Join Birchbark Books for an evening with three emerging Indigenous poets, published by Abalone Mountain Press, a Diné woman owned press. Kinsale Drake, Tate Walker, and Boderra Joe will read from their books followed by a panel discussion with Amber McCrary about the importance of independent presses by Indigenous people for Indigenous people.

Boderra Joe is a Diné poet, journalist, and photographer from Bááhazł'ah (Twin Lakes), New Mexico, on the Navajo Nation. Landscape and perspective flood Boderra Joe’s Desert Teeth, a collection of poetry that unfolds the wakening shift of scarred violence affecting native people and land for centuries. Lakota storyteller Taté Walker is a citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe of South Dakota. In their debut poetry collection, The Trickster Riots, Taté Walker steps into the role of a contemporary trickster to continue the purposefully disruptive legacy of a cultural icon: Iktómi, the Spider. Kinsale Drake (Diné) is a senior at Yale University and an Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow. She was named by Time Magazine as an artist representing her decade “changing how we see the world.” hummingbird heart is a zine about inversion of the cishet white, male gaze, alienation, desire, loneliness, queerness, and other “ness”es.

This is a virtual event and registration is required.

Join us for a virtual conversation with Joshua Whitehead, author of Making Love with the Land, recently published by University of Minnesota Press. In prose that is evocative and sensual, unabashedly queer and visceral, raw and autobiographical, Joshua Whitehead writes of an Indigenous body in pain, coping with trauma. Intellectually audacious and emotionally compelling, Whitehead shares his devotion to the world in which we live and brilliantly—even joyfully—maps his experience on the land that has shaped stories, histories, and bodies from time immemorial.

Whitehead's previous books include Jonny Appleseed, Full-Metal Indigiqueer, and Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction.

This event will take place on Zoom. Registration is required.

Please join Birchbark Books for a reading, conversation, and all around good time with the authors of the newly published children's book, Where We Come From. In this unique collaboration, four authors lyrically explore where they each come from—literally and metaphorically—as well as what unites all of us as humans. Richly layered illustrations connect past and present, making for an accessible and visually striking look at history, family, and identity.

Featuring Diane Wilson (The Seed Keeper, Spirit Car), Sun Yung Shin (Wet Hex, Unbearable Splendor), Shannon Gibney (Dream Country, The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be), and Jon Coy (Strong to the Hoop, Hoop Genius).

Free and open to the public, the event will be held at Bockley Gallery, 2123 W 21st St, Minneapolis (down the block from Birchbark Books). Books will be available for purchase on site.