Kimberly Blaeser book launch at Milkweed Books

ABOUT THE BOOK

This bold and genre-defying prose debut by the prizewinning poet incorporates social, historical, and supernatural elements to create a collection that is both contemporary and timeless, communal and deeply intimate

Kimberly Blaeser’s singular stories center Anishinaabe characters who bring traditional tribal stories into contemporary experiences and break the stereotypes too often used to portray them. Here, we experience an Indigenous America inhabited by fancy dog contests, social protests, tree doctors, monsters, mosquitoes, and facial recognition software, all while blending, in the most exciting ways, the genre elements of magical realism, humor, horror, and speculative literary fiction.

At the heart of the collection is the story “Red Ants,” which opens on the rez between a jump rope chant and a test proctor’s smile, where two girls learn how easily a life can be reduced to numbers, and how quickly those numbers can tilt ordinary days into something mythic, unsettling, and deeply human. Blaeser delves into the complexities of kinship and survival, exploring how the smallest moments of cruelty or tenderness can shape generations.

For readers of Night of the Living Rez and Crooked Hallelujah speaking to larger issues of race, culture, and history, Red Ants explores alienation, displacement, and loneliness elevated through the precision of language, fierce emotional intelligence, and the haunting sense of place that permeates every page.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Kimberly Blaeser, former Wisconsin poet laureate, is the founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets. Her six poetry collections include Ancient Light, a 2026 National Book Foundation Science + Literature title; Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance; and Copper Yearning, winner of the Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award. Other awards include the O. Henry Prize in fiction, Writer for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. Blaeser is Anishinaabe, an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, who grew up on the reservation in northern Minnesota. She is an MFA faculty member at Institute of American Indian Arts and a Professor Emerita at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Learn more at www.kblaeser.org.

Brenda J. Child is Northrop Professor and former Chair of the Departments of American Studies and American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, where she received the President’s Engaged Scholar Award. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2022-23, and a Nonfiction Judge for the National Book Awards in 2024. Child is the author of several award-winning books in American Indian history and recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Western Historical Association for her work in Indigenous History. She was born on the Red Lake Ojibwe Reservation and now lives with her husband, the Ojibwe artist Steve Premo, and her family in Saint Paul and Bemidji, Minnesota.