Kimberly M. Blaeser

Kimberly Blaeser, past Wisconsin Poet Laureate and founding director of In-Na-Po—Indigenous Nations Poets, is a writer, photographer, and scholar. She is the author of six poetry collections including Ancient Light, Copper Yearning, and the bilingual Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance. Blaeser edited Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry and wrote the monograph Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. Her photographs, picto-poems, and ekphrastic pieces have appeared in exhibits such as “Visualizing Sovereignty,” and “No More Stolen Sisters.” An Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, she is an enrolled member of White Earth Nation and grew up on the reservation. The 2024 Mackey Chair in Creative Writing at Beloit College and a Vassar College Tatlock Fellow, Blaeser is a Professor Emerita at UW–Milwaukee and an MFA faculty member for Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Her accolades include a Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. In 2020, Blaeser was named a Fellow by the Wisconsin Academy. Blaeser splits her time between her home in rural Wisconsin and a water-access cabin near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota. Mackey Chair in Creative Writing, Beloit College, 2024 Tatlock Fellow, Vassar College, 2023-24 MFA Faculty, Institute of American Indian Arts Professor Emerita, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Fellow, Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters, Class of 2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate, 2015-2016  Founding Director, Indigenous Nations Poets http://www.kblaeser.org https://www.facebook.com/kimberly.blaeser   Video provided courtesy of the UWM Media Team.