Kimberly Blaeser, past Wisconsin Poet
Laureate and founding director of In-Na-Po—Indigenous Nations Poets, is a writer, photographer,
and scholar. The author of five poetry collections including Copper
Yearning, Apprenticed to Justice, and Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance, Blaeser edited Traces in Blood, Bone,
and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry and her monograph Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral
Tradition was the first native-authored book-length study of an Indigenous
author. Her photographs, picto-poems, and ekphrastic pieces have been included
in exhibits such as “Ancient Light,” “Visualizing Sovereignty,” and “No
More Stolen Sisters.” An enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, Blaeser
is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist who grew up on the reservation. She is the recipient
of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas
and a Wisconsin Library Association Notable Author award for her body of
literary works as well as awards and
fellowships from Wisconsin Arts Board, Wisconsin Humanities Council, Tribal College Journal,
and Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters among others. A Professor
Emerita at UW—Milwaukee and MFA faculty member for
Institute of American Indian Arts, Blaeser is an editorial board member for the University of Nebraska
Press “American Indian Lives” series, serves on the Poetry Coalition of the Academy
of American Poets and on the boards of directors of Wisconsin Academy of
Sciences, Arts, and Letters, and Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission. Her
writing is included in 100+ anthologies with selections translated into multiple
languages including Chinese,
Spanish, Norwegian, Indonesian, Hungarian, French, Slovene, Armenian, and
Anishinaabemowin. Blaeser has performed at 400+ in-person and virtual venues around the globe from arctic Norway to
the Kingdom of Bahrain. 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. http://kblaeser.org