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I'll keep this brief.
Thank you for coming out.
It's really awesome to see you all.
I wanted to add that Ander Monson was also
my guide in organizing DVS, which I'll do for next year.
Yeah, I just want to introduce the readers
and get out of your way.
And thank you, Michael.
I feel your presence.
I'm so glad you're here among us, somewhere.
So Michael Wasson is the author of This American Ghost from
YesYes Books, 2017-- winner of the Vinyl 45 Chapbook prize,
and Swaddled Light, out with Copper Canyon Press--
2022.
His honors include a Ruth Lilly--
excuse me, and Dorothy Sergeant Rosenberg Poetry Fellow,
and a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist
Fellow in literature.
He is nimiipuu from the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho.
Wasson's work witnesses state-sanctioned violence,
the colonial legacy of erasure, and the voids
left when one is left vulnerable and overcome.
His poems illuminate with honesty,
patiently contemplating their imagery and subjects.
I'm just going to go ahead and introduce Jennifer
as well so we can just roll through with poetry.
Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author
of three books of poetry--
Leaving Tulsa, which is out with Sun Tracks in 2013,
Bright Raft in the Afterweather-- also
Sun Tracks, 2018, and most recently,
The Maybe-Bird from The Song Cave that came out last year.
She's also the recipient of an NEA Creative Writing
Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency
Fellowship, and a Wallace Stegner
Fellow in poetry at Stanford.
She lives in San Francisco.
Foerster's work is ever-changing and exploratory.
Each of her poetry collections presents a strong and deft
poetics.
Ever lyrical and polyglot, her poems
show us the Muskogee thought, history,
and language at the center of the US's violent and amnesiac
past.
So please welcome Michael Wasson and then Jennifer Foerster.
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