Kara Briggs - Rivers in My Veins

Join Village Books and North Cascades Institute in welcoming local author Kara Briggs for another installment in the Nature of Writing series to share her debut novel, Rivers in My Veins.

With calm elegance and precise language, Rivers in My Veins is a work of lyric courage celebrating the connection we all share to the earth. Kara Briggs' poems sing her people, Sauk-Suiattle and Yakama, onto the pages. "Land we live on land," she writes, calling us to embrace our kinship with the earth. As a career journalist, Briggs uses documentary poetry to expose the false settler-colonial narratives while innovating rhythms from the social dances of her tribes in poems that take the reader to the dance circle. She received the 2024 James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poetry for "Acknowledgement Two," a poem in this collection about her uncle who fought for fishing rights. Her fierce love of lands, waters, and stories of her peoples are carried in familiar poetic forms-sonnet, pantoum, and haiku-as vehicles to carry the readers on a journey through our shared world of literary - and deeply alive - landscapes.

Kara Briggs is a resident of the Tulalip Reservation and a Sauk-Suiattle Citizen, Yakama direct descendant. Her debut book of poetry, Rivers in My Veins, follows her graduation from the Institute of American Indian Art with a Master of Fine Arts. The book is about the lands of her tribes, including the North Cascades, the Skagit and Columbia Rivers, the salt waters, the salmon, and the birds of Washington state. The book demonstrates Briggs' skill with form poetry, including haiku and haibun from the Japanese, various types of sonnets, pantoum, and sestina. She was a career journalist with two decades experience, primarily at The Oregonian in Portland. She has worked in higher ed, public affairs and non-profit management. Her passion has always been writing, and her literary career is afoot.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Village Books and Paper Dreams, 1200 11th Street, Bellingham, United States