In-Person | Thursday | May 8 | 7-9pm
Celebrate Kenzie Allen‘s debut poetry collection, Cloud Missives (Tin House, 2024), and Elise Paschen’s newest collection, Blood Wolf Moon (Red Hen Press, 2025). Cloud Missives is a poetry collection of excavation and renewal. With care and deep attention, Kenzie Allen asks what one can reimagine of Indigenous personhood in the wake of colonialism, what healing might look like when loving the world. Elise Paschen’s sixth collection, Blood Wolf Moon, explores her family history and Osage heritage, grappling with The Reign of Terror when outsiders murdered individual members of the Osage for their oil headrights. Blood Wolf Moon is an intimate and unrelenting quest for the translation of identity, attending to what lives on in the body, landscape, and language.
Join us for an evening honoring two new collections about indigeneity, survivance, and inheritance.
Readings in Kray Hall followed by a reception in the Reading Room.
Events at Poets House are popular, and seating is first-come, first-seated. We have several seats reserved for people with access needs. If events reach capacity, seating will be available in an overflow viewing room.
About the poets:
Kenzie Allen is a Haudenosaunee poet and multimodal artist. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, her work has appeared in Poetry magazine, Boston Review, Narrative, The Paris Review’s The Daily, Best New Poets, Poets.org, and other venues. Born in West Texas, she now shares time between Toronto, Ontario; Stavanger, Norway; and the Oneida reservation in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Elise Paschen, an enrolled member of the Osage Nation, is the author of six poetry collections, most recently, Blood Wolf Moon, as well as Tallchief, The Nightlife, Bestiary, Infidelities (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), and Houses: Coasts. As an undergraduate at Harvard, she received the Garrison Medal for poetry. She holds M.Phil. and D.Phil. degrees from Oxford University. Paschen received the Rupert Costo Chair in American Indian Affairs Medal in 2019. Her poems have been published in Poetry Magazine and The New Yorker, among other magazines, and in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Poetry and A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. She is the editor of The Eloquent Poem: 128 Contemporary Poems and Their Making as well as The New York Times best-selling anthology, Poetry Speaks to Children, and co-editor of Poetry Speaks and Poetry in Motion, among other anthologies. Former Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America, she is a co-founder of Poetry in Motion, a nationwide program which places poetry posters in subway cars and buses. Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.