Kimberly Blaeser

Kimberly Blaeser, founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets and past Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is the author of six poetry collections including Ancient Light, Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance, and Copper Yearning. Blaeser’s honors include a 2026 O. Henry Prize, the 2026 Science and Literature Award from the National Book Foundation, 2025 Poets & Writers’ Writer for Writers Award, Hayden’s Ferry Review’s Indigenous Poets Prize, The Masters Review Short Story Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. An enrolled member of the White Earth Nation who grew up on the reservation, Blaeser is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, a Professor Emerita at UW–Milwaukee, and an MFA faculty member at Institute of American Indian Arts. She lives in the woods and wetlands of Wisconsin and, for part of each year, in a water-access cabin near the Boundary Water Canoe Area Wilderness following poems, photos, stories, and river otters—sometimes all at once. Her debut collection of fiction, Red Ants, is forthcoming from Counterpoint Press in October 2026.

Blaeser edited Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry, wrote the monograph Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition on the work of fellow White Earth writer, and served as contributing editor for When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. Her writing is included in over 100 anthologies and translated into multiple languages including French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, and Hungarian. Her photographs, picto-poems, and ekphrastic pieces have appeared in exhibits such as “Visualizing Sovereignty,” and “No More Stolen Sisters.”