Kimberly Blaeser, founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets and past Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is the author of works in several genres. Her six poetry collections include Ancient Light (2024), Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance (2020), and Copper Yearning (2019). Blaeser edited Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry, wrote the monograph Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition on the work of fellow White Earth writer, and served as contributing editor for When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020). Her writing is included in over 100 anthologies and translated into multiple languages including French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, and Hungarian. Her photographs, picto-poems, and ekphrastic pieces have appeared in exhibits such as “Visualizing Sovereignty,” and “No More Stolen Sisters.” 

An Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, she is an enrolled member of White Earth Nation and grew up on the reservation. Blaeser’s honors include the 2025 Poets & Writers’ Writer for Writers Award, Zona Gale Short Fiction Award from the Council of Wisconsin Writers, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. She is a Professor Emerita at UW–Milwaukee and an MFA faculty member at Institute of American Indian Arts. Recent projects include the curation of a “Water Portfolio” for Prairie Schooner and an “Indigenous #LanguageBack through Poetry” project.