Indigenous Poetics

Molly McGlennen was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is of Anishinaabe and European descent. She earned a PhD in Native American studies from University of California–Davis and an MFA in creative writing from Mills College. Currently, she is a professor of English and Native American studies as well as the Anne McNiff Tatlock ’61 Chair in Multidisciplinary Studies at Vassar College, where she has been responsible for building its Native American Studies program. McGlennen is the author of two collections of poetry, and her poems appear in Poetry, Academy of American Poets’ Poets.org (Poems-a-Day), Red Ink, Yellow Medicine Review, Prairie Schooner, and Sentence. Her critical monograph Creative Alliances: The Transnational Designs of Indigenous Women’s Poetry earned the Beatrice Medicine Award for Scholarship in American Indian Studies. From 2020–23, McGlennen served as president of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures. Inés Hernández-Ávila is Niimiipuu (Nez Perce) and Tejana (Texas-Mexican). She is a poet, visual artist, and professor emerita of Native American studies at University of California–Davis and one of the six founders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). She collaborates with the Library of Congress, Palabra archive, working to increase the recordings of Indigenous creative writers from Latin America. She is a member of Luk’upsíimey/The North Star Collective, which promotes Niimiipuu language revitalization through creative writing. A recent publication (poems and an essay) appeared in the anthology The Shared Language of Poetry: Mexico and the United States. She contributed poems to wiic’íiqin hitoláaycix / “words going upriver” / palabras yendo rio arriba: Poesía de [Poetry from] Luk’upsíimey: The North Star Collective, a chapbook given to Mayan writers in Chiapas in 2022."

• Contents Foreword | Esther Belin Preface Acknowledgments Introduction How Poetry Breaks Language Open, How the Broken Can Feed Us | Kimberly Blaeser Song Maps and Moving Islands: On Writing Poetry from a Chamoru Perspective | Craig Santos Perez Rasquachismo: An Indigenous Approach to Poetry | Casandra López Colliding Heartwork and Poetry: Writing about the Legacy of Colonial School Systems | Natahnee Winder and Tanaya Winder On Overcoming the Anxiety of Making Creative Work: Interview with Brandon Stosuy | Layli Long Soldier The Memory Field: Musings on the Diné Perspective of Time, Memory, and Land | Jake Skeets Shell Shaking Sisters and Chain Cries Blues: Creole Tidalectics and Echolocative Self-Reflexive Rhetorical Praxis | Rain Prud’homme-Cranford and Carolyn M. Dunn Poetry as Performance of Language | Beth Piatote Our World Was Born from Poetry: Ko‘ihonua as ‘Ōiwi Poetic Praxis | ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui After the Before Time: Mapping the Temporal in Poetry by Jennifer Foerster, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, and Karenne Wood | Janet McAdams Diné Brevity as Indigenous Theory | Shaina A. Nez Snowmaking: A Native Poetics of Winter, Mountains, and Bathing | Cj Jackson The Resonance of Poetry | Molly McGlennen Memory Strings: Formative Moments in My Life with Poetry | Inés Hernández-Ávila The Sound of a Butterfly Opening and Closing Its Wings: Musings on Nez Perce Sound Poetics | Michael Wasson Index Contributors’ Biographies