An Evening of Native Spoken Word Artists & Poets

Please note the time for this event - 5:30pm

This will be an in-store presentation and we will live stream the evening on Zoom, please register to watch here.

If you are attending in person, for your safety and those around you, we will be requiring all audience members wear a mask.

Please call the store to order any of the presenters works - (505) 988-4226

Boderra Joe, Desert Teeth

Landscape and perspective flood Boderra Joe’s Desert Teeth, a collection of poetry that unfolds the wakening shift of scarred violence affecting native people and land for centuries, where alcohol and uranium, two of many elements, continue to take the lives of our relatives. Each poem lingers and holds the face of the reader through deep explorations of grief, family, identity, and love. These poems walk out on their own with the memories and images that flicker by, like a thought too frightened to talk. The vulnerability and rawness in each poem expands the perspective, longing for closure, acceptance, and understanding. Each poem lives in language and landscape, all while the haunting violence interferes. Beauty has its way of revealing itself.

Boderra Joe is a poet, journalist, and photographer from Twin Lakes, New Mexico, on the Navajo Nation. She is Diné of the Folded Arms Clan, born for the Water’s Edge Clan. She is the author of the poetry collection Desert Teeth (Abalone Mountain Press, 2022). Her work can also be found in the first issue of the New Mexico Poetry Anthology, Yellow Medicine Review, Tribal College Journal, Mass Poetry, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA and BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). She serves as the Program Coordinator in the MFA Creative Writing Department at IAIA. She is the recipient of the Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po) Fellowship, an Alpha Chi National Honor Society Scholar, a Truman Capote Scholar, Idyllwild Scholar, Naropa University Scholar, and a recipient of the Bosque Redondo Memorial Artists-in-their-Residence Fellowship. She resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Darcie Little Badger, A Snake Falls to Earth

A Snake Falls to Earth is a breathtaking work of Indigenous futurism. Darcie Little Badger draws on traditional Lipan Apache storytelling structure to weave another unforgettable tale of monsters, magic, and family. Nina is a Lipan girl in our world. She's always felt there was something more out there. She still believes in the old stories. Oli is a cottonmouth kid, from the land of spirits and monsters. Like all cottonmouths, he's been cast from home. He's found a new one on the banks of the bottomless lake. Nina and Oli have no idea the other exists. But a catastrophic event on Earth, and a strange sickness that befalls Oli's best friend, will drive their worlds together in ways they haven't been in centuries.

Darcie Little Badger is a Lipan Apache writer with a PhD in oceanography. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Elatsoe, was featured in Time Magazine as one of the best 100 fantasy books of all time. Elatsoe also won the Locus award for Best First Novel and is a Nebula, Ignyte, and Lodestar finalist. Her second fantasy novel, A Snake Falls to Earth, received a Nebula Award and a Newbery Honor and is on the National Book Awards longlist.

Amber McCrary, Electric Deserts!

Electric Deserts! is desert-gothic, soul-baring, sensual, reveling in the red dirt beneath fingernails, claiming self and culture. Electric Deserts! is Amber's first poetry chapbook. Amber's hope is that her chapbook will speak to young indigenous folks who may feel lost between cultures.

Amber McCrary is Diné poet, zinester and feminist. She is Red House Clan born for Mexican people. Originally from Shonto, Arizona and raised in Flagstaff, Arizona. She earned her BA from Arizona State University in Political Science with a minor in American Indian Studies. She received her MFA in creative writing with an emphasis in poetry at Mills College. She recently released a chapbook of poetry titled, Electric Deserts! (Tolsun Books). She currently resides in Mesa, Arizona. McCrary is also the owner and founder of Abalone Mountain Press, a press dedicated to publishing Indigenous voices. She is also a board member of the Northern Arizona Book Festival.

Kinsale Drake, hummingbird heart

“hummingbird heart” is a zine about inversion of the cishet white, male gaze, alienation, desire, loneliness, queerness, and other “ness”es.

Kinsale Drake (Diné) is a writer and narrator whose work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Yale Literary Magazine, TIME, New World Coming (Torrey House Press, 2021), her zine Hummingbird Heart (Abalone Mountain Press, 2022), and elsewhere. She is an Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow, and the recent winner of the Academy of American Poets/Sean T. Lannan Poetry Prize, and the Young Native Playwrights Award. She has also been recognized as a National Student Poet, the nation’s highest honor for youth poets presenting original work, and one of Time’s People Changing How We See the World. Her work is forthcoming in Poetry Online, Poets.org, diode poetry journal, The Languages of our Love (Abalone Mountain Press, 2022), and elsewhere.