In person: Kenzie Allen book launch with Kimberly Blaeser

Please join us as we welcome debut author KENZIE ALLEN to Milkweed Books to read from her collection Cloud Missives. She will be joined in conversation by poet and founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets, KIMBERLY BLAESER.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Intimate, dissecting, and liberating, Cloud Missives is a poetry collection of excavation and renewal. Like an anthropologist, Kenzie Allen reveals a life from what endures after tragedies and acts of survival. Across four sections, poems explore pop culture—the stereotypes in Peter Pan, Indiana Jones, and beyond—fairy tales, myths, protests, and forgotten histories, before arriving at a dazzling series of love poems that deepen our understanding of romantic, platonic, and communal love.

Cloud Missives is an investigation, a manifestation, and a celebration: of the body, of what we make and remake, of the self, and of the heart. With care and deep attention, it asks what one can reimagine of Indigenous personhood in the wake of colonialism, what healing might look like when loving the world around you—and introduces readers to a profound new voice in poetry.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

KENZIE ALLEN is a Haudenosaunee poet and multimodal artist. She is the recipient of a 92NY Discovery Prize, an inaugural James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets, the 49th Parallel Award in poetry, broadside prizes from Sundress Publications and Littoral Press, and fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Aspen Writers’ Foundation, and In-Na-Po (Indigenous Nations Poets). A finalist for the National Poetry Series, her work has appeared in Poetry magazine, Boston Review, Narrative, The Paris Review’s The Daily, Best New Poets, Poets.org, and other venues. Born in West Texas, she now shares time between Toronto, Ontario; Stavanger, Norway; and the Oneida reservation in Green Bay, Wisconsin. She is a direct descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin.

KIMBERLY BLAESER, past Wisconsin Poet Laureate and founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets is a poet, photographer, and scholar. She is the author of six poetry collections including Ancient Light, Copper Yearning, and Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance. Her photographs and picto-poems have appeared in exhibits such as “Visualizing Sovereignty,” and “No More Stolen Sisters.” An enrolled member of White Earth Nation, Blaeser is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist whose accolades include a Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. She is an MFA faculty member at Institute of American Indian Arts and Professor Emerita at UW–Milwaukee.