Kimberly Blaeser, founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets and past Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is the author of works in several genres. Her six poetry collections include Ancient Light (2024), Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance (2020), and Copper Yearning (2019). Her writing is widely anthologized with pieces translated into several languages including French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, Indonesian, and Slovene. Blaeser edited Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry, wrote the monograph Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition, 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. She recently curated a “Water Portfolio” for Prairie Schooner, andis currently completing a short fiction collection, Red Ants.
An enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, Blaeser is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist. Her honors include the 2025 Poets & Writers’ Writer for Writers Award, Zona Gale Short Fiction Award, Masters Review Summer Short Story Award, Hayden’s Ferry Review’s Indigenous Poets Prize, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. A past Lois and Willard Mackey Chair in Creative Writing at Beloit College and Tatlock Fellow atVassar College, Blaeser is currently an MFA faculty member at Institute of American Indian Arts and a Professor Emerita at UW–Milwaukee. She lives in the woods and wetlands of Lyons Township, Wisconsin and, for part of each year, in a water-access cabin adjacent to the Boundary Water Canoe Area Wilderness following stories, photos, and river otters—sometimes all at once.
Kimberly is represented by Rachel Letofsky.
Welcome, Kimberly!