"This Woven Being": Reading & Panel with Chicago Indigenous Poets

Please join us in celebrating the power of the spoken word. The evening will feature poetry reading and a panel discussion by local poets River Kerstetter (Oneida), Mark LaRoque (White Earth Ojibwe), Elise Paschen (Osage), and Mark Turcotte (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe). Both Mark LaRoque’s and Mark Turcotte’s work is featured in the forthcoming exhibition catalog for Woven Being: Art for Zhegagoynak / Chicagoland. The event will be moderated by Kelly Wisecup, Arthur E. Andersen Teaching and Research Professor; Professor of English.

Participation level – light, participants may share thoughts and questions at the close of the panel during the Q&A.

Programs are open to all, on a first-come first-served basis. RSVPs are not required, but are appreciated.

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River Ian Kerstetter is an enrolled citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. She is a queer trans artist, designer, writer, and educator. River is a contributor and social media lead at Sixty Inches From Center, a collective which publishes and produces collaborative projects about artists, archival practice, art history, and culture in Chicago and the Midwest. River is also a co-founder of TIES poetry readings with Patrick Del Percio, and Fruit Punch Press with H. Melt. Previous projects include co-founding PansyGuild and Vecinos Artist Collective. River has served as a SITE Scholar at SITE Santa Fe. River holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Book & Paper Arts from Columbia College Chicago, and a BFA in Art & Ecology from the University of New Mexico.

Mark LaRoque (White Earth Band of Ojibwe) was born in White Earth, Minnesota, in Naytawaush Village. He relates some of his village experiences through poem and stories. He started writing at 16 and received tutelage in presentation from his mentor the late Eddie Two Rivers, an Anishinaabe poet and the artistic director of Chicago’s groundbreaking Red Path Theater Company. Mark’s work appears in the poetry anthology Skins: drum beats from city streets. He has performed at the Art Center Highland Park, Gichigamiin Indigenous Nations Museum, Goodman Theatre, and Sequence Ch!cago.

Elise Paschen, an enrolled member of the Osage Nation, is the author of Blood Wolf Moon, Tallchief, The Nightlife, Bestiary, Infidelities (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), and Houses: Coasts. As an undergraduate at Harvard, she received the Garrison Medal for poetry. She holds M.Phil. and D.Phil. degrees from Oxford University. Her poems have been published widely, including Poetry Magazine, The New Yorker, A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry and The Best American Poetry. She has edited or co-edited numerous anthologies, including The New York Times best-seller, Poetry Speaks. A co-founder of Poetry in Motion, Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Mark Turcotte was raised on North Dakota's Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation. Turcotte moved to Chicago in 1993, where his literary career was given a boost by Illinois Poet Laureate, Gwendolyn Brooks, who awarded him the first Gwendolyn Brooks Open-mic Poetry Award and recognized him as a Significant Illinois Poet. Turcotte’s books of poetry include Exploding Chippewas (Northwestern University Press, 2002), Le Chant de la route (Vague Verte Editions, 2001), and The Feathered Heart (Michigan State University Press, revised 1998). Turcotte has received awards from the Lannan Foundation, the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, and the Wisconsin Arts Board. He is a senior professional lecturer at DePaul University in Chicago.

Kelly Wisecup is a literary and cultural historian whose work brings together early American studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and histories of books and archives. She is a non-Native scholar who works with contemporary Native nations and people to research, teach, and write about Indigenous literatures. Wisecup’s books include Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures (Yale, 2021) and Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013). With Lisa Brooks, Wisecup co-edited Plymouth Colony: Narratives of English Settlement and Native Resistance from the Mayflower to King Philip’s War, a volume bringing together primary text accounts of Plymouth colony on Wampanoag homelands (Library of America, 2022).

Host or Publisher The Block Museum of Art