Maurice Kenny – författare

"This sampler is a good introduction to a number of writers and to the kind of work being done by American Indian poets. Kenny has chosen carefully and well. The work is varied, but the poems have in common the celebration, without romanticising, of heritage and the power of remembering." -- Joseph Bruchac, American Indian Quarterly.

"The most distinguished figure in the renaissance that has occurred in American Indian poetry over the last three decades. He thus brings to his fiction a poet's concern for precision and exactness in diction."--World Literature Today

Reveals the development of Maurice Kenny's growing artistic consciousness, while attesting to both the beauty and brutality of the world in which he lived.Maurice Kenny's career as a writer, teacher, publisher, and storyteller spanned more than six decades, during which he published over thirty books and became one of the most prominent voices in American poetry. From the early 1970s onward, he was instrumental in the resurgence of Native American literature through both his celebrated volumes of poetry, such as I Am the Sun and the award-winning The Mama Poems, and his work as an editor and publisher.Angry Rain, his bittersweet memoir, reveals this rich literary life by recounting its tumultuous "first half…plus a bit," a time during which he moved through a series of worlds that all left their marks on him. Kenny begins with his early years spent among his family in the small northern New York city of Watertown and continues through an adolescence marked by both significant awakenings and grievous traumas. Determined, Kenny sets out to seek his fortunes and find his poetic voice, landing in the Jim Crow-era South, in St. Louis, in Indiana, and finally in New York City, where he becomes part of a motley creative group of performers and poets that offers both fascinating inspiration and disheartening rejection. These recollections end with Kenny's maturation into a poet whose reaffirmed indigenous heritage unified an artistic vision that remained in conversation with a wide range of other themes and traditions until his death in 2016.

Sister of famed warrior Chief Joseph Brant and wife of the legendary Sir William Johnson, Tekonwatonti/Molly Brant seemed destined to exist only in their shadows until acclaimed poet Maurice Kenny plucked her from the footnotes of history. In a remarkable sequence of voices that span the centuries, Molly takes her rightful place as one of the most powerful figures in Native American history. As she grows from young girl to wife and mother to warrior who leads her people in a futile attempt to hold their ancestral lands, Molly comes vibrantly to life in poems that transcend time and place. In a luminous tribute to the indomitability of the human spirit, Kenny eloquently addresses the power of belief and the importance of memory.

American Book Award winner Maurice Kenny has long been a major voice in Native American literature. In this collection, he writes of such little-known and controversial issues as the gay tradition in Native American history and looks at how his Mohawk background has impacted on his own writing.

Storytelling has always had an important role in Native American culture. Beginning as an oral tradition, Native stories became the repositories of tribal history and memory, and the story-tellers were revered members of every tribe. As a written form, storytelling took much longer to develop. As Native Americans mas-tered English in school, they incorporated American and European literary genres into their own experiences, and by the late eighteenth century, Native writers were publishing their work. However, because of the importance of educating non-Native atidi-It t Nit ye American culture and history, the published work of Native writers consisted largely of non-fiction. It wasn't until the late 1960s that Native poetry and fiction began to appear. One of the earliest anthologies of Native America short fiction, 'The Man to Send Rain Clouds', published in 1974, contained only six Native writers, and most of them were from the Southwest. This new anthology contains the work of thir-ty-five writers from across the continent.Some of those included have achieved mainstream success, others are little-known outside literary circles, and some are young writers just beginning to emerge. What they all share is a desire to blend imagination with the experience of being Native American to create a rich and var-ied body of work that will be read and enjoyed for many years to come by Native and non-Native alike.

This book contains work from all phases of Kenny's career, beginning with his Butler University days through his life in New York City and on his many road trips through his eventual return to his homeland in the Adirondack Mountains in New York State. Much of the work appeared originally in books that are long out of print. The book also contains over twenty new poems.

"Maurice Kenny stands at the forefront of his generation. Few writers of any ethnicity are destined to be remembered in the mainstream of literary history; I believe that Kenny's contributions as a poet are among those few. He writes from the center, as our Elders would say."-Wendy Rose "A master lyricist."-Joseph Bruchac This bold new collection by American Book Award-winner Maurice Kenny explores the intersections between life and art. Part one explores the lives of well-known gay artists; part two focuses on Kenny's often difficult relationship with his father.