The University of Arizona Press
Date: Friday, April 26, 2024
Time: 4:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m., CST
Where: The Commons, 401 E. Jefferson St., Viroqua, WI
Kimberly Blaser, will read from her book, Ancient Light, for the “Connections to Place” panel at Rivers and Ridges Book Festival. Blaeser is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist enrolled at White Earth Nation. She is a professor emerita at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and an Institute of American Indian Arts MFA faculty member. Quan Berry will be joining Blaeser as they both read from their works and share their personal relationship to place and how it has impacted their writing. Book sales and signings will follow the reading.
This in-person event is open to the public.
About the book:
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. With an Anishinaabe sensibility, her words and images invoke an ancient belonging and voice the deep relatedness she experiences in her familiar watery regions of Minnesota.
