Ride your Bicycle to De Paul for Indigenous Poetry

Thursday, October 4 at 6:00pm Student Center (Lincoln Park), 314 2550 N Sheffield Ave

Please join in on Thursday, October 4, 2012 (6:00 pm in room 314 of the DePaul Student Center; a reception will precede at 5:30 pm) for an evening of poetry and discussion with three of North America’s most exciting young Indigenous poets. Natalie Diaz, Santee Frazier, and Orlando White will read selections from their poetry, followed by a discussion and audience Q&A (moderated by DePaul Professor Mark Turcotte) exploring ways in which the poets’ Native beliefs and traditions influence and are expressed in their art.

Natalie Diaz is a member of the Mojave and Pima Indian tribes. She earned her BA and MFA in Creative Writing from Old Dominion University. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Iowa Review, Narrative, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. Her work was selected by Natasha Trethewey for Best New Poets and she has received the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Her first book of poems, When My Brother Was An Aztec was published by Copper Canyon in early 2012. She lives in Surprise, Arizona.

Santee Frazier is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. He is the recipient of various awards including a Syracuse University Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Residency, and most recently was selected as The School for Advanced Research Indigenous Writer in Residence. His poems have appeared in American Poet, Narrative Magazine, Ontario Review, Ploughshares, and other literary journals. His first collection of poems, Dark Thirty , was released by the University of Arizona Press in 2009.

Orlando White is the author of Bone Light (Red Hen Press, 2009). Originally from Tólikan, Arizona, he is Diné of the Naaneesht’ézhi Tábaahí and born for the Naakai Diné’e. He holds a BFA in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Brown University. His poems have appeared in The Florida Review, The Kenyon Review, Omnidawn Poetry Feature Blog, Salt Hill Journal, Sentence, and the American Indian Culture And Research Journal, and elsewhere. He has taught at Brown University, the Institute of American Indian Arts and The Art Center Design College of Santa Fe, and Naropa University’s summer writing program. Currently, he teaches at Diné College, and lives in Tsaile, Arizona.