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Join us at the museum for a special presentation by writer Annie Wenstrup. Wenstrup will read her poetry, including pieces from her most recent publication, The Museum of Unnatural Histories. This program is presented in conjunction with the exhibition, Homelands: Connecting to Mounds through Native Art, now on view at the McClung Museum. The reading will be preceded by a light reception, starting at 5 pm.
This program is presented in partnership with UT's Department of English, Denbo Center for the Humanities & the Arts, and UT's Creative Writing Program .
About the Book: The Museum of Unnatural Histories, is Annie Wenstrup's debut collection which parses personal history in the space of an imagined museum. Outside the museum, Ggugguyni (the Dena'ina Raven) and The Museum Curator collect discarded French fries, earrings, and secrets—or as the curator explains, together they curate moments of cataclysm. Inside the museum, their collection is displayed in installations that depict the imagined Indigenous body. Into this "distance between the learning and the telling," Wenstrup inserts The Curator and her sukdu'a, her own interpretive text. At the heart of the sukdu'a is the desire to find a form that allows the speaker's story to be heard. Through love letters, received forms, and found text, the poems reclaim their right to interpret, reinvent, and even disregard artifacts of their own mythos. Meticulously refined and delicately crafted, they encourage the reader to "decide/who you must become.”
About the writer: Annie Wenstrup (Dena’ina) is the author of The Museum of Unnatural Histories (Wesleyan University Press in March 2025). Wenstrup won the 2025 Whiting Award in Poetry, the 10th annual New England Review Emerging Writer’s Award, and is the 2024 Stephen Donadio Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Scholar. In 2023, she received the Alaska Literary Award and support from the Rasmuson Foundation. She has held a Museum Sovereignty Fellowship with the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center (Alaska office) supported through a Journey to What Matters grant from The CIRI Foundation and was an Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow in 2022 and 2023. Her poems have been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Ecotone, Poetry, and elsewhere. She lives in Fairbanks, Alaska.
This program is presented in partnership with UT's Department of English, Denbo Center for the Humanities & the Arts, and UT's Creative Writing Program
Support for Homelands: Connecting to Mounds through Native Art is provided by The Henry Luce Foundation and The Terra Foundation for American Art.
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