The University of Arizona Press
Date: Friday, February 16, 2024
Time: 3 – 4:30 p.m., PST
Where: UC Riverside Writers Week Virtual Event, register here
Kimberly Blaeser, author of of Ancient Light and Daisy Ocampo, author of Where We Belong will speak at UC Riverside’s Writers Week. (Image above shows Ocampo on the left and Blaeser on the right.) The other writer on the panel is Randi LeClair (Pawnee Nation), Filmmaker of Native stories based in rural Oklahoma. The event is free and open to the public. Register for this virtual session on Zoom.
About the books:
Elegiac and powerful, Ancient Light uses lyric, narrative, and concrete poems to give voice to some of the most pressing ecological and social issues of our time. With vision and resilience, Kimberly Blaeser’s poetry layers together past, present, and futures. Against a backdrop of pandemic loss and injustice, MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women), hidden graves at Native American boarding schools, and destructive environmental practices, Blaeser’s innovative poems trace pathways of kinship, healing, and renewal. They celebrate the solace of natural spaces through sense-laden geo-poetry and picto-poems.
Where We Belong brings together the history and experiences of the Chemehuevi people and their ties with Mamapukaib, or the Old Woman Mountains in the East Mojave Desert, and the Caxcan people and their relationship with Tlachialoyantepec, or Cerro de las Ventanas, in Zacatecas, Mexico. Through a trans-Indigenous approach, Daisy Ocampo weaves historical methodologies (oral histories, archival research, ethnography) with Native studies and historic preservation to reveal why Native communities are the most knowledgeable and transformational caretakers of their sacred places.
