F248.
Indigenous-Aboriginal American Writers Caucus
Friday, March 25, 2022
5:00 pm to 6:15 pm
Indigenous writers and scholars participate fluidly in AWP, teaching, directing affiliated programs, working as independent writers or scholars, and/or within community language revitalization efforts. Annually imparting field-related craft, pedagogy, celebrations, and concerns as programming understood by Indigenous-Native writers from the Americas and surrounding island nations is necessary. AWP conferences began our caucus discussions in 2010. Essential program development continues in 2022.
Participants
Shauna Osborn is executive director of Puha Hubiya, a nonprofit literary arts organization, and author of the poetry collection Arachnid Verve, which was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Awards. They have won awards from the New York Public Library, A Room of Her Own Foundation, and the Taos Summer Writers' Conference and a Crescendo Literary Fellowship.
Rena Priest is a poet and enrolled member of the Lummi Nation. She has been appointed to serve as Washington state poet laureate for the term of April 2021–2023, has published two collections of poetry, and is the recipient of an Allied Arts Professional Poets Award.
Deborah Taffa is the director of the MFA in creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 2021, her memoir manuscript won awards from PEN America, MacDowell, Tin House, and Kranzberg Arts. Her writing can be found at Boston Review, A Public Space, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is a citizen of the Quechan Nation.
Kimberly Blaeser, past Wisconsin poet laureate, is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Copper Yearning. A professor at UW—Milwaukee and MFA faculty member for Institute of American Indian Arts, Blaeser is Anishinaabe and founding director of Indigenous Nation Poets.
