Moderated by Lucille Lang Day, Wampanoag, Scarlet Tanager Books with poets Denise Low, Delaware Heritage; Stephen Meadows, Rumsen Ohlone; Kurt Schweigman, Oglala/Sicangu Lakota and Kim Shuck, Cherokee Nation. Introduced by Kirk Glaser, Director of Creative Writing, English Dept.
Five Indigenous poets will read from their work and discuss how it is informed by and promotes awareness of the climate crisis and related environmental and political issues.
RSVP to this zoom only session. This is not screened at a central location on campus. Enjoy from your home or office or classroom.
Moderator KIRK GLASER teaches writing and literature at Santa Clara University, where he serves as Director of the Creative Writing Program and Faculty Advisor to the Santa Clara Review. He has created three literary headliners for tUrn9 at SCU in October 2023. His poetry has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Threepenny Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Nimrod, Split Rock, Chicago Quarterly Review, Catamaran, The Worcester Review, The Cortland Review, and elsewhere. Awards for his work include an American Academy of Poets prize, C. H. Jones National Poetry Prize, and University of California Poet Laureate Award. He is co-editor of the anthology, New California Writing 2013, Heyday.
LUCILLE LANG DAY, of Wampanoag heritage, is the author of four poetry chapbooks and seven full-length collections, most recently Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place, as well as two children’s books and a memoir, Married at Fourteen: A True Story. She edited the anthology Poetry and Science: Writing Our Way to Discovery and coedited Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California and Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California. Her many honors include the Blue Light Poetry Prize, two PEN Oakland – Josephine Miles Literary Awards, the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, and eleven Pushcart Prize nominations. The founder and publisher of Scarlet Tanager Books, she received her MA in English and MFA in creative writing at San Francisco State University, and her BA in biological sciences, MA in zoology, and PhD in science/mathematics education at the University of California, Berkeley. She is of Wampanoag, British, and Swiss-German descent. https://lucillelangday.com

DENISE LOW, of Delaware Heritage, Kansas Poet Laureate 2007-09, won a Red Mountain Press Award for Shadow Light: Poems. Other publications are The Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival (University of Nebraska Press; Jigsaw Puzzling: Essays (Meadowlark, Coffin Award); Wing (Red Mountain); and Casino Bestiary (Spartan). Forthcoming is House of Grace, House of Blood, docu-poetry from the University of Arizona Press, Suntracks series. She teaches for Baker University’s School of Professional and Graduate Studies. Low is a founding board member of Indigenous Nations Poets, former board president of AWP, and literary co-director of The 222 arts organization. At Haskell Indian Nations University she founded the creative writing program. She lives in California’s Sonoma County, homeland of Pomo people. www.deniselow.net
STEPHEN MEADOWS, of Ohlone heritage, El Dorado County Poet Laureate 2023-2025, is a Californian poet with roots in both the Ohlone and the pioneer soil of his home state. He was born and raised on the Monterey Bay of Central California and received his secondary education at U.C. Santa Barbara, U.C. Santa Cruz where he earned his Bachelor of Arts Degree and went on to earn a Master's Degree at San Francisco State University.
Stephen has published poems in anthologies and collections nationwide; The Sounds of Rattles and Clappers from the University of Arizona Press, The Dirt is Red Here from Heyday Books and his first book also from Heyday Releasing the Days. Stephen is included in; Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California from Scarlet Tanager Books edited by Lucille Lang Day and Ruth Nolan and Red Indian Road West also from the same press. In addition, his poems can be found on the spoken word CD Red Smoke Dawn Wind with background music by David Blonski as well as appearing on the CD from Mignon Geli entitled Under a Buffalo Sun. The most recent publication is his collection of poetry entitled Winter Work which was published by Nomadic Press in November 2022 and is now represented by Black Lawrence Press in New York.
KURT SCHWEIGMAN is Oglala/Sicangu Lakota, born and raised in South Dakota, and currently resides in Sonoma County, California. He formerly performed and published under the nom de plume Luke Warm Water. Confluences of Solitude (Mitote Press, 2023) is his first poetry book in nearly a decade. Kurt’s forthcoming 2023 bilingual poetry book Roots Define the Reach of My Branches will be published by Gilgamesh Press in Mantua, Italy. He is the co-editor of Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California (Scarlet Tanager, 2016). Currently, he is writing his first novel titled “Sitting Bull in Paris,” which blends contemporary and historical fiction.
KIM SHUCK, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is the 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco Emerita. She is author of 11 books and editor or edit involved in another 11. Most of what you will find in a cursory web surf of her name is reliable.
https://www.manifestdifferently.org/ and kim.shuck on IG