Milkweed Presents: Found Ancestry with K. Iver

Join K. Iver and panelists Dorothy Chan, Eli Erlick, and Danez Smith as they explore the idea of found ancestry and its impact on their work.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

K. Iver is a nonbinary trans poet born in Mississippi. Their work has appeared in Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The Adroit, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. They are the 2021-2022 Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow for the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the recipient of the 2022 Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Residency Grant. They have a Ph.D. in Poetry at Florida State University. They live in Madison, Wisconsin.

Dorothy Chan (she/they) is the author of five poetry collections, including Return of the Chinese Femme, BABE, Revenge of the Asian Woman, Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold , and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets. They were a 2023 finalist for the Roethke Poetry Award, 2022 finalist for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize from the New England Poetry Club, a 2020 and 2014 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a 2020 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry for Revenge of the Asian Woman, and a 2019 recipient of the Philip Freund Prize in Creative Writing from Cornell University. Their work has appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Chan is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and was the 2021 Resident Artist for Toward One Wisconsin. They are a 2022 recipient of the University of Wisconsin System’s Dr. P.B. Poorman Award for Outstanding Achievement on Behalf of LGBTQ People.

Eli Erlick is an internationally acclaimed author, activist, and educator. In 2011, she founded Trans Student Educational Resources (TSER), a national organization dedicated to transforming the educational environment for trans students. Her first book, Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950 (Beacon Press/Manchester University Press), narrates the astonishing lives of 30 trans people who radically change common conceptions about transgender history. Her forthcoming book, Belonging Through Exclusion: Understanding the Transgender Far-Right (University of Chicago Press) describes how right-wing transgender people adopted their views – and how we might prevent others from joining them. Blending innovative research with cutting-edge activism, she undertook her Ph.D. research at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Erlick’s work has been featured in hundreds of outlets including The New York Times, Time Magazine, and The Washington Post. Learn more at www.elierlick.com.

Danez Smith is the author of four poetry collections: [insert] boy, Don’t Call Us Dead, Homie, and, most recently, Bluff. They are also the curator of Blues In Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes. For their work, Danez was won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and have been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, as well as an array of grants, fellowships, and residencies including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Princeton Arts Fellowship. Danez lives in the Twin Cities with their people and teaches at the Randolph College MFA program and the Black Youth Healing Arts Center in St. Paul, MN.