Kimberly Blaeser, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2015-2016, is the author of five poetry collections including Copper Yearning, Apprenticed to Justice, and the bilingual Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance. An indigenous activist and environmentalist from White Earth Reservation, she also edited Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. Her book Copper Yearning won the Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award and was named one of the best native books in 2019 by the Tribal College Journal. Her photographs, picto-poems and ekphrastic pieces have been included in exhibits such as ‘Ancient Light’ and ‘Visualizing Sovereignty’. A professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and the MFA faculty for the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, in 2020 Blaeser founded the literary organization In-Na-Po—Indigenous Nations Poets. She lives in rural Wisconsin, and, for portions of each year, in a water-access cabin near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota.
Photo: John Fisher