Kimberly Blaeser, writer, photographer, and scholar, is a past Wisconsin Poet Laureate. She is the author of five poetry collections, most recently the bi-lingual Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance (2020), Copper Yearning (2019), and Apprenticed to Justice. Blaeser edited the anthology Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry, and her scholarly study, Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition, was the first native-authored book-length study of an Indigenous author. An Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, Blaeser is an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation and grew up on the reservation. A Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, she is also an MFA faculty member for the low residency program in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. In 2024, she will be the Mackey Chair in Creative Writing at Beloit College and a Tatlock Fellow at Vassar College. Blaeser serves as an editorial board member for the “American Indian Lives” series of the University of Nebraska Press and for the “Native American Series” of Michigan State University Press. In 2021, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas. She lives in the woods and wetlands of Lyons Township, Wisconsin, and for portions of each year, in a water-access cabin near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota. Her poetry collection Ancient Light is forthcoming from University of Arizona’s Sun Track series in spring 2024.