Join us for a multi-day forum exploring issues and ideas around language, translingual borders, and the environment as experienced by Indigenous communities throughout the country.

Day 1 Schedule:
6:00pm Welcome Reception
7:00pm James Welch Prize Reading: Chris Hoshnic, Desireé Bewley Dallagiacomo, dg nanouk okpik. Hosted by Keetje Kuipers
8:00pm Night 1 Reading: Kimberly Blaeser, Bonney Hartley, m.s. RedCherries. Hosted by Rob Arnold

About the James Welch Prize Readers:

Chris Hoshnic is a Navajo poet, playwright, and filmmaker, honored with the 2023 Indigenous Poets Prize for Hayden’s Ferry Review and the Poetry Northwest 2025 James Welch Prize. His fellowships include the Native American Media Alliance’s Writers Seminar, UC-Berkeley Arts Research Center, and the Diné Artisan and Authors Capacity Building Institute, with support from Indigenous Nations Poets, Playwrights Realm, Tin House, and others. He currently directs Diné Kids Film Club, a career readiness project for young Indigenous people in the arts.

Desireé Bewley Dallagiacomo is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is a poet and memoirist raised in the foothills of Northern California and the swamplands of Southeast Louisiana. She is the recipient of the 2025 James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poetry, and she has received fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, The Harpo Foundation, Tin House Writing Workshop, and the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, among others. Desireé received her BA in Feminist Studies and a certificate from the Visualizing Abolition Studies program from the University of California, Santa Cruz and she is a poetry candidate in the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. She is writing about indigeneity, class, surveillance, and the carceral state.  She is the founder of The Heart of It Writing Retreat & Residencies, and with a team of writers and organizers, she is procuring seed funding to steward land and creative space to house no-cost and low-cost retreats alongside other co-op creative projects. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Sink, was published by Button Poetry.

dg nanouk okpik is Inupiaq, Inuit from Alaska. okpik is the author of Blood Snow (Wave Books, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and Corpse Whale (University of Arizona Press, 2012), which won the American Book Award and the May Sarton Award. okpik was also the recipient of the Truman Capote Literary Trust Scholarship.

About the Night One Readers:

Kimberly Blaeser, founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets and past Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is the author of works in several genres. Her six poetry collections include Ancient Light (2024), Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance (2020), and Copper Yearning (2019).

Bonney Hartley (Munsee/Mohican) holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Institute of American Indian Arts. She is a 2024 and 2025 Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow and a 2025 Forge Project Fellow. Her work has appeared in Stonecoast Review, The Last Milkweed (Tupelo Press), and Boundless (Amherst College Press), among others. She is a member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community and founding member of Mohican Writers Circle.

m.s. RedCherries received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a JD from Arizona State University College of Law. She is a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation. Her debut, mother (Penguin Books) was a finalist for the National Book Award.