Late Thursday: Poetry Reading Inspired By Free Land Exhibition

Join poets Tami Haaland, Melissa Kwasny, David L. Moore, and M.L. Smoker for a powerful evening of poetry inspired by Jason Elliott Clark’s Free Land exhibition. Each poet will share works that reflect on the prairie’s rich history and ongoing transformation, exploring themes of land, Indigenous culture, and environmental change.

This special reading offers a unique blend of art and poetry, allowing the land’s stories to come to life through the voices of these talented poets.

David Axelrod of Bear Scratch Press will also be present to offer broadsides and chapbooks featuring the poets’ works for sale.

This special gathering brings together four of Montana’s most revered literary voices:

 M. L. Smoker (Assiniboine and Sioux, Fort Peck)

M. L. Smoker is a member of the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes of the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana in Missoula, where she was the recipient of the Richard Hugo Fellowship.

Smoker’s first collection of poems, Another Attempt at Rescue, was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2005. In 2009, she coedited an anthology of human rights poetry with Melissa Kwasny titled, I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights (Lost Horse Press, 2011). Smoker has received a regional Emmy award for her work as a writer and consultant on the 2013 PBS documentary Indian Relay. She served as the director of Indian education for the state of Montana for almost ten years. In 2015, she was named the Indian Educator of the Year by the National Indian Education Association and was appointed to the National Advisory Council on Indian Education by President Barack Obama. She currently works at Education Northwest as a practice expert in Indian education.

Smoker served as co-poet laureate for the state of Montana, alongside Melissa Kwasny. In 2021, Smoker and Kwasny were named Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellows.

Melissa Kwasny

Melissa Kwasny is the author of seven collections of poems, including The Cloud Path, Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today, Pictograph, and The Nine Senses, which contains a set of poems that won the Poetry Society of America’s 2008 Cecil Hemly Award. A portion of Pictograph received the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, judged by Ed Roberson. Kwasny is also the author of Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision, and has edited multiple anthologies, including Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800–1950 and, with M.L. Smoker, I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights. Widely published in journals and anthologies, her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Boston Review, and The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral. She lives outside of Jefferson City, Montana, in the Elkhorn Mountains. She was an 2023 OpenAIR resident at American Prairie, where she wrote these poems about “What the Prairie Knows.”?

David L. Moore

David L. Moore is Professor of English at the University of Montana. His fields of research and teaching at graduate and undergraduate levels include cross-cultural American Studies, Native American literatures, Western American literatures, Peace Studies, Baha’i Studies, literature and the environment, and ecocritical and dialogical critical theory. He has taught previously at the University of South Dakota, Salish Kootenai College, University of Washington, and Cornell University. He was the recipient of a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University and of the Faculty Research Fellowship in Western Studies at the O’Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West, among other awards. His book, That Dream Shall Have a Name: Native Americans Rewriting America, is published by the University of Nebraska Press. He currently is editing a collection of essays on prominent author Leslie Marmon Silko, for Bloomsbury Academic Publishers in the UK. Other publications include an edited volume of American Indian Quarterly as well as numerous articles and chapters. He co-hosts Reflections West, a short weekly literary program on Montana Public Radio; and he participates in theater productions by the Bearhead Swaney Intertribal Playwrights Project on the Flathead Reservation. He lives with his family in Missoula, Montana.

Tami Haaland

Tami Haaland is the author of four poetry collections, If I Had Said Beauty, What Does Not Return, When We Wake in the Night, and Breath in Every Room, winner of the Nicholas Roerich First Book Award. In addition, Bear Scratch Press at the University of Montana published a quire, or sequence of six poems, roughly based on the Demeter myth and titled Bright Flower.

Haaland’s poems have appeared in many periodicals and anthologies, including, South Dakota Review, Fugue, Ascent, Consequence, The American Journal of Poetry, Cascadia Field Guide, The Ecopoetry Anthology, and Healing the Divide. Her work has also been featured on The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, and The Slowdown.

This event is free and open to the public.