About this Event
In Prairie Midden, Kildegaard draws on research to explore the demise of the prairie from 1832-2032. The voice of an imagined daughter of the prairie--a teenage daughter of settlers and settler descendents--is one strand through the book. Another strand considers the lives of settlers who busted sod and planted corn and beans to the fencerows. And others acknowledge the kin of the prairie--plants and animals--those still around and those lost to us.
Athena Kildegaard is the author of six books of poetry. Prairie Midden won the 2023 WILLA Award for Poetry. She has been a recipient of grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Lake Region Arts Council, and she has twice received the Artist Fellowship from LRAC. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart and have been set to music by many composers. She teaches at the University of Minnesota Morris.
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Little Big Bully begins with a question asked of a collective and troubled we - how did we come to this? In answer, this book offers personal myth, American and Native American contexts, and allegories driven by women's resistance to narcissists, stalkers, and harassers. These poems are immediate, personal, political, cultural, even futuristic object lessons. What is truth now? Who are we now? How do we find answers through the smoke of human destructiveness? The past for Indigenous people, ecosystem collapse from near-extinction of bison, and the present epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women underlie these poems. Here, survivors shout back at useless cautionary tales with their own courage and visions of future worlds made well.
Heid E. Erdrich is a writer from North Dakota who curates art exhibits, teaches, researches, and collaborates with other artists. She’s Ojibwe, enrolled at Turtle Mountain. Her most recent book of poems is Little Big Bully.
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Lesley Wheeler’s The State She’s In dives deeply into Virginia history to discover a path forward that includes all of us. As Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Diane Seuss writes, “Wheeler’s formal virtuosity wheels and sparks as she explores the impact of whiteness and sexism on the literal state—its history, its land, its educational institutions…Wheeler’s research, her feral witchery, her poems themselves, are an answer, if not the antidote, to the state we’re in.”
In her debut nonfiction book, award-winning poet and critic Lesley Wheeler tells the story of her father’s unraveling. While she studies poetry in New Zealand on a Fulbright fellowship, his dishonesty smashes her parents’ marriage and destroys their savings. Reading contemporary poetry, however, helps Wheeler negotiate the crisis. Wheeler’s frank, lively book demonstrates how traveling through a poem’s pocket universe can change people for the better.
, Poetry Editor of Shenandoah, is the author of six poetry collections, including Mycocosmic (Tupelo Press, 2025) and The State She’s In. Her other books include the hybrid memoir and the novel. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poets & Writers, Pleiades, Poetry, Ecotone, and Massachusetts Review.
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