Craft Talk: Kimberly Blaeser and Laura Tohe

Please join us for a conversation with these two nationally-recognized writers about interdisciplinary practices and collaborations. Both poets have engaged in several inter-arts projects, including Laura Tohe’s libretto and Kim Blaeser’s photography and picto-poems, among others. Each also will read some of their poems during the conversation. Woodland Pattern Book Center will be present to sell books for the authors to sign.

Kimberly Bleaser, an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, is a past Wisconsin Poet Laureate, founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets, an MFA faculty member at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and a Professor Emerita of English at UW-Milwaukee. She is currently a Vassar College Tatlock Fellow and the 2024 Mackey Chair in Creative Writing at Beloit College. A recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, Blaeser is the author of six poetry collections, including Ancient Light, published this past January by The University of Arizona Press.

Laura Tohe is Diné, Sleepy-Rock People clan, and born for the Bitter Water People clan. She is Professor Emerita with Distinction at Arizona State University and is the current Navajo Nation Poet Laureate. A multiple award-winning writer, Tohe’s published work include Making Friends with Water (chapbook); No Parole Today, a book on boarding schools; Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers on Community, co-edited with Heid Erdrich; Tseyí Deep in the Rock, in collaboration with photographer Stephen Strom; and Code Talker Stories, an oral history book with the remaining Navajo Code Talkers.  The Phoenix Symphony commissioned Tohe to write the libretto for Enemy Slayer, A Navajo Oratorio, which made its 2008 world premiere in France as part of the Phoenix Symphony’s 60th anniversary.

Sponsored by Special Collections, UWM Libraries, and made possible as part of the Woodland Pattern Book Center series Native Writers in the 21^st Century, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.