Tacey M. Atsitty
Among several mentors are Navajo poets Luci Tapahonso and Laura Tohe, who have both mentored me early on, just out of high school, and even still today. I offer gracious thanks to them and their encouragement and support.
All people can benefit from the beauty and translation of the world as dg nanouk okpik sees it, and the use of language as Layli Long Soldier constructs her poems. I’m looking forward to a collection by Michael Wasson.
Layli Long Soldier
My mentors include Sherwin Bitsui, dg nanouk okpik, Cedar Sigo, Jennifer Foerster, Orlando White, and Santee Frazier. More people should read Michael Wasson.
Tommy Pico
My first book came about when the editor of Birds LLC saw me read and asked me if I had a manuscript. This makes it sound kind of whimsical when in reality I had sent IRL to every open reading period, every book contest, and every publisher who would look at it. Before Birds it was rejected like … 69 times.
Sherman Alexie has offered me a lot of support and advice for not only navigating the world of indigenous literature but also film, as I am currently working on a screenplay for Cinereach Ltd.
The almost complete eradication of the Kumeyaay language is one of the major themes of my first book, IRL, and also pops up in Nature Poem. As I write, “English is some Stockholm shit.” It’s weird because I actually literally love language so much (you have to as a poet) and I’m pretty smitten with English so it troubles me for sure.
More people should read Tanaya Winder, Cassandra M Lopez, b. william bearheart, Frank Waln—I mean there are so many. I think it’s a really exciting time for native lit.
Margaret Noodin
Akawe nind’anishinaabebiige apane. I always write first in Anishinaabemowin.
Nind’ozhibii’igemin ji-nanaakwiiyang gaye ji-nanaa’imang akiing miinawaa ji-abamiitawyang gaye abaakaawiyang. We write to resist and repair the world, to rise up and be renewed.
Jim Northrup-ba, Gordon Henry, Kim Blaeser, and Allison Adelle Hedge Coke have encouraged me to stick with the Ojibwe poems when others said they would be hard to publish. Many Ojibwemowin teachers helped me learn the language and many poet mentors encouraged me to use it. Eventually, editors Keith Taylor and Annie Martin took a chance on publishing my bi-lingual work. I thank them.
More people should know about Kenzie Allen, a young Oneida poet whose artistic vision is clear and worth encountering. I would love to see Red Cliff Ojibwe poet Bryce Stevenson publish a collection one day.
Laura Da’
My first chapbook came to be published in Effigies II alongside work by Ungelbah Davila, Kristi Leora, Laura Mann, and Kateri Menominee. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke edited the anthology with deep care and support. I feel honored that she invited me to submit my work.
Among poets more readers should know, Layli Long Soldier and Tommy Pico are two that I am reading right now.
Gwen Nell Westerman
Dakota language is an integral part of my writing, in both poetry and prose. I often begin with Dakota phrases from songs or everyday conversation that capture best what I want to say. It’s important that people know the language is living, and is spoken and written today.
In 2006, I went to the Turtle Mountain Writers Workshop with a blank journal and wrote three new poems in an afternoon. Louise Erdrich read them, and told me to come back the next year with thirty completed poems. I did what she said, and those poems became the core of Follow the Blackbirds, which I submitted to the American Indian Series at Michigan State University Press in 2010.
I am honored to have been mentored by Linda Hogan, Gordon Henry, Louise Erdrich, and Carter Revard. Many other incredible poets have inspired me, including Sherman Alexie, Heid E. Erdrich, Simon Ortiz, John Trudell, LeAnne Howe, and Eric Gansworth.
Jennifer Elise Foerster
My mother introduced me to Joy Harjo when I was a young girl. Reading a Mvskoke woman poet inspired me in the possibilities of writing and being taken seriously as a poet.
Natalie Diaz
My first book came to life because I was writing and writing and writing poems, on my own out in the middle of my desert, and some good people sent those poems to Copper Canyon without me knowing. Sometimes we think ambition is what gets us published, but sometimes it is really just building a strong family of people who believe in your work and also contributing to that family and community by being supportive.
I think most people don’t know about most native poets. They don’t even know about most native people. They need to go to the library and read books written by people not like them.
Native languages are the foundation of the American poetic lexicon, and I believe they are a valuable language on and off the page. I hope to see more of them in poets’ works.
Trevino L. Brings Plenty
I’m not skilled with the Lakota language. My grandparents didn’t pass it on. So I come to use Lakota words as I gather momentum learning my language and cultural practices. Lakota words/meanings become agents for another intimate thought process to generate work.
My first book, Real Indian Junk Jewelry, started out self-published with a hundred-book, limited edition run in 2005. It wasn’t until I was approached by Backwater Press that the manuscript was accepted for publication with better distribution than my hand delivery per scheduled reading.
Adrian C. Louis has been really helpful early in my writings. He pulled together a collection which featured my work and three other Lakota writers: Shedding Skins: Four Sioux Poets. I’ve reached out to other Native poets and they have been supportive of my work. I’m waiting for Sherwin Bitsui’s and Santee Frazier’s latest collections to be published. More readers should know Santee Frazier.
I’m an experiential learner, an aural and visual learner, the challenges I encounter to generate work taxes my mental abilities. This is both illuminating and highlights my insecurities in the creative process. I don’t take my work efforts as getting better over-time, but different per piece generated.
dg nanouk okpik
I am not fluent in Inupiaq, but I studied it for two years in college as an independent study. So my use is personal and urgent. I only use Inupiaq if there is no English word available to explain what I’m trying to convey to the reader. As you know, translation is tricky yet vital. I think in Inupiaq then write as a way of how to suffice. Even if I don’t know my indigenous language fully, I still know enough to be mindful of both languages and how they juxtapose or can be parallel at the same time. But surely, my first language is English. Although some words in English are just not denotative or connotative and precise in some instances. So I can use Inupiaq as a tool to be as concise in the Inupiaq thought process.
I was taught there are the ones who-sit-beside in storytelling, a multigenerational poetic force of the Sila or the voice spirit in the wind, in which it is vital to understand Inupiaq tradition. It is as if there is a storyteller from 1,009,790 million years ago on the right side of me, and one on the left from 134 years in the future, and then me in the middle. Inupiaq storytellers have long histories and should be honored, revered, respected, and accounted for. Like I said these are not my poems to own; they are the multi-universes. I am from a long heritage of these special people. I am humbled and aware of this as I write daily and think of them as if they are here with me now.
I felt the dire need for a collection of Inupiaq, Inuit poetry which dealt with history, culture, identity, adoption, and ecopoetics. I breathe to write and write to breathe. These poems I do not consider mine to own. I am a hollow bone in which the words flow through me from many generations of historical grief, colonialism, global warming, my identity as adopted out & meeting my birth family over fifteen years ago, also continuous non-Inupiaq writers telling our stories.
I have been mentored by Layli Long Soldier, Sherwin Bitsui, Heid E. Erdrich, Natalie Diaz, Heather Cahoon, Jennifer Foerster, and Joy Harjo. I think more readers should know and read Jennifer Foerster and Heather Cahoon. I look forward to Heather Cahoon’s first collection, a work that is contemporary yet traditional in storytelling, poignant yet humble, from a Salish native from the Flathead Indian Reservation.
Julian Talamantez Brolaski
I was living in Gowanus near the Gowanus Canal, researching its history as a fishing ground for the Canarsie and writing poems. I had spent many years attempting to publish books, unsuccessfully. But I was having my poems published in journals, and I was continuing to involve myself in organizing and attending readings. Finally, I queried Ugly Duckling Presse, whose offices are also in Gowanus, and they accepted my manuscript.
I look forward to seeing first books by Crisosto Apache (Mescalero Apache) and Inés Talamantez (Mescalero and Lipan Apache).
More readers should know about poet dg nanouk okpik.
Poets who have mentored me include Cedar Sigo, Allison Hedge Coke, Inés Talamantez.
My first book, gowanus atropolis, is an ecopoetical exploration of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, a recently designated superfund site that was once a fertile fishing ground for the Canarsie Native American tribe. The poems grapple with reconciling the toxicity of the titular Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn and the east river in “Manahatta” with the poet’s search for the pastoral in New York City. A queer elegy for when language might have been prior to thought, where the phrase becomes the thought, rather than the other way around—so that the dystopic might become, if not utopic, at least measurable / pleasurable, “melodious offal.” Gowanus atropolis reinscribes, as always already present, both queer and Native spaces in and around the Gowanus through a radical reshaping of English.
Of Mongrelitude is a colloquy on the mongrel body, texual and actual, sexual, special, and racial. Composed in a hybrid style that draws on language spanning centuries, it makes the argument that everything can and does come into “englyssh,” including neologisms, archaisms, vocables, Apache, Spanish, French, other romance and germanic tongues, tongues not yet named. A trans-literal, transmogrified body, the body of the poems figured as the body of the poet. The “hide” / “hyde” is ruminated upon, the poet’s own ambiguous body, cowboy and indian, male and female and a third and fourth thing, hide as flesh, as a noun, also “being hided,” being hidden, being flayed. The subject imagines and therefore does become other species, other animals—contemplation of being a bird or a worm at the end of the world. We are brought together with the thing that unites us, love, and all its permutations and magics: “what is love / but a constellation of significances // lyke-like magic.” All of this “made up as medicine,” as literal song, to heal the wounds of the violence that comes from embodying a mongrel state.
Sy Hoahwah
Because they did not ask for a reader’s fee, I mailed a copy of my manuscript to editor John Crawford at West End Press. I was poor and fortunate enough.
The inviters and motivators, for me, have been Adrian Louis, Joy Harjo, Lance Henson, and then everybody else. I look forward to seeing first books by any Native voice brave enough to share their insight and brutal honesty about their world.
Native/Indigenous poets I think more readers should know and read? Every one of us.
Craig Santos Perez
My first book was published by a Hawai‘i-based press in 2008, but is being re-published in a revised edition by Omnidawn publishing in 2017.
Important mentors to me include Allison Hedge Coke, Joy Harjo, Albert Wendt, and Simon Ortiz. There are several native Pacific writers that come to mind: No‘u Revilla and Kisha Borja-Kicho‘cho‘. More readers should know and read Native Hawaiian poet Brandy Nālani McDougall.
I have never learned to write in my indigenous language, so the use of Chamoru in my work is often fragmented.
Gordon Henry, Jr.
My first book came about because I had been publishing poetry for years, in anthologies and journals, so I had spoken to a number of people, including other poets and publishers about publishing a poetry book. Through such conversations, I spoke to Janet McAdams, who was editing a book publication series on Indigenous Writers for Salt Press. I sent her my manuscript; she forwarded it to Salt and after a series of contractual and production discussions via email, Salt agreed to include it in their list of Indigenous works.
My mentors include Lance Henson, Gerald Vizenor, Louise Erdrich, and Carroll Arnett. Geary Hobson inspired me at early stages of my career. I look forward to works by most Native writers and I am also interested in new and innovative work. Simon Ortiz, Joy Harjo, Natalie Diaz, Heid E. Erdrich, Lance Henson, Ray Young Bear, Orlando White. More people should read Carroll Arnett, Lance Henson, Ray Young Bear, and Heid E. Erdrich, as well as Natalie Diaz.
I use Anishinaabemowin sparingly, as reference to places and names mostly, as a marker of turns back to tribal ways of knowing place, people, or honoring storied beings.
I published the following in a special issue of the Yellow Medicine Review. It still holds for me, though I’ve amended it a bit: “I write to find the red sun road, to pick up the passenger whose dreams time grinds to salt and tears, to stop whatever the last flash of intuition flares up shadows across landscapes memory won’t hold, as if any or all of this were writing, anything, but we what cannot say, is not love, is not hope, is not the line circumscribing, an invisible center, perhaps to find a singer therein, chasing sounds, senses, the rhythms and patterns, for calling forth memory and the invented extensions of memory, the events, whether dream or percept, or associate affects, drawn by longing, with the hope of a gift to give.”
Brandy Nālani McDougall
When I use ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i in my writing alongside English, I often do not provide a translation, nor do I italicize ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i to both honor and emphasize our language sovereignty and resurgence. Most publications and presses, especially those edited by non-Indigenous editors, request that I provide translations and automatically italicize our Indigenous language (adhering to MLA rules that dictate that “foreign” languages should be italicized) during the copyediting stage. I’ve found most to be open to honoring my wishes about translation, but some can be sticklers for italicization. That’s when I point out that to adhere to the MLA rules of italicizing foreign languages means that all of the English should be italicized and all of the Indigenous American and Pacific languages left “Roman.” :)
My first book was published by Kuleana ‘Ōiwi Press, a small and independent Hawaiian-run press based in Hawai‘i. It was the second in the Wayne Kaumualii Westlake series, a series that honors a prolific Hawaiian poet and activist.
Important kumu (teachers) of mine include Albert Wendt, Haunani-Kay Trask, Garrett Hongo, and Robert Sullivan.
M. L. Smoker
Certain parts of poems or whole poems feel more authentic in my language, Assiniboine. I feel it is important to give my language life in my work, to allow it to come in to this world in a different way/format.
My first book came about when I began sending poems to Hanging Loose Press because I encountered Sherman Alexie’s work in their journal. After some time, they asked if I had a full manuscript, and once I completed my MFA, I sent my thesis to them.
Writers who mentored me or whose writing motivated my own include James Welch, Paula Gunn Allen, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Debra Magpie Earling. More readers should know James Welch. Most people know his novels, but his collection of poetry is amazing. There are several Montana authors whose work I would like to see published.
The ever evolving genre of American Indian poetry is breathtaking to watch mature and develop. I’m so proud to be a part of that continuum. We have to keep using our voice and the presence of our ancestors to keep us moving forward so that younger, newer writers emerge.
LeAnne Howe
I use Choctaw in my poetry, and often use Choctaw chants or songs that enhance the work. For example, in Evidence of Red one of the poems is called “A Duck’s Tune.” The Choctaw song becomes the refrain in the poem.
My first book: I had been writing poems for a book, but didn’t know how they held together until poet Janet McAdams contacted me, asking if I had a poetry manuscript I might like to publish with Salt Publishing, UK. Evidence of Red was born.
Just a few examples of wonderful Native poets who’ve nurtured me: Gerald Vizenor, Joy Harjo, Gordon Henry, Roxy Gordon, Carroll Arnett, Phillip Carroll Morgan, and Linda Hogan. More readers should know Ernestine Hayes, Tlingit. Her work is poetry on the page, and memoir, and just gorgeous. I hope we will see first books by my granddaughters. Sounds self-serving, but it is my hope that I will live to see them publish their poetry. We need more Choctaw poets.
My newest book manuscript is titled Savage Conversations. The book is literally a conversation between Mary Todd Lincoln and the “savage Indian” she invented to torture her while she was in Bellevue Place in Batavia, Illinois. She claimed that the Indian nightly came into her room and slit her eyelids and sewed them open with wire. She said he scalped her and cut a bone from her cheek, always putting her back together by dawn’s first light. I believed her. The book is set in 1875 and chronicles their four months together in an asylum for the insane.
Cedar Sigo
My first book came to be because several of the poets behind Ugly Duckling Presse attended my first reading at St. Mark’s Church in New York City in 2000. They published a selection of early poems in issue #3 of 6X6 and that led to a wonderful friendship with the poet/editor Julien Poirier.
Native/Indigenous poets who have mentored, or otherwise motivated my own writing include: Jennifer Foerster, Layli Long Soldier, Orlando White, James Thomas Stevens, Allison Hedge Coke. More readers should know and read Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Tommy Pico, Luci Tapahonso, and dg nanouk okpik.
More and more I see the poet’s work as connecting bits of language as they begin to surface outright. My dream of composition is not to convey narrative but rather to illumine the fact that scaling these gaps aloud creates intimacy. It is a revealing process. Its arrival may result in entire lines or unsettled syllabic fits of speech. The pull of a rhythm can haunt the mind to the point of destroying any notion of free verse. I have always been entranced by these words from the poet Robert Duncan, “It is no longer supernatural, the gods are states of mind.”
Karenne Wood
My first book came to be published because I entered the First Book Award contest offered by the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. The first year, it didn’t win. I received great encouragement from Joe Bruchac and Geary Hobson, though, so I revised and submitted it the following year, and it won!
Eric Gansworth
I was taught Tuscarora through elementary school, and often use words and phrases that remain in my everyday lexicon. I’ve written some poems in response to elders’ lessons, fascinated by their priorities.
During production of my first novel, editor Cliff Trafzer asked about my next project, a poetry collection. I finished it while also working against a deadline on my first solo visual art show. The projects merged into one form, and that fusion of visual art and poetry has remained in my work.
I’m confronted with my choices whenever I read indigenous poets. I often revisit the work of Joy Harjo and Mark Turcotte, learning from their sense of execution with each reading. Diane Burns was a poet I’d always wanted to hear more from—she did not leave much behind.
My work’s synthesis grows out of Haudenosaunee culture’s relationship to wampum belts: visual representations of our culture’s defining qualities, transmitted to others by the telling. The visual and the verbal always operate together in my work.
Janet McAdams
Geary Hobson, who was then directing the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, had read some of my poetry and asked me to submit a manuscript for their first book competition. I was lucky to work with the University of Arizona Press, who published the prize winners, with an editor like Patti Hartmann and with Arizona’s superb designers.
More people should know about Gladys Cardiff. I love her work, especially her collection A Bare Unpainted Table, which weaves personal lyrics about homeland, here, the Qualla Boundary, with tough, sophisticated readings of colonialism’s texts. I’m also a fan of the poetry of Louise Halfe (Cree), a First Nations poet whose work should be better known. And the work of the Zapotec poet Natalia Toledo is finally available in English—she is a superb writer.
Mentors: Deborah Miranda’s complex engagement with genres and forms has always made me think harder about language’s possibilities. Allison Hedge Coke and Joy Harjo are visionaries; the scope of their work is staggering, both for its prophetic quality and for its profound engagement with history.