VISITING WRITERS

Brandon Hobson

Cedar Sigo

Luci Tapahonso

IAIA MFA INTERIM PROGRAM DIRECTOR

Jennifer Elise Foerster

Jennifer Elise Foerster,  an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts , received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts , and has recently completed a PhD at the University of Denver.  She is the recipient of a 2017 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University . A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, her first book of poems,  Leaving Tulsa , was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2013. Her second book,  Bright Raft in the Afterweather , was released in 2018, also by University of Arizona Press.

ASSISTANT TO THE DIRECTOR OF THE MFA PROGRAM

Jamie Figueroa

Jamie Figueroa  (Afro-Taíno),  is Boricua by way of Ohio and a long-time resident of northern New Mexico. She explores identity, familial relationships, place, culture, and ancestry. A two-time graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts, (BFA and MFA in Creative Writing), she publishes across genres including fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry.   Her work has been published in McSweeney's,  Catapult, Epoch, Hinchas de Poesia, The Santa Fe Literary Review, Yellow Medicine Review, Flash: International, Eleven Eleven , and  Sin Fronteras , among others. Her collaborative community work facilitates an engagement with underrepresented voices and highlights intergenerational, multi-racial & multi-ethnic, gender & sexuality difference, and equity. Currently, in addition to advising in the MFA-Interdisciplinary Arts program at Goddard College, within the Indigenous/Decolonial Art focus, Jamie facilitates modern myth making for personal and collective restoration and healing.


FACULTY

Marie-Helene Bertino

Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of the novel 2 A.M. At The Cat's Pajamas and the story collection Safe as Houses, and was the 2017 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Fellow in Cork, Ireland. Her work has received The O. Henry Prize, The Pushcart Prize, The Iowa Short Fiction Award, The Mississippi Review Story Prize, and has been twice featured on NPR's Selected Shorts. In addition to IAIA, she teaches at NYU and The New School and lives in Brooklyn, where she is finishing a new novel and collection. For more information and film recs, please visit: www.mariehelenebertino.com.

Sherwin Bitsui

Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is Diné of the Todich'ii'nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl'izilani (Many Goats Clan). He is the author of Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press, 2003) and Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009). His recent honors include a 2011 Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship and a 2011 Native Arts & Culture Foundation Arts Fellowship. He is also the recipient of a 2010 PEN Open Book Award, an American Book Award, and a Whiting Writers Award. His third collection of poems, Dissolve, was released by Copper Canyon Press in the fall of 2018.

Kimberly Blaeser

Kimberly Blaeser is a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she teaches Creative Writing and Native American Literatures. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Apprenticed to Justice, Absentee Indians and Other Poems, and Trailing You. Blaeser is Anishinaabe, an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, and grew up on the White Earth Reservation in northwestern Minnesota. She is the editor of Stories Migrating Home: A Collection of Anishinaabe Prose and Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. Blaeser is currently at work on a collection of "Picto-Poems" combining her photographs and poetry. Her creative nonfiction, short stories, and scholarship have appeared widely in journals and anthologies.

Cherie Dimaline

Cherie Dimaline  (Georgian Bay Métis) is most noted for her 2017 novel  The Marrow Thieves,  which won the Governor General's Award for English-language children's literature at the 2017 Governor General's Awards and the 2017 Kirkus Prize in the young adult literature category. She won the award for Fiction Book of the Year at the Anskohk Aboriginal Literature Festival for her first novel,  Red Rooms.  She has since published the novel  The Girl Who Grew a Galaxy  and the short story collection  A Gentle Habit . She was founding editor of  Muskrat Magazine , was named the Emerging Artist of the Year at the Ontario Premier's Awards for Excellence in Arts in 2014, and became the first Aboriginal writer in residence for the Toronto Public Library.

Santee Frazier

Santee Frazier  is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. He holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts  and an MFA from Syracuse University . He is the recipient of various awards including: a Syracuse University Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship, The School for Advanced Research Indigenous Writer in Residence, and a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowship. His poems have appeared in American Poet, Narrative Magazine, Ontario Review, Ploughshares,  and other literary journals. His first collection of poetry, Dark Thirty,  was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2009.

Geoff Harris

Before becoming a freelance writer/producer, Geoff Harris was Vice President in charge of Story and Writer Development at NBC, where he worked for 12 years. He also has taught TV-writing intensive workshops for Native American and Latino writers, sponsored by ABC and NBC, as well as a Web Series writing class for MFA students at Cal State University, Los Angeles. Many of his workshop students have gone on to staff positions on TV shows. He blogs about television writing on the  Save the Cat!  website.

Pam Houston

Pam Houston is the author of the memoir,   Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country,  as well as two novels,   Contents May Have Shifted  and   Sight Hound, two collections of short stories,   Cowboys Are My Weakness and   Waltzing the Cat, and a collection of essays,   A Little More About Me, all published by W.W. Norton.  Her stories have been selected for volumes of   The O. Henry Awards,   The Pushcart Prize, Best American Travel Writing, and   Best American Short Stories of the Century  among other anthologies.  She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA Award for contemporary fiction, the Evil Companions Literary Award and several teaching awards.  She teaches in the Low Rez MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, is Professor of English at UC Davis, and co-founder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers. She lives at 9,000 feet above sea level near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.

Toni Jensen

Joan Naviyuk Kane

Joan Naviyuk Kane's books and chapbooks of prose and poetry include The Cormorant Hunter's Wife (2009), Hyperboreal (2013), The Straits (2015), Milk Black Carbon (2017), A Few Lines in the Manifest (2018), and Sublingual (2018). She is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, has won a Whiting Writer's Award, the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, the USA Projects Creative Vision Award, an American Book Award, the Alaska Literary Award, and fellowships from the Rasmuson Foundation, Alaska State Council on the Arts, Alaska Arts and Cultures Foundation, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the School for Advanced Research, and the Aninstantia Foundation. Kane was a Harvard National Scholar, and the recipient of a graduate Writing Fellowship from Columbia University's School of the Arts. Iñupiat with family from King Island and Mary's Igloo, she raises her children as a single mother in Anchorage, Alaska.

Chip Livingston

Chip Livingston is the mixed-blood Creek author of four books: two collections of poetry, Crow-Blue, Crow-Black (2012) and Museum of False Starts (2010); a collection of short stories and creative nonfiction, Naming Ceremony (2014); and a novel, Owls Don't Have to Mean Death (2017). His writing has received awards from Native Writers' Circle of the Americas, Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, and the AABB Foundation. Chip's writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, South Dakota Review, Cincinnati Review, and on the Academy of American Poets' and Poetry Foundation's websites. He has taught at the University of Colorado, University of the Virgin Islands, Brooklyn College, and Regis University.

Tommy Orange

Tommy Orange is a recent graduate from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is a 2014 MacDowell Fellow and a 2016 Writing by Writers Fellow. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He was born and raised in Oakland, California, and currently lives in Angels Camp, California.

James Thomas Stevens

James Thomas Stevens is an Associate Professor in the BFA Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. A member of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation in upstate New York, Stevens grew up between three reservations, the two where his grandparents came from, Akwesasne Territory and Six Nations Reserve, and the one where they settled, the Tuscarora Nation. Stevens earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University. He has taught at Haskell Indian Nations University and the State University of New York at Fredonia. Stevens has published seven books of poetry, including Combing the Snakes from His Hair, for which he was awarded a 2000 Whiting Writer's Award, A Bridge Dead in the Water, Mohawk/Samoa: Transmigrations (with Caroline Sinavaiana), Bulle/Chimere, and Tokinish. His work has been anthologized in works such as Genocide of the Mind, Visit Teepee Town, and Sovereign Bones.

Ken White

Ken White is a co-writer and co-producer of the feature film Winter in the Blood, adapted from James Welch's novel of the same name, and co-director and co-writer of the short film Universal VIP. He has written or co-written ten feature scripts.  His poetry has appeared in The Boston Review, The Tusculum Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Versal, Omniverse, Manor House Quarterly, Spork, Horsethief, and Poets.org, among others. He is the author of the books of poems, Eidolon (Peel Press 2013), and The Getty Fiend (Les Figues Press 2017), as well as the chapbook Middlemost Constantine (Spork 2017).