About this Event
Join Jake Skeets at Minnesota Museum of American Art in conversation with Milkweed’s Creative Director Mary Austin-Speaker for a reading and discussion of his latest work, Horses. The reading and reception will be in celebration of the “Queering Indigeneity” exhibit.
ABOUT THE BOOK
With Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, Jake Skeets emerged as a visionary new literary voice, offering readers a queer, Indigenous poetics inextricable from a connection to land. With Horses, Skeets tracks the shifting land of the Navajo Nation: What changes and what remains the same in a place that has been inhabited for thousands of years?
In poems employing numbers significant to Diné thought and lifeway, Skeets explores the reclamation of land, imagination, and language—a world beyond environmental apocalypse, where joy is possible and where transformation is embraced over erasure. Arranged as a quartet, Horses begins with a meditation on two hundred horses found dead, mired in mud that had once been a stock pond on Navajo land in Arizona. What was once a source of life had become a death trap for a herd living on the edge of survival. From here, Skeets’s poems radiate outward, tracing the body and its relationship to a landscape marked by geologic time and the fragile, eroding moments of the present.
Fiercely observant, brilliantly constructed, and hauntingly incisive, Horses evokes both the end of a world and a new dawn emerging on the horizon.
ABOUT THE EXHIBIT
Queering Indigeneity is a multi-year, multi-generational project that celebrates the vision and diversity of 2-Spirit, Native queer, gender expansive artists in the Upper Midwest. In seeking out and amplifying voices of Indigenous artists and culture bearers, the M, guided by Penny Kagigebi, hopes to influence the types of artists who are supported, seen, and centered at the museum, and to show both Indigenous and non-Indigenous visitors a more comprehensive and complex story of this region’s art and artists.
Artists include Sharon Day, Ryan Young, Delia Touché, Awanigiizhik Bruce, Niibawi Ajijaak, Awanaabe Syverson, Zoe Allen, Naawakamigookwe Lera Hephner, Noah Polk, Madeline Treuer, Chewie Mason, Asin-Gwiiwizens, Sav Jonsa, Giiwedin, Nick Metcalf, and Penny Kagigebi.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Jake Skeets is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, selected by the National Poetry Series and winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and an American Book Award. A Whiting Award recipient, Skeets is from the Navajo Nation and was appointed the Nation’s third Poet Laureate. He is an assistant professor of English at the University of Oklahoma.
Mary Austin Speaker is the Creative Director of Milkweed Editions. Before joining Milkweed’s staff in 2017, Mary worked in New York trade publishing for ten years, managing the Ecco and Smithsonian imprints for HarperCollins Publishers and designing for Simon & Schuster. She co-founded and curated the Triptych Poetry Series in the East Village, and while studying for her MFA in poetry at Indiana University, she taught creative writing and edited the Indiana Review. She has published two collections of poetry—Ceremony (Slope Editions, 2013) and The Bridge (Shearsman Books, 2016).
NOTE ABOUT THE VENUE
Please park in the First National bank parking ramp. The entrance is on 5th Street between Minnesota and Robert streets. It is a $5 flat fee rate after 5:00pm. The skyway leads straight over to the museum and there will posted signage that night.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Minnesota Museum of American Art, 350 Robert Street North, Saint Paul, United States
USD 0.00
