The University of Arizona Press
Date: Thursday, April 17, 2025
Time: 4-8 p.m., EDT
Where: McGregor Memorial Conference Center, Wayne State University, 495 Gilmour Mall, Detroit, MI
Kimberly Blaser will read from her book, Ancient Light: Poems, at McGregor Memorial Conference Center on April 17. Blaeser, former Wisconsin Poet Laureate and founding director of In-Na-Po, Indigenous Nations Poets, is a writer, photographer, and scholar. She is also an Anishinaabe activist, environmentalist, and professor emerita at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and an Institute of American Indian Arts MFA faculty member.
This in-person event is free and open to the public, and sponsored by the Wayne State University Native American Student Organization. Reserve your spot here.
Event schedule:
4 p.m. Doors Open, Reception, Refreshments
4-5:30 p.m. Open Mic
5:30 p.m. Food Served
6 p.m. Reading, followed by Q and A
About the book:
With vision and resilience, 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.
The collection invites readers to see with a new intimacy the worlds they inhabit. Blaeser brings readers to the brink, immerses them in the darkest regions of the Anthropocene, in the dangerous fallacies of capitalism, and then seeds hope. Ultimately, as the poems enact survivance, they reclaim Indigenous stories and lifeways.
