The University of Arizona Press
Date: Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Time: 7-8 p.m., CDT
Where: Pillsbury Hall 412, 310 Pillsbury Dr. SE, Minneapolis, MN
Kimberly Blaeser, will read from her book, Ancient Light, for the inaugural Gerald Vizenor Lecture at The University of Minnesota Pillsbury Hall. Joining her is writer, literary critic, and citizen of the White Earth Nation, Gerald Vizenor. 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.
The event is sponsored by the University of Minnesota Department of English. This in-person event is free and open to the public. Register here.
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.
