and scholar. She is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Ancient Light (2024), Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance (2020), and Copper Yearning (2019). Blaeser edited Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry, wrote the monograph Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition on the work of fellow White Earth writer, and served as contributing editor for When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020). Her poetry is widely anthologized and her photographs, picto-poems, and ekphrastic pieces have appeared in exhibits such as “Visualizing Sovereignty,” and “No More Stolen Sisters.” An Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, she is an enrolled member of White Earth Nation and grew up on the reservation. The 2024 Mackey Chair in Creative Writing at Beloit College, Blaeser is a Professor Emerita at UW–Milwaukee and an MFA faculty member for Institute of American Indian Arts. She serves on the Poetry Coalition of the Academy of American Poets, and as Vice President of Letters for Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. Her accolades include a Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. Blaeser splits her time between her home in rural Wisconsin and a water-access cabin adjacent to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota.

An Anishinaabe poet and novelist, Gordon Henry, Jr. is an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation of Minnesota. He is the author of the poetry collection Spirit Matters: White Clay, Red Exits, Distant Other (2022), a mixed-genre collection The Failure of Certain Charms and Other Disparate (2007), a chapbook Outside White Earth (1986), and the novel The Light People (1994) which won an American Book Award. He co-published an educational reader The Ojibway (2004) with George Cornell, and his poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in various journal and anthologies in the U. S. and Europe including in New Poets of Native Nations (2018), When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through (2020), and Living Nations, Living Words (2021). A past Professor in the English Department at Michigan State University, he also served for many years as Senior Editor of the American Indian Studies Series at Michigan State University Press, and held a Fulbright Lectureship in Spain. Gordon now lives in Empire, Michigan.

Gerald Vizenor is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a citizen of the White Earth Nation in Minnesota, and has published more than forty books, novels, literary and cultural studies, and poetry. Native Provenance: The Betrayal of Cultural Creativity, a collection of essays, is his most recent publication. Vizenor has received many awards including the American Book Award for Griever: An American Monkey King in China, the Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award, and the Mark Twain Award from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature.

Registration

There is no cost to attend this event, however registration is required. A complimentary light evening meal will be served at 5:30 p.m. prior to the event start at 6:00 p.m.

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