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Kimberly Blaeser is the former Wisconsin Poet Laureate and the founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets. Her six poetry collections include Ancient Light, a 2026 Science + Literature selected title; Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance; and Copper Yearning, winner of the Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award. Among her many awards and accomplishments, Blaeser received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of Americas in 2021. More about this author >
From the publisher:
Kimberly Blaeser’s singular stories center Anishinaabe characters who bring traditional tribal stories into contemporary experiences and break the stereotypes too often used to portray them. Here, we experience an Indigenous America inhabited by fancy dog contests, social protests, tree doctors, monsters, mosquitoes, and facial recognition software, all while blending, in the most exciting ways, the genre elements of magical realism, humor, horror, and speculative literary fiction.
At the heart of the collection is the story “Red Ants,” which opens on the rez between a jump rope chant and a test proctor’s smile, where two girls learn how easily a life can be reduced to numbers, and how quickly those numbers can tilt ordinary days into something mythic, unsettling, and deeply human. Blaeser delves into the complexities of kinship and survival, exploring how the smallest moments of cruelty or tenderness can shape generations.
