About this Event
Kimberly Blaeser, former Wisconsin poet laureate and the founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets, visits the store for her collection Red Ants, a bold and genre-defying prose debut by the prizewinning poet incorporating social, historical, and supernatural elements to create a collection that is both contemporary and timeless, communal and deeply intimate. She'll be joined by writer and artist Sonia Barry.
Registration is not required, but helps us anticipate audience size.
Kimberly Blaeser’s singular stories center Anishinaabe characters who bring traditional tribal stories into contemporary experiences and break the stereotypes too often used to portray them. Here, we experience an Indigenous America inhabited by fancy dog contests, social protests, tree doctors, monsters, mosquitoes, and facial recognition software, all while blending, in the most exciting ways, the genre elements of magical realism, humor, horror, and speculative literary fiction.
At the heart of the collection is the story “Red Ants,” which opens on the rez between a jump rope chant and a test proctor’s smile, where two girls learn how easily a life can be reduced to numbers, and how quickly those numbers can tilt ordinary days into something mythic, unsettling, and deeply human. Blaeser delves into the complexities of kinship and survival, exploring how the smallest moments of cruelty or tenderness can shape generations.
For readers of Night of the Living Rez and Crooked Hallelujah speaking to larger issues of race, culture, and history, Red Ants explores alienation, displacement, and loneliness elevated through the precision of language, fierce emotional intelligence, and the haunting sense of place that permeates every page.
Kimberly Blaeser, former Wisconsin poet laureate, is the founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets. Her six poetry collections include Ancient Light, a 2026 National Book Foundation Science + Literature title; Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance; and Copper Yearning, winner of the Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award. Other awards include the O. Henry Prize in fiction, Writer for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. Blaeser is Anishinaabe, an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, who grew up on the reservation in northern Minnesota. She is an MFA faculty member at Institute of American Indian Arts and a Professor Emerita at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Learn more at www.kblaeser.org.
Sonia Marie Barry (Unangax̂/Alutiiq) is a federally enrolled member of the Native Village of Ouzinkie and a descendant of Cook Inlet Region Incorporated. Her short story "Footprints" appears in Never Whistle at Night, Part II: Back for Blood. She earned her Ed.D. through the University of Washington Tacoma's Muckleshoot Cohort, centering Indigenous story, art, and place as living practices of memory, responsibility, and survival. A public school administrator, and visual artist, her award-winning painting Assimilation won the People's Choice Award at the Washington State History Museum’s In the Spirit exhibition. She lives in Poulsbo, WA, with her family.
Event venue & nearby stays
The Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Avenue, Seattle, United States
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