About the Workshop

This workshop focuses on developing poetry-writing practices informed by Indigenous texts and on sharing knowledge through relational rigor. We will challenge the division of knowledge into separate fields and demonstrate how intellectual traditions evolve through connections to land, community, and individual artistic practice. In this way, verse making becomes an act of acknowledgment and reciprocity that positions the poem within a nexus of cultural and ecological understanding. Workshop members will write poems that test the boundaries of form and perception while experimenting with sound orchestration and tonal variation. Grounded in Indigenous philosophies and knowledge systems, our work will ask how poetic practice can respond to colonial processes while imagining other ways of being, knowing, and writing. Each workshop member should expect to write 3-4 new poems and receive generative feedback via workshop discussions. Expect to engage with 3-4 short readings by Indigenous authors.

About the Instructor

Santee Frazier, a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Syracuse University. His first collection of poems, Dark Thirty (2009), was published in the University of Arizona Press Sun Tracks series. Frazier’s honors include a Fall 2009 Lannan Residency Fellowship, 2011 School for Advanced Research Indigenous Writer in Residence, the 2014 Native Arts and Culture Foundation Literature Fellowship, and a 2024 Amant Siena Residency Fellowship. His second collection of poems, Aurum, was released in 2019 by The University of Arizona Press.