Thank you.
"Laura Tohe grew up in a Navajo Nation in Crystal,
New Mexico near the [? Chooshgai ?] Mountains where
she learned to speak, both Diné and English,
and where her grandmother was one of the first Diné teachers.
Tohe also grew up in a Native American boarding school,
an offshoot of the 19th century schools instituted
by General Richard Henry Pratt, whose maxim, kill the Indian,
save the man, is steeped into the boarding school culture.
Likewise, Tohe's histories are steeped
into the stories and poetry of No Parole Today, a collection
for which she received a Poetry of the Year Award
from the Word Craft Circle of Native Writers
and Storytellers.
Tohe is also the author of the chapbook Making Friends
With Water, which was translated into modern dance
and performed by The Moving Company in Omaha, Nebraska.
Her collaboration about Canyon de Chelly with astronomer
and photographer Stephen Strom is
forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press.
And she has co-edited Sister Nations,
an anthology of Native American women's
writing with poet Heid Erdrich.
In addition, Tohe has collaborated
with Hispanic and African-American artists
to write the play The Story of Me
commissioned by the Emmy Gifford Children's Theater.
She has academic degrees in psychology and English,
and is on the faculty of the Department of English
at Arizona State University.
In No Parole Today, Tohe compares the boarding school
experience with prison incarceration, the shared
submission or resistance to an inability to be sprung.
In a series of poems in the latter section of the book,
she unflinchingly explores death as the consequence
of suppressing the spirit of both
an individual and a culture.
And in "So I Blow Smoke in Her Face,"
the narrator finds reprieve and a path
to resistance in her memories of freedom
at the base of the [? Chooshgai ?] Mountains.
The sentences of No Parole Today are literally
broken in her penultimate poem, "Easter Sunday," which
tells in syntactic fragments the story of sustenance, a family
celebration.
And this is from the poem.
Ribs cooked.
Coffee boiled.
Fry bread stacked.
Stew boiled.
Stomach rumbling.
Mouth watery.
Anticipation.
Plates full.
Sit down.
Under tree.
Family together.
Give thanks.
We eat now.
The book returns two complete sentences in the final poem,
"At Mexican Spring," in which the narrator finally
sprung from the confines of her cultural struggle,
if not from the struggle itself.
Sees herself as a moment in time,
linking the ancient stories of first woman and first man
to the future stories of her children."
In this moment in time, we are lucky to have her here.
Please welcome Laura Tohe.