Heid E. Erdrich presents New Poets of Native Nations (Graywolf Press, 2018), a landmark anthology celebrating Native poets first published in the 21st century, on Friday, August 24, 2018, 7 p.m., at Zenith Bookstore in Duluth, Minnesota.
Gathering poets of diverse ages, styles, languages, and tribal affiliations, editor Heid E. Erdrich presents an extraordinary range of new Native poetry. The 21 poets featured in the collection, whose first books were published after the year 2000, have written poems of great breadth, including long narratives, political outcries, experimental work, and traditional lyrics. The result is a contemporary, singular, and essential anthology.
Heid will be introduced at this evening's event by Duluth author Linda LeGarde Grover, whose most recent work Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year received the 2018 Minnesota Book Award for Memoir and Creative Nonfiction.
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Praise for New Poets of Native Nations
“This collection is a breathtaking, wide-ranging work of art, comprising everything from electrifying political dissent to narratives in verse to abstract formats. It is a modern classic.” – Buzzfeed
“Here are twenty-one new (and not-so-new) Native poets, writing in English and sometimes our original languages still listening and translating into language what is given to give back. These twenty-one new poets, like their predecessors, are emerging from the Earth or falling from the Sky, from industrial streets, boarding schools, fast cars, all-night tribal or city dances, MFA programs, and bureaucratic lines. Beauty threads with squalor. This is Earth. What a collection Heid E. Erdrich has made of so many original and fresh Native voices, from so many places, gathered here, right here; it is happening, this new Native Nations poetry.” — Joy Harjo
“At their best, anthologies minimize canonization and maximize community and conversation. In New Poets of Native Nations, Heid E. Erdrich invites twenty-one innovative voices to talk to each other and us, and the result is remarkable. I love how this generous collection integrates work from established writers such as Gordon Henry, LeAnne Howe, and Janet McAdams with newer poets like Natalie Diaz, Jennifer Foerster, Layli Long Soldier, and Tommy Pico, and in so doing illustrates the incredible diversity of contemporary Indigenous poetry. This is an important book not just for Native American writing but for American literature and American history.” — Dean Rader
About the Author
Heid E. Erdrich is the author of five collections of poetry, including Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media, which received the 2018 Minnesota Book Award in poetry. She has won numerous awards as have her collaborative poet films, which can be viewed online at vimeo.com/user32717386. She has been named a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Fellow in Literature. She is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain, and lives and teaches in Minneapolis.