EIU Booth Library

Kimberly Blaeser, past Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is the author of five poetry collections including Copper Yearning, Apprenticed to Justice, and the 2020 bi-lingual Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance. An Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist from White Earth Reservation, she also edited Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. Blaeser is a professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an MFA faculty member for the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Her photographs, picto-poems and ekphrastic pieces have been included in exhibits such as “Ancient Light” and “Visualizing Sovereignty.” She lives in rural Wisconsin; and, for portions of each year, in a water-access cabin near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota. Blaeser is founding director of the literary organization In-Na-Po—Indigenous Nations Poets. In this program, Blaeser will discuss her picto-poems and the role of art in Native communities.