Diane Glancy is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and professor emeritus at Macalester College. Her works have won the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, the 2016 Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book, the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas, the 2003 Juniper Prize for Poetry for The Primer of the Obsolete, and the 1993 American Book Award for Claiming Breath.
In 2018, Publishers Weekly named her book Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears one of the ten essential Native American novels. Glancy's work reflects her European and Native-American descent, and frequently depicts both Native American and non-Native characters.
Her latest work, Island of the Innocent: A Consideration of the Book of Job, continues and deepens her lifelong exploration of the religious and cultural dimensions of identity, both personal and collective. Her most recent books are It Was Over There by That Place (The Atlas Review Chapbook Series) and The Book of Bearings (Wipf and Stock).
Glancy divides her time between Kansas and Texas.
Kimberly Blaeser, poet, critic, essayist, and fiction writer, is a Professor at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee and a member of the low residency MFA faculty for the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. She served as Wisconsin Poet Laureate for 2015-2016. Blaeser is Anishinaabe, an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, and grew up on White Earth Reservation in northwestern Minnesota. Her collections of poetry include Apprenticed to Justice (2007), Absentee Indians and Other Poems (2002), and Trailing You (1994), which won the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas First Book Award. She is also the author of a critical study on fellow White Earth writer Gerald Vizenor, entitled Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition (1996), and editor of the anthologies Traces in Blood, Bone & Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry (2006), and Stories Migrating Home: A Collection of Anishinaabe Prose (1999).
Blaeser’s poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction have been widely published, and selections of her poetry have been translated into several languages including Spanish, French, Norwegian, Indonesian, and Hungarian. Her writing is included in more than forty anthologies and collections such as Native Voices: Honoring Indigenous Poetry from North America (2019), Fire and Ink: An Anthology of Social Action Writing (2009), The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (2011), Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time (2017), Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems (2017) and Reinventing the Enemy's Language (1997). Blaeser has performed her poetry at over 350 different venues around the globe, and has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Wisconsin Arts Board, the Center for 21st Century Studies, the D’Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian, and the Institute on Race and Ethnicity among others. She is an editorial board member for the “American Indian Lives” series of the University of Nebraska Press, for the “Native American Series” of Michigan State University Press, and for the Indigenous Studies Journal Transmotion.
Blaeser, who worked as a journalist before earning her Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame is also an avid wildlife and nature photographer often exhibiting her photos, ekphrastic poetry, and a mixed-genre art form for which she invented the term “Picto-Poem.” She lives in the woods and wetlands of rural Lyons Township Wisconsin and spends part of each year at a water access cabin adjacent to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota.
