POETRY READING: Kimberly Blaeser, Luci Tapahonso, and Laura Tohe

Join us for an evening of powerful storytelling with Kimberly Blaeser, Luci Tapahanso, and Laura Tohe. Open to all. Light refreshments will be served.

Kimberly Blaeser is the founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po) and a past Poet Laureate of Wisconsin. She is the author of books in several genres, including six collections of poetry, most recently, Ancient Light. She edited Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry, wrote the monograph Gerald Vizenor Writing in the Oral Tradition, and served as contributing editor for When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020). Her writing is included in over 100 anthologies and translated into multiple languages, including French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, and Hungarian. An Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, she is an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation and grew up on the reservation. Her honors include the 2025 Poets & Writers’ Writer for Writers Award, Zona Gale Short Fiction Award from the Council of Wisconsin Writers, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. She is a Professor Emerita at UW-Milwaukee and an MFA faculty member at Institute of American Indian Arts.

Luci Tapahonso is Professor Emerita of English Literature at the University of New Mexico and served as the inaugural Poet Laureate of the Navajo Nation. She is the author of three children’s books and six books of poetry, including A Radiant Curve. She has delivered keynote addresses at numerous conferences and institutions including Harvard University, Kenyon College, the Institute of American Indian Arts, the Tbisili International Literature Festival in the Republic of Georgia, and elsewhere. Tapahonso created the script for an exhibition called “Creating Tradition: Innovation and Change in American Indian Art” for the American Heritage Gallery at Walt Disney World’s Epcot Center. She is a recipient of a 2018 Native Arts and and Culture Foundation Artist Fellowship. She lives in Santa Fe with her husband, Dr. Robert Martin.

Laura Tohe is an award-winning poet and writer. Her books of poetry include No Parole Today, Tséyi, Deep in the Rock, and Meeting the Spirit of Water. Along with Heid E. Erdrich, she co-edited Sister Nations, an anthology of Native American Women writing. Her oral history book, Code Talker Stories, is a bilingual book of interviews with the remaining Navajo Code Talkers and their descendants. Her commissioned libretto, Enemy Slayer, A Navajo Oratorio, made its world premeire at Phoenix Symphony Hall and performed at the University of Utah and the Colorado Music Festival. She has written poetry, essays, and media articles for more than forty years and has published nationally and internationally in Canada, France, England, Peru, Chile, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. Among her awards are the Navajo Nation Poet Laureate, the 2025 Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award, the Academy of Poets Fellowship, the 2019 American Indian Festival of Worlds Writer’s Award and the Dan Shilling Public Scholar Award from the Arizona Humanities.