Milkweed Presents: Found Ancestry hosted by K. Iver

Join K. Iver and panelists Dorothy Chan, Eli Erlick, and Danez Smith as they explore the idea of found ancestry and its impact on their work.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

K. Iver is a nonbinary trans poet born in Mississippi. Their work has appeared in Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The Adroit, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. They are the 2021-2022 Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow for the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the recipient of the 2022 Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Residency Grant. They have a Ph.D. in Poetry at Florida State University. They live in Madison, Wisconsin.

Dorothy Chan (she/they) is the author of five poetry collections, including Return of the Chinese Femme (Deep Vellum, 2024); BABE (Diode Editions, 2021), a 2022 finalist for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize from the New England Poetry Club; Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, 2019), a finalist for the 2023 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry; Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018); and the chapbook, Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017), selected by Douglas Kearney for the 6th Annual New Delta Review Chapbook Contest. They are an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of Honey Literary Inc., a 501(c)(3) BIPOC literary arts organization. Chan was a 2022 recipient of the University of Wisconsin System’s Dr. P.B. Poorman Award for Outstanding Achievement on Behalf of LGBTQ+ People. Chan’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2025, The American Poetry Review, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Society of America, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. Visit their website at dorothypoetry.com

Eli Erlick is an internationally acclaimed author, activist, and educator. In 2011, she founded Trans Student Educational Resources (TSER), a national organization dedicated to transforming the educational environment for trans students. Her first book, Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950 (Beacon Press/Manchester University Press), narrates the astonishing lives of 30 trans people who radically change common conceptions about transgender history. Her forthcoming book, Belonging Through Exclusion: Understanding the Transgender Far-Right (University of Chicago Press) describes how right-wing transgender people adopted their views – and how we might prevent others from joining them. Blending innovative research with cutting-edge activism, she undertook her Ph.D. research at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Erlick’s work has been featured in hundreds of outlets including The New York Times, Time Magazine, and The Washington Post. Learn more at www.elierlick.com.

Danez Smith is the author of four poetry collections: [insert] boy, Don’t Call Us Dead, Homie, and, most recently, Bluff. They are also the curator of Blues In Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes. For their work, Danez was won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and have been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, as well as an array of grants, fellowships, and residencies including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Princeton Arts Fellowship. Danez lives in the Twin Cities with their people and teaches at the Randolph College MFA program and the Black Youth Healing Arts Center in St. Paul, MN.

Host or Publisher Milkweed Books