About this Event
Join us for a lovely evening to celebrate the release of Boomhouse by Summer J. Hart! She will be in conversation with Teresa Peterson and Diane Wilson.
Boomhouse thrums with loss, with complicated love, with fortitude. The poems travel a chain of rivers and lakes from the great timber stands of Canada to the dying mill towns of Maine, bending and rippling through history, oral accounts, superstitious customs, family lore and memory. Summer J. Hart navigates the twisting dynamics of a family that is both Native and settler. She weaves stories and spells from the most delicate and indelible details.
Summer, Teresa, and Diane will kick off the night with a reading before conversing and answering audience questions.
Summer J. Hart is an interdisciplinary artist and writer from Maine living in the Hudson Valley, New York. She is a member of the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation. Her written and visual narratives are influenced by folklore, superstition, divination, and forgotten territories reclaimed by nature. Summer is the author of Boomhouse (2023, The 3rd Thing Press). She is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Poetry and the recipient of the 2022 Hellen Ingram Plummer Fellowship at MacDowell. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in The Best Small Fictions 2023 (Alternating Current Press), Bedfellows, Denver Quarterly, Heavy Feather Review, The Massachusetts Review, Northern New England Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. Her mixed-media installations have been featured in shows and galleries including SPRING/BREAK, NYC; Pen + Brush, NYC; Gitana Rosa Gallery at Paterson Art Factory, Paterson, NJ; LeMieux Galleries, New Orleans, LA; and The Parsonage Gallery, Searsport, ME.
Teresa Peterson, Utuhu Cistinna Win, is Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota and citizen of the Upper Sioux Community. Teresa and her uncle, Walter LaBatte Jr authored Voices from Pejuhutazizi: Dakota Stories and Storytellers, published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press. She is also the author of Grasshopper Girl, a children’s book published by Black Bears and Blueberries Publishing, a contributor to Voices Rising: Native Women Writers, and has poetry in “The Racism Issue” of the Yellow Medicine Review. Her upcoming book, Perennial Ceremony: Lessons and Gifts from a Dakota Garden is published by the University of Minnesota Press, to be released in May. Teresa earned her doctorate in Education from the University of Minnesota Duluth and currently serves as a Program Manager for the Foundation at NDN Collective. Teresa’s passion is digging in her garden that overlooks the Mni Sota River valley and feeding friends and family.
Diane Wilson is a Dakota writer, educator, and bog steward, who has published four award-winning books as well as numerous essays. Her novel, The Seed Keeper, received the 2022 Minnesota Book Award for Fiction, and her memoir, Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past, won a 2006 Minnesota Book Award and was selected for the 2012 One Minneapolis One Read program. She has also published a nonfiction book, Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life, a middle-grade biography, Ella Cara Deloria: Dakota Language Protector, and co-authored a picture book—Where We Come From. Her essays have been featured in many publications, including We Are Meant to Rise; Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations; and A Good Time for the Truth. Wilson is a Mdewakanton descendent, enrolled on the Rosebud Reservation. She is the former Executive Director for Dream of Wild Health, an Indigenous non-profit farm, and the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, a national coalition of tribes and organizations working to create sovereign food systems for Native people.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Birchbark Bizhiw, 1629 Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis, United States
USD 0.00