The University of Arizona Press
Date: Thursday, May 16, 2024
Time: 4 p.m., PDT
Where: Willamette Room, 2nd Floor, Werner University Center, 400 Monmouth Ave., Monmouth, OR
Western Oregon University welcomes Anishinaabe writer Kimberly Blaeser, for a reading and discussion of her poetry book Ancient Light. Blaeser is the former Wisconsin Poet Laureate, founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets, and is a professor emerita at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and an Institute of American Indian Arts MFA faculty member. The event will take place in the Willamette Room of the Werner University Center, with an introduction by President Jesse Peters.
This event is free and 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.
