Indigenous Poetics: Tacey Atsitty, Heid Erdrich, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Elise Paschen, Nicole Wallace
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 2 Schedule:
Translational Migrations: Indigenous Languages and Bilingual Poetics
How do we define Indigenous poetics outside the frameworks imposed by Western literary traditions? How can literature, poetry, and visual art serve as tools of resistance, healing, and sovereignty? How can we support Indigenous poetry for greater visibility and connection across geographical spaces? And how can we foster both critical thinking and creative responsibility to ensure visibility for all Native writers?
Experimental Poetry Practices in Indigenous Poetry
Reclamation, Empowerment, Repair
Poetry has long served as a powerful tool for resistance and reclamation. This panel invites an exploration of how experimental poetic forms, whether through hybridity, genre-bending, or documentary practices, can be used to challenge and dismantle colonial narratives. We will explore work that engages with cross-genre innovation, multilingualism, archival interventions, and other strategies that disrupt dominant histories. How might poetic form itself become a site of refusal, recovery, or reinvention?
7:00pm Night 2 Reading: Tacey Atsitty, Heid Erdrich, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Elise Paschen, Nicole Wallace, hosted by María Elisa Schmidt
About the Night Two Readers:
Dr. Tacey M. Atsitty, Diné (Navajo), is Tsénahabiłnii (Sleep Rock People) and born for Ta’neeszahnii (Tangle People). Atsitty is a recipient of the Wisconsin Brittingham Prize for Poetry and other prizes. She holds bachelor’s degrees from Brigham Young University and the Institute of American Indian Arts, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY; EPOCH; Kenyon Review Online; Prairie Schooner; When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry; Leavings, and other publications. Her first book is Rain Scald (University of New Mexico Press, 2018), and her second book is (At) Wrist (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023). She is a member of the Advisory Council for BYU’s Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and a board member for Lightscatter Press. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University and is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Beloit College in Wisconsin, where she lives with her husband.
Heid E. Erdrich curates art exhibits, teaches, researches, and collaborates with other artists. In 2024 she was the inaugural Minneapolis Poet Laureate and in 2025 she served as the James Welch Distinguished Visiting Professor at University of Montana Missoula. Erdrich is Ojibwe and an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. Her most recent books are Boundless: Abundance in Native American Art and Literature (co-edited, Amherst Press, 2025) Verb Animate -Poems, Prose, and Prompts from Collaborative Acts (Trio House Press, 2024) and National Poetry Series winner Little Big Bully (Penguin 2020).
Joan Naviyuk Kane’s books of poetry include The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife (2009), Hyperboreal (2013), Milk Black Carbon (2017), Dark Traffic (2021), and with snow pouring southward past the window (forthcoming in 2026) in addition to the chapbooks The Straits (2015), Sublingual (2018), A Few Lines in the Manifest (2018), Another Bright Departure (2019), Ex Machina (2023) and & all the ones who chose to leave her (forthcoming in 2028). Her edited volumes include the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology (House of Anansi Press), Circumpolar Connections: Creative Indigenous Geographies of the Arctic (Wesleyan University Press), and the forthcoming Colonialism and the Environments: Past, Presents, Futures (Heidelberg University Press). A Guggenheim Fellow, Radcliffe Fellow, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellow, and Whiting Award and Paul Engle Prize recipient, she’s a 2025 United States Artists Fellow raising her children in Oregon, where she’s an Associate Professor at Reed College.
Elise Paschen, an enrolled member of the Osage Nation, is the author of Blood Wolf Moon, Tallchief, The Nightlife, Bestiary, Infidelities (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), and Houses: Coasts. As an undergraduate at Harvard, she received the Garrison Medal for poetry. She holds M.Phil. and D.Phil. degrees from Oxford University. Her poems have been published widely, including Poetry Magazine, The New Yorker, A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry and The Best American Poetry. She has edited or co-edited numerous anthologies, including The Eloquent Poem and The New York Times best-seller, Poetry Speaks. A co-founder of Poetry in Motion, Dr. Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Nicole Wallace’s first chapbook, WAASAMOWIN, was published by IMP in 2019. Most recently, Nicole was the June/July 2020 poetry micro-resident at Running Dog and a 2019 Poets House Emerging Poets Fellow. Recent work can be read in print in Survivance: Indigenous Poesis Vol. IV Zine and online at Running Dog, A Perfect Vacuum, and LitHub. They have also contributed to programs and publications celebrating the work and life of the late poet, Diane Burns, author of Riding the One-Eyed Ford (Contact II, 1981).