In 2024, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Laura Tohe discusses her curatorial approach and her own creative work.

Poets.org: Welcome to the Guest Editor Q&A, hosted by the Academy of American Poets. I’m Mary Sutton, senior content editor at the Academy, and I’m here today with the Guest Editor for November, Laura Tohe. Laura is the author of Tséyi’/Deep in the Rock. Laura, welcome and thank you so much for joining me today.

Laura Tohe: Thank you. First of all, I want to say thank you and to the Academy for this opportunity to create Poem-a-Day for the month of November, which is also Native American Heritage Month. This curation is a tremendous opportunity for me to highlight American poetry, which Indigenous poetry is part of. Now, as for my curation, I wanted to invite poets who I’ve admired and whose works have inspired me and taught me more about poetry. One of the fun things about curating was reaching out to these poets. I also wanted to invite younger and emerging Indigenous poets whose work is indicative of the diversity of poems that speak of so many things from Indigenous communities, like trauma, claiming voice, and healing. Curating the selections reminded me of how we are all dressed in language, poetry, and stories, and I celebrate all these writers.

Poets.org: Well, we thank you so much for this curation in honor of Indigenous Heritage Month. Now, aside from your curation, if you could direct readers to one poem in our collection, or more than one poem, at Poets.org that you haven’t curated, what would it be and why?

Tohe: Yes. When I was looking at all these poets who have inspired me and whose work I admire, it was really hard to come down to just one poet because I liked many of these poets for different reasons, and I realize the [poems] that I’ve selected are from poets that have passed now. So as I was looking at these works, I also wanted to include people from my own community. These are people who have songs and prayers that they used for different ceremonies, and they are not poets in the Western sense, but nevertheless, they are artists of language.

So the first poet I selected was Scott Momaday who was Kiowa, and he won the Pulitzer for a novel, House Made of Dawn, but he also wrote poetry. He wrote benign self-portraits against the construct of a stereotype and more from the center of himself. He was also a painter, and I appreciate how his poetry intersected with painting, like his poetry evolved from the page to a canvas.

And the other poem I selected is “The world is a beautiful place” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. This poem strikes me as a poem that moves between dualities that create a kind of balance in the world, but there’s no perfection. One of the reasons I like this poem is how it resonates with the worldview I was raised in.

And the other poem I so much admire is the one by Maya Angelou, “Still I Rise.” This is one of my favorite poets and poems. I identify with this poem in so many ways: for its stance against how others oppress us, how we oppress ourselves, and how institutions and systems can work against us. Angelou reminds me of an auntie or a grandmother who reminds us that we can overcome with our confidence and our belief in ourselves and [that is] something the women in my family taught me. And I think it’s a great poem for younger people too.

Poets.org: I agree. It’s a timeless work for a reason, right?

Tohe: Yes.

Poets.org: Yeah. Who or what are you reading right now?

Tohe: Well, I tend to read several things at one time, and right now I’m reading Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars and Deborah G. Plant’s Of Greed and Glory. And I also dip into various poets’ work to give me inspiration when I get stuck writing, or I want to see how they wrote a poem about a specific topic. And I’ll go to their work and I’ll read that. And so, you know, I kind of jump around.

Poets.org: Can you give us a brief list of who those poets are, whom you return to for inspiration?

Tohe: I’m reading an anthology of Native poets that was edited by … or poet, sorry, just … sorry. [laughs] Let me get the name. So we have several anthologies of Native poets. So there’s a collection of their works in The Diné Reader. These are all Navajo or Diné writers, and it’s interesting to look at their work and see what they’re writing about. Some of these writers are from my generation, some are younger. So I read those and I read Joy Harjo’s poetry as well, because she was one of the first Native writers whose readings I went to when I was an undergrad back a long time ago. And as a poet, [a] former poet laureate, I think her work is tremendous. So I look at her work and I look at some of, you know, the colleagues whose books I’ve read over the years, whose work to me is something that I feel like they’re taking me to places where I’ve not been before. And I really appreciate that because when I was growing up, reading was a way for me to go to other places and other time periods. And poetry, I think, still does that for me.

Poets.org: What are you working on now in your writing, teaching, and publishing life?

Tohe: I don’t teach anymore, but I continue to write and do poetry readings. I’m starting an essay about Diné poetics as part of a larger feature on Diné writers and Indigenous literature. And I’m currently finishing up a short historical piece based on the photographs by Milton Snow who photographed Diné people and our homeland during the Navajo Livestock, excuse me, Navajo Livestock Reduction Program. This took place during the Great Depression and resulted in the wholesale slaughter of thousands of livestock owned by Diné people. And I think this is one of the topics that’s not known or not known much of outside the tribal communities in the Southwest who experienced this. So in this piece, I’m trying to give visibility to this history and how it affected Indigenous communities, including my own.

Poets.org: Speaking of your historical works, your 2012 book Code Talker Stories is about the World War II veterans, or code talkers, who communicated key messages in Navajo, foiling Japanese attempts to break code. Your father, Benson Tohe was a code talker, correct?

Tohe: Yes, that’s right.

Poets.org: So I’m curious, how much of your work would you say is informed by the archive, and how critical do you think it is for poets to engage with historical archives?

Tohe: I think it’s very important to engage in those stories because in this country, our stories are still invisible. Our history is invisible. Not much of it is taught in the lower grades. And I think too, part of this book, this oral history book that I wrote, has to do with language which we lost during the Indian boarding school days. And I feel like it was really important to focus a lot on the language because it was that language that the Japanese were not able to decipher. And I think that this history of the code talkers and my father being part of that is part of the larger story that I find lots of people are interested in. They want to know who were the code talkers, what did they do? How did they devise this language that confounded the Japanese and also is being diminished today?

So I think these stories, we are, as native writers are starting to tell today, like the story about the stock reduction. And I think maybe some of the younger generation from the native communities don’t know these stories as well. So, you know, this is a tremendous opportunity for us as writers to look back and to examine and to think and to reflect on those stories and what it means for us as tribal people and how it has affected us today because we are still living with many of these repercussions from the past.

Poets.org: Agreed. And something very much to keep in mind as we head toward an election this year.

Tohe: Yes.

Poets.org: Thank you. Thank you so much, Laura, for spending this time with me.

Tohe: Thank you.