In person: Kinsale Drake book launch with Heid E. Erdrich

Please join us as we welcome debut poet KINSALE DRAKE to Milkweed Books to read from her collection . She will be joined by Minneapolis Poet Laureate .

ABOUT THE BOOK

The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket traverses the Southwest landscape, exploring intricate relationships between Native peoples and the natural world, land, pop culture, twentieth-century music, and multi-generational representations. Oscillating between musical influences, including the repercussions of ethno-musicology, and the present/past/future, the collection rewrites and re-rights what it means to be Indigenous, queer, and even formerly-emo in the twenty-first century.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

KINSALE DRAKE is the author of THE SKY WAS ONCE A DARK BLANKET, a winner of the National Poetry Series. An enrolled citizen of the Navajo Nation, her work has appeared in Poetry, Poets.org, Best New Poets, Black Warrior Review, Nylon, Teen Vogue, and elsewhere. She lives in Nashville, TN, and is the director of NDN Girls Book Club.

HEID E. ERDRICH grew up in Wahpeton North Dakota and is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain. Heid teaches, edits, and curates visual arts exhibitions with a focus on Native American art. Many of her seven poetry collections contain works created for collaborations with visual artists. Her poetry collection Little Big Bully, 2020, won a National Poetry Series award and the Bobbitt prize from The Library of Congress. Heid edited the 2018 anthology New Poets of Native Nations which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. She is the 2024 Minneapolis Poet Laureate.

Host or Publisher Milkweed Books