"This collection is an entrance into that part of "America" without which there is no real America and not even a real United States. It is a bravura collection, a long needed Anthology of those antediluvian descendants of the Western Hemisphere."
Amiri Baraka
“Sing: Indigenous Poetry of the Americas” showcases writing of American Indian poets from the North to South in the Western Hemisphere, giving us readers a rare and direct connection into the complexity of their lives and thinking today.
—Carla Blank, co-editor, “PowWow: Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience—Short Fiction from Then to Now”
“Many of the poems in this ambitious collection remind us why we read poetry at all—to be returned to the elemental, to relish the beauty of repetition and variation, and to hear the cries of singular voices, here marginalized because of their native culture but also because of the daring announcement of their individuality”
—Billy Collins
Sometimes, an anthology will remind us of just how much the poet as editor can bring to the conception and execution of a work, turning it from a mere compilation of random poems, to a wonderfully conceived and eloquently expressed grand poem of multiple voices, that is marked by all the qualities we want in the best poems: passion, risk, daring, grace, imagination, urgency, compassion, visionary power, and profound homage to the grounding of tradition. In what can only be called a historical anthology of indigenous poets from the Americas, Allison Hedge Coke has given us, in Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, a stunning gift that is splendid because of the brilliance of the individual and eclectic poems collected, but richer for the coherent collective song that the anthology represents. This is a big fat book of endless pleasures that helps us to re-imagine America!
—Kwame Dawes, Editor of Prairie Schooner
From Canada to Chile (and Columbia, Mexico, Guatemala, the U.S., Ecuador, Venezuela, and Peru too), in English, Spanish, Quecha, Wayuu, Mapuche, Comanche and more, the range of voices represented here is astounding.
Sing celebrates the life and breadth of Indigenous American poetry. This long-awaited anthology is a beautiful and necessary treasure.
—Camille T. Dungy, editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and author of Smith Blue
I will sing this book to my children. I will give this book to my cadre, the ones that dreamt it in the sixties when they journeyed thousands of miles in search of it. And I will pour it over my face – to behold its Victory Dance and “ghost roads awakened,” its salmon climb and “hugging duendes,” its songs of dignity and its split moons sewn back into one – each voice tasking the cosmos, dissolving borders and smoothing all beings from the blood and breathe to the ink-song. Here, Hedge-Coke calls us to the new cycle of Américas indigenous poetry. A monumental triumph.
- Juan Felipe Herrera,
Author of Half of the World in Light, New and Selected Poems.
NANCY MOREJÓN / BLURB SOBRE
SING: INDIGENOUS POETRY OF THE AMERICAS
COMPILED BY ALLISON HEDGE COKE
Sing... es como un ánfora de plumas colocada sobre las cumbres de una expresión tanto oral como literaria que representada en varios idiomas --originarios o modernos--, convoca a un ánima sola, hechizándonos con esa sensibilidad sobre la que se han construido un carácter, una identidad y una voluntad de belleza presente en cada gesto de afirmación y resistencia ante sus más antiguos y fieros depredadores. En manos de la poeta Allison Hedge Coke, aquí palpita el canto, la música y la mejor poesía de los pueblos indígenas de las Américas.
One of the most essential anthologies of recent years, Sing is rare in scope and insight. The poems found here are a testament to the power of indigenaity and the urgency of our current moment. This book sings the hemisphere into glorious fullness, teaching us the connections between us, and the great schisms between our knowledge and our actions.
Matthew Shenoda, author of Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone
What a diverse feast of poetry! Indigenous poets from Peru, Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico and Canada as well as the United States serve up delicious unforgettable poems. A good number of the poems are composed in indigenous languages which make this collection especially valuable.
—Leslie Marmon Silko
Allison Hedge Coke has assembled a multilingual feast of songs, bringing together established and emerging indigenous poets in South, Central, and North America. With poems presented in their original languages, this anthology is a groundbreaking collection.
—Arthur Sze, author, The Ginkgo Light
Panoramic, wise, palpable texts of beauty and vitality. This is what the world needs to wake itself up to its own better self and imagination.
Anne Waldman
The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Naropa University
Editor and poet Allison Hedge Coke assembles this multilingual collection of Indigenous American poetry, joining voices old and new in songs of witness and reclamation. Unprecedented in scope, Sing gathers more than eighty poets from across the Americas, covering territory that stretches from Alaska to Chile, and features familiar names like Sherwin Bitsui, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Lee Maracle, and Simon Ortiz alongside international poets—both emerging and acclaimed—from regions underrepresented in anthologies.
They write from disparate zones and parallel experience, from lands of mounded earthwork long-since paved, from lands of ancient ball courts and the first great cities on the continents, from places of cold, from places of volcanic loam, from zones of erased history and ongoing armed conflict, where “postcolonial” is not an academic concept but a lived reality. As befits a volume of such geographical inclusivity, many poems here appear in multiple languages, translated by fellow poets and writers like Juan Felipe Herrera and Cristina Eisenberg.
Hedge Coke’s thematic organization of the poems gives them an added resonance and continuity, and readers will appreciate the story of the genesis of this project related in Hedge Coke’s deeply felt introduction, which details her experiences as an invited performer at several international poetry festivals. Sing is a journey compelled by the exploration of kinship and the desire for songs that open “pathways of return.”
Great sale for the memoir:
Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer contact:
"Razor-sharp."—Chris Rubich, Billings Gazette
Off-Season City Pipe Drawing on her background as a tobacco sharecropper, factory worker, and fisherwoman, Hedge Coke fills the void of Native American working-class literature with poems as vivid in their telling as they are powerful in their ethos. Off-Season City Pipe lyrically articulates the stark contrast between an ancestry whose strong work ethic, manual skills, and environmental stewardship defined their communities, but whose present circumstances have forced so many into poverty, performing work that fails to provide sustenance for the land or its people.
Listed on Poetry Foundation Bestsellers, in the U.S., from time to time.
Dog Road Woman "Allison Hedge Coke is a skilled, spirited, young poet who is transforming and honing her social and personal experience and reflection to speak with the voice of a whole people. This is a very formidable task, but it is, finally, the work we’ve chosen. She’s up to it." - Amiri Baraka
In Dog Road Woman, an autobiographical sketch of a contemporary mixed-blood native life, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke weaves the shapes and patterns of her heritage into a magnificent tapestry of prayer, story and song. Dog Road Woman is winner of a 1998 American Book Award and a finalist for the 1998 Patterson Poetry Prize.
Coffee House Press
79 Thirteenth Avenue NE,
Suite 110
Minneapolis, MN 55413
molly@coffeehousepress.org
Phone: 612.338.0125
Fax: 612.338.4004
WC Writer of the Year Award Winning Labor Poetry from Coffee House Press [poetry]
Drawing on her background as a tobacco sharecropper, factory worker, and fisherwoman, Hedge Coke fills the void of Native American working-class literature with poems as vivid in their telling as they are powerful in their ethos. Off-Season City Pipe lyrically articulates the stark contrast between an ancestry whose strong work ethic, manual skills, and environmental stewardship defined their communities, but whose present circumstances have forced so many into poverty, performing work that fails to provide sustenance for the land or its people.
"A welcome new voice in American Poetry." - Jessica Hagedorn
"Allison Hedge Coke is a skilled, spirited, young poet who is transforming and honing her social and personal experience and reflection to speak with the voice of a whole people. This is a very formidable task, but it is, finally, the work we’ve chosen. She’s up to it." - Amiri Baraka
In Dog Road Woman, an autobiographical sketch of a contemporary mixed-blood native life, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke weaves the shapes and patterns of her heritage into a magnificent tapestry of prayer, story and song. Dog Road Woman is winner of a 1998 American Book Award and a finalist for the 1998 Patterson Poetry Prize.
Hedge Coke recounts surviving domestic violence, racism, addiction, and an extraordinary number of challenges. By drawing upon a variety of poetic and prosaic forms, she simulates and transforms the rhythms and sounds of her people. Dog Road Woman is a sublime presentation of the strength, beauty, and spirit of the nations.
To order Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer AIROS Native American Calling Book of the Month from the University of Nebraska Press [memoir] [Native memoir] [North American Memoir]
It is a rare pleasure to unleash beauty upon the ever-tragic world, an exception to the plagued misfortune of greed, despair, and injury. Though elements of colonization do present certain challenges and malady to a natural world inhabited for tens of thousands of years by peoples steeped in ideologies, practical and philosophic systems, they do not overcome the lingual sensibilities and prowess of the poets representing the areas of the planet present in this text. Instead the poets overcome the intrusion.
From baleen row, razor clam edge, rabid willow ptarmigan plume, to white buds of plumeria, gardenia, lei, shaded grave of dried lauhala and graying niu, fertile Pacific essence swells these poems into hummock ice knolls, into layers and layers of white sea laps rolling, into mindfulness, consideration, climate care—belonging.
From ulu, to cane knife, where aurora’s green vein bleeds blue and tangles into indigo or green-robed mauna combs t? stalks, palms, kukui, and pines. From Barrow to Waihe’e, tethered and hammered through wild among dark branches and snared by voices, these poems harbor whale and seal oil burning to bring sustenance to a reader’s search for light and with them carry us into a seafaring world of rich embrace. Spectacular, immediate, these beaches and beeches along the shores provide a tactile relationship made immense in their stream-crafted images.
Effigies juxtaposes the distinctive voices and visions of four emerging poets — dg nanouk okpik, Cathy Rexford, Brandy Nalani McDougall, and Mahealani Perez-Wendt. In drawing from their Native Alaskan and Native Hawaiian cultures and histories, the poems in this book are not an assemblage but a living force and create an intricate, haunting weave.
Arthur Sze
What a shape-shifting moment, this release of four lush and necessary voices into the open air. Linked by blood and fevered lyric, dg nanouk okpik, Cathy Tagnak Rexford, Brandy Nalani McDougall and Mahealani Perez-Wendt offer up unapologetic and unflinching lessons that, as okpik says in the astonishing "Corpse Whale," shove "sinew back into the threaded bones of the land." Individually, each of these voices would be a revelation. Collectively, they're a revolution.
Patricia Smith
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke was born between paternal oratory and sudden maternal madness; somewhere north of the condor and south of raven. Crow sometimes cawed morning into malady's mixture, pouring song and hack into bleating skies, swirling sunrise and set. Once, high over the Arctic, she witnessed the pounding lights hammer horizon. Since that time her rendezvous with realtime has been a real ride.
Hedge Coke is a MacDowell, Black Earth Institute Think-Tank, Hawthornden Castle, Weymouth Center, and Center for Great Plains Research Fellow, and holds the Distinguished Paul W. Reynolds and Clarice Kingston Reynolds Endowed Chair in English as an Associate Professor of Poetry and Writing at the University of Nebraska, Kearney. She is a core faculty in the University of Nebraska MFA Program and Visiting Faulty of the MFA Intensive Programs at University of California, Palm Desert and Naropa University. Her books include: Dog Road Woman, American Book Award, Coffee House Press, 1997; The Year of the Rat, chapbook, Grimes Press, 2000; Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer, AIROS Book-of-the-Month, University of Nebraska Press, 2004; Off-Season City Pipe, Wordcraft Writer of the Year for Poetry, Coffee House Press, 2005; Blood Run, Wordcraft Writer of the Year for Poetry, Salt Publications, UK 2006-US 2007; and To Topos Ahani, Oregon State University, 2007.
Guests for No Limits Conference & World Affairs Conference UNK. 2011.
Allison Hedge Coke has been an invitational performer in international poetry festivals in Medellin, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Canada, and Jordan and foreign visiting professional in poetry and writing, Shandong University in Wei Hai, China. She is a Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities, MacDowell Colony for Artists, Black Earth Institute Think Tank, Hawthornden Castle, and Center for Great Plains Research Fellow, is a former National Endowment for the Humanities Appointment Distinguished Visiting Professor at Hartwick College, and holds the Distinguished Paul W. Reynolds and Clarice Kingston Reynolds Endowed Chair in Poetry as an Associate Professor of Poetry and Writing at the University of Nebraska, Kearney where she directs the Reynolds Reading Series and Sandhill Crane Migration Retreat. She is core faculty in the University of Nebraska MFA Program and Visiting Faulty of the MFA Intensive Programs at University of California, Palm Desert and Naropa University, and a 2008 Paul Hanly Furfey Endowed Lecturer. Her books include: Dog Road Woman, American Book Award, Coffee House Press, 1997; The Year of the Rat, chapbook, Grimes Press, 2000; Rock Ghost, Willow, Deer, AIROS Book-of-the-Month, University of Nebraska Press, 2004; Off-Season City Pipe, Wordcraft Writer of the Year for Poetry, Coffee House Press, 2005; Blood Run, Wordcraft Writer of the Year for Poetry, Salt Publications, UK 2006-US 2007; To Topos Ahani: Indigenous American Poetry, Journal Issue of the Year Award (ed.), Oregon State University, 2007; and Effigies, (ed.), Salt Publications, 2009. She has edited five other volumes. Her long poem "The Year of the Rat" is currently being made into a ballet through collaboration with Brent Michael Davids, composer. Recent literary publications include Connecticut Review, Prometeo Memories, Akashic Books, and Black Renaissance Noire. Recent photography publications include Connecticut Review, Future Earth Magazine and Digital Poetics. She has also authored a full-length play Icicles, numerous monologues, and has worked in theater, television, and film. Hedge Coke has been awarded several state and regional artistic and literary grants, fellowships, and tours; multiple excellence in teaching awards, including the King Chavez Parks Award; a Sioux Falls Mayor's Award for Literary Excellence; a National Mentor of the Year, a Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers Award; has served on several state, community, and national boards in the arts, a housing board, as a Delegate, in the United Nations Women in Peacemaking Conference, Joan B. Kroc Center for Peace and Justice, University of San Diego, and as a United Nations Presenting Speaker (with James Thomas Stevens, Mohawk Poet), Facilitator, and Speaker Nominator for the only Indigenous Literature Panel of the Indigenous Peoples Human Rights Forum. For many years she has worked with incarcerated and underserved Indigenous youth and youth of color mentorship programs and served as a court official in Indian youth advocacy and CASA. Hedge Coke is editing the Platte Valley Review and two book series of emerging Indigenous writing (Salt Publishing and Red Hen Press). She is of Huron, Cherokee, French Canadian, and Portuguese descent and came of age working fields, waters, and working in factories.
Selected Recent Activities:
*August 3-6, 2010. CYCC Custer State Park Incarcerated Youth Residency
*July 17-24, 2010. Nebraska Low Res MFA Program Summer Residency.
*June Third Week 2010. Naropa University Summer Writing Program Residency (MFA/BFA).
*June 15, 2010. SD Prison Workshop. Yankton, South Dakota.
*June 6-9, 2010. Filming with Southern Spaces in North Carolina.
*June 2-14, 2010. Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, Resident Fellow, Southern Pines, North Carolina.
*April 30 – May 2, 2010. Invitational Field Symposium, “DRAGONFLY EYES: Multiple Ways to Envision the Future.” H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest in the Oregon Cascades. The symposium will bring together distinguished writers, architects, artists, humanities scholars, land managers, social scientists and ecologists to find ways to bring literary, artistic, and moral imagination together with the best empirical science to more fully imagine future scenarios of landscape change. The Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word, the Andrews Experimental Forest Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program, and the U.S. Forest Service. You can find more information about the Spring Creek Project and the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest on the websites:http://springcreek.oregonstate.edu/ and http://www.fsl.orst.edu/lter/
.++
*April 7-10, 2009, AWP. Activities include: Honoring the Sandhill Crane Literary Fest Panel, Women Writing the West, Prose Poem Reading/Talk, and coordinator Indigenous Writer Caucus -- also book table for newly released Platte Valley Review and Nebraska Low Res MFA Program (Uno?UNK joint program) AWP AWP
*Washington Pavilion, Sioux Falls, SD. Poetry Opening, P3 Exhibit, December 4th, 2010-February 28th, 2010.
*November 14th, 2009, Nebraska Book Festival.
Professor Hedge Coke will also be reading at the Nebraska Book Festival on Saturday, 14 November, from 3:15-3:45 in the Auditorium of the Nebraska State Historical Museum, 15th and P Streets, Lincoln.
Reading sponsored by Native American Studies, the Department of English, and the Place Conscious Literature Group, UNL
*November 13th, 2009, University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
BAILEY LIBRARY, 227 ANDREWS
RECEPTION AND BOOK SIGNING TO FOLLOW
Allison A. Hedge Coke is a noted poet and nature writer whose books include Dog Road Woman (1997), Off-Season City Pipe (2005), Blood Run (2007), the memoir Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer (2004), and Effigies: An Anthology of New Indigenous Writing, Pacific Rim (2009). Her work is strongly influenced by her Cherokee and Huron heritage, and reflects her lifelong love and observation of the physical, animal, and plant worlds around us.
Visit/Reading. Dr. Fran Kaye, Organizer.
*October 29-31, 2009, University of South Dakota, John R. Milton Writer's Conference, Featured Writer. John R. Milton Writer's Conference
*November 4th, 2009, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Missouri Valley Reading Series, Featured Reading. Missouri Valley Reading Series
September 24, 2009
Keynote “Many Souths: Remembering, Sustaining, Creating.”
Eighth Biennial Southern Women Writers Conference
Berry College
Mount Berry, GA
http://www.berry.edu/academics/humanities/english/swwc2009/bios.asp
Eastern Carolina University-North Carolina September 25-26, 2009
So Lit Conf
Invitational Photography Gallery Show, ECU & Pitt County Arts Council at Emerge Gallery
Summer-Fall
Ann Arbor, Reading with Jan Beatty at Shaman's Drum March 26th, 2009
Shaman Durm Bookstore
Women's Month University of Idaho March 2-3, 2009
U Idaho
Hosting-UNK Crane Festival March 14-25, 2009
Fredy Chicangana, Sherwin Bitsui, Cristina Eisenberg, Linda Hogan, LeAnne Howe, Laura Tohe, and Wang Ping.
Sandhill Crane Conference
World Affairs Conference Moderator March 9, 2009
WAC UNK
Environmental Policy, Macalester College, Panel with Will Steger, Mark Dayton, and Allison Hedge Coke, Organized by Wang Ping, February 18
Policy
Who Speaks for the Dead, Western Virginia University, Panel, February 17
WVU
October 11th, 2008, Bowery Poetry Club Reading with LaTasha Diggs
September 26-28, 2008, SD Book Festival
September 25, Host, Carol Moldaw Reading Performance
September 17, Northeast Community College, Reading
September 16, Wayne State University, Reading
September 11, Host, Arthur Sze Reading Performance
Other Tassels:
Hosting:
Reynolds Series:
Spring 2010 Honoring the Sandhill Crane Festival & Literary Retreat and National Poetry Day Readings: Honoring the Sandhill Crane Festival III Lee Ann Roripaugh,Travis Hedge Coke, Lise Erdrich, Sherwin Bitsui, Quincy Troupe, Margaret Porter Troupe, LeAnne Howe, Greg Kuzma, Greg Kosmicki, Don Welch
Reynolds Series March 2008 Included the Honoring the Sandhill Crane Tribute Retreat. Hosted: Wang Ping author of numerous award winning books, includingthe Last Communist Virgin, LeAnne Howe, author of Evidence of Red, Shell Shaker, and Mikko Kings, exemplary poet Hugo Jamioy Juagibioy, oraliterature weaver Aty Janay, the prolific poet James Thomas Stevens who most recently authoredA Bridge Dead in Water and Janet McAdams Island of Lost Luggage and Feral. Ramon Palomares, Fredy Chicangana, and Jack Collom were unable to come at this time. March 7-14th during the 40 to 60,000,000 year annual apex of the Sandhill Crane migration to the Kearney, Nebraska area, where 600,000 cranes are expected to arrive in this season, these poets and writers came to retreat here with the migration and performed numerous presentations for UNK and the general public.
I am a descendent of the mound-builders. I say, Praise to the book that praises this mystery and beauty and history. Allison Hedge Coke is a woman who has fallen deep into the earth world and reveals its hidden truths. She is a mesmerizing artist, with work based on research chanted into poetry.
Linda Hogan
These poems bear witness to a difficult age, an age built on a spiral of earthliness. They make an honoring song for the earth. This honoring song carries joy, sadness, fury and grief. We need this gift, these poems.
Joy Harjo, Mvksoke poet and musician
“Blood Run” the name of an ancient site in an eastern corner of the US state South Dakota. Hundreds of mounds were built here by Native American Plains peoples and cultures, a thousand years before the arrival of the white intruders (e.g., settlers, military). The poems revive the history of the sites at “Blood Run” giving profound voice to humans, animals, plants and structures, also with political-ecological hope for the future to preserve ancient spiritual places.
Bernhard Widder
Purity in Poetry! Allison Hedge Coke has captured the true essence of the way of life, celebration of life enjoyed by all the many nations of Indigenous people(s) living here on our Makoce (land) which all indigenous nations call in unison Mother Earth. All Our Relations (Mitakuye Oyasin) is eloquently spoken and expressed by Allison. It is a true honor to have a kola (friend) a true Indigenous winyan (lady), to hold, keep and express the true spirit of all nations. I AM HONORED.
Irwin Sharp Fish, Sr.2003-04 NIEA Teacher of the Year
Dog Road WomanPoems by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
"These are songs of righteous anger and utter beauty." - Joy Harjo
"A welcome new voice in American Poetry." - Jessica Hagedorn
"Allison Hedge Coke is a skilled, spirited, young poet who is transforming and honing her social and personal experience and reflection to speak with the voice of a whole people. This is a very formidable task, but it is, finally, the work we’ve chosen. She’s up to it." - Amiri Baraka
In Dog Road Woman, an autobiographical sketch of a contemporary mixed-blood native life, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke weaves the shapes and patterns of her heritage into a magnificent tapestry of prayer, story and song. Dog Road Woman is winner of a 1998 American Book Award and a finalist for the 1998 Patterson Poetry Prize.
Hedge Coke recounts surviving domestic violence, racism, addiction, and an extraordinary number of challenges. By drawing upon a variety of poetic and prosaic forms, she simulates and transforms the rhythms and sounds of her people. Dog Road Woman is a sublime presentation of the strength, beauty, and spirit of the nations.
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, of Huron, Tsa la gi, French Canadian and Portuguese descent, grew up in North Carolina, Canada, Texas, and throughout the Great Plains. She is the author of the American Book Award-winning debut poetry collection Dog Road Woman, the new Off-Season City Pipe, and the memoir Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer. Instrumental in creating Native American and incarcerated youth mentorship programs throughout the country, Hedge Coke now teaches at Naropa University.
A. A. Hedge Coke Walk over Esk 1
A. A. Hedge Coke Drummond's Place
Full Month Long (May 24-June 21, 2008) Hawthornden Castle Writer Fellowship Residency.
A. A. Hedge Coke Bamboo 1 China July 2-July 16, 2008
A. A. Hedge Coke Fruit Bat 1
2008 Indigenous Poets & Writers Retreat, Soul Mountain Retreat, co-hosting with LeAnne Howe. Courtesy of the phenomenal poet and human being, Marilyn Nelson and her working group: Rhonda Ward and Giddeon, LeAnne Howe, Lara Mann, Santee Frazier, and I are all taking in the beauty of Old Lyme Connecticut here where dozens of turtles rise up and down the pond waters, split by skeins of Canadian Geese, alongside lush banks huddled over by an always eager marmot and several early robins. The air is ripe with poetry, writing, and much needed rest and community support. Santee has proven his worth as a chef as well as poet. LeAnne is providing great insight, intelligence, and terrific comic relief. Lara is ever-present with her Sedaris in-hand for belly laughs to carry her through the rigorous poetry drive she has committed to. We read in Central Gallery in Old Saybrook with Rhonda on Saturday. LeAnne's blog http://mikokings.wordpress.com/ has a photo and updates.
With what is happening in the world, with the weather turned on its head, people in turmoil and the over drawn-out campaign primary madness, this break is welcome welcome.
AWP Conference, two panels, February 11th-14th, 2009
BLACK EARTH INSTITUTE THINK TANK PANEL:
Patricia Monaghan (Chair), Annie Finch, Allison Hedge Coke, Linda Hogan, Richard Cambridge, Deborah Holton
Event Title #2: The Poet as Oracle. Oratory
Scheduled Day: Thursday, February 12
Scheduled Time: 12:00-1:15 pm
Scheduled Room: Chicago Hilton, Grand Ballroom
Title: Indigenous AWP Poets & Writers Read for the Chicago American Indian Center
Date & time: February 12th, 2009. 6-8:00 PM
Location: Chicago American Indian Center, Trickster Gallery
http://www.aic-chicago.org/trickster.html
www.aic-chicago.org
1630 W Wilson Ave
Chicago, IL 60640
(773) 275-5871
Free and open to the public
AWP Saturday February 14
Waldorf, 3rd Floor S167
Brain Power: Processing the Beautiful and the Horrendous. (Allison Hedge Coke, Peggy Shumaker, Linda Hogan, & Mira Bartok) Brain injury presents uniquely significant challenges to creative process, yet affords uniquely stimulating conceptualized possibility in a simultaneous manner. Each of the panelists included on this panel have cajoled memoir and life-story from revelations made apparent through their climb up and down the noodled rungs of brain trauma or neurological dilemma. We will consider the work presenting panelists and of Maxine Kumin and Floyd Skloot who support this panel.
Environmental Policy Panel February 18th 4pm
Ruth Stricker Dayton Campus Center
1600 Grand Ave.
St. Paul, MN
651.696.6249
http://www.citypages.com/events/environmental-policy-forum-will-steger-mark-dayton-allison-hedge-coke-763087/
Allison Hedge Coke has been an invitational performer in international poetry festivals in Medellin, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Canada, and Jordan and foreign visiting professional in poetry and writing, Shandong University in Wei Hai, China. She is a Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities, MacDowell Colony for Artists, Black Earth Institute Think Tank, Hawthornden Castle, and Center for Great Plains Research Fellow, is a former National Endowment for the Humanities Appointment Distinguished Visiting Professor at Hartwick College, and holds the Distinguished Paul W. Reynolds and Clarice Kingston Reynolds Endowed Chair in Poetry as an Associate Professor of Poetry and Writing at the University of Nebraska, Kearney where she directs the Reynolds Reading Series and Sandhill Crane Migration Retreat. She is core faculty in the University of Nebraska MFA Program and Visiting Faulty of the MFA Intensive Programs at University of California, Palm Desert and Naropa University, and a 2008 Paul Hanly Furfey Endowed Lecturer. Her books include: Dog Road Woman, American Book Award, Coffee House Press, 1997; The Year of the Rat, chapbook, Grimes Press, 2000; Rock Ghost, Willow, Deer, AIROS Book-of-the-Month, University of Nebraska Press, 2004; Off-Season City Pipe, Wordcraft Writer of the Year for Poetry, Coffee House Press, 2005; Blood Run, Wordcraft Writer of the Year for Poetry, Salt Publications, UK 2006-US 2007; To Topos Ahani: Indigenous American Poetry, Journal Issue of the Year Award (ed.), Oregon State University, 2007; and Effigies, (ed.), Salt Publications, 2009. She has edited five other volumes. Her long poem "The Year of the Rat" is currently being made into a ballet through collaboration with Brent Michael Davids, composer. Recent literary publications include Connecticut Review, Prometeo Memories, Akashic Books, and Black Renaissance Noire. Recent photography publications include Connecticut Review, Future Earth Magazine and Digital Poetics. She has also authored a full-length play Icicles, numerous monologues, and has worked in theater, television, and film. Hedge Coke has been awarded several state and regional artistic and literary grants, fellowships, and tours; multiple excellence in teaching awards, including the King Chavez Parks Award; a Sioux Falls Mayor's Award for Literary Excellence; a National Mentor of the Year, a Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers Award; has served on several state, community, and national boards in the arts, a housing board, as a Delegate, in the United Nations Women in Peacemaking Conference, Joan B. Kroc Center for Peace and Justice, University of San Diego, and as a United Nations Presenting Speaker (with James Thomas Stevens, Mohawk Poet), Facilitator, and Speaker Nominator for the only Indigenous Literature Panel of the Indigenous Peoples Human Rights Forum. For many years she has worked with incarcerated and underserved Indigenous youth and youth of color mentorship programs and served as a court official in Indian youth advocacy and CASA. Hedge Coke is editing the Platte Valley Review and two book series of emerging Indigenous writing (Salt Publishing and Red Hen Press). She is Huron and Cherokee, French Canadian and Portuguese descent and came of age working fields, waters, and working in factories.
Also, to order downloadable podcasts of both past and future Lannan programs (including outstanding literary reading performances as well as phenomenal author interviews):
To order To Topos AHANI: Indigenous American Poetry Western Hemisphere contributors from the Arctic to Antarctic Circles (Inuit to Mapuche) from Oregon State University, Guest Edited by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke [poetry] Winner, Wordcraft Journal of the Year, Editing.
To order Blood Run Free Verse Play from Salt Publications UK/USA [poetry] Winner, Wordcraft Writer of the Year, Poetry.
WC Writer of the Year Award Winning Labor Poetry from Coffee House Press [poetry]
Drawing on her background as a tobacco sharecropper, factory worker, and fisherwoman, Hedge Coke fills the void of Native American working-class literature with poems as vivid in their telling as they are powerful in their ethos. Off-Season City Pipe lyrically articulates the stark contrast between an ancestry whose strong work ethic, manual skills, and environmental stewardship defined their communities, but whose present circumstances have forced so many into poverty, performing work that fails to provide sustenance for the land or its people.
"A welcome new voice in American Poetry." - Jessica Hagedorn
"Allison Hedge Coke is a skilled, spirited, young poet who is transforming and honing her social and personal experience and reflection to speak with the voice of a whole people. This is a very formidable task, but it is, finally, the work we’ve chosen. She’s up to it." - Amiri Baraka
In Dog Road Woman, an autobiographical sketch of a contemporary mixed-blood native life, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke weaves the shapes and patterns of her heritage into a magnificent tapestry of prayer, story and song. Dog Road Woman is winner of a 1998 American Book Award and a finalist for the 1998 Patterson Poetry Prize.
Hedge Coke recounts surviving domestic violence, racism, addiction, and an extraordinary number of challenges. By drawing upon a variety of poetic and prosaic forms, she simulates and transforms the rhythms and sounds of her people. Dog Road Woman is a sublime presentation of the strength, beauty, and spirit of the nations.
To order Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer AIROS Native American Calling Book of the Month from the University of Nebraska Press [memoir] [Native memoir] [North American Memoir]
It is a rare pleasure to unleash beauty upon the ever-tragic world, an exception to the plagued misfortune of greed, despair, and injury. Though elements of colonization do present certain challenges and malady to a natural world inhabited for tens of thousands of years by peoples steeped in ideologies, practical and philosophic systems, they do not overcome the lingual sensibilities and prowess of the poets representing the areas of the planet present in this text. Instead the poets overcome the intrusion.
From baleen row, razor clam edge, rabid willow ptarmigan plume, to white buds of plumeria, gardenia, lei, shaded grave of dried lauhala and graying niu, fertile Pacific essence swells these poems into hummock ice knolls, into layers and layers of white sea laps rolling, into mindfulness, consideration, climate care—belonging.
From ulu, to cane knife, where aurora’s green vein bleeds blue and tangles into indigo or green-robed mauna combs t? stalks, palms, kukui, and pines. From Barrow to Waihe’e, tethered and hammered through wild among dark branches and snared by voices, these poems harbor whale and seal oil burning to bring sustenance to a reader’s search for light and with them carry us into a seafaring world of rich embrace. Spectacular, immediate, these beaches and beeches along the shores provide a tactile relationship made immense in their stream-crafted images.
Effigies juxtaposes the distinctive voices and visions of four emerging poets — dg nanouk okpik, Cathy Rexford, Brandy Nalani McDougall, and Mahealani Perez-Wendt. In drawing from their Native Alaskan and Native Hawaiian cultures and histories, the poems in this book are not an assemblage but a living force and create an intricate, haunting weave.
Arthur Sze
What a shape-shifting moment, this release of four lush and necessary voices into the open air. Linked by blood and fevered lyric, dg nanouk okpik, Cathy Tagnak Rexford, Brandy Nalani McDougall and Mahealani Perez-Wendt offer up unapologetic and unflinching lessons that, as okpik says in the astonishing "Corpse Whale," shove "sinew back into the threaded bones of the land." Individually, each of these voices would be a revelation. Collectively, they're a revolution.
Patricia Smith
Bio:
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke was born between paternal oratory and sudden maternal madness; somewhere north of the condor and south of raven. Crow sometimes cawed morning into malady's mixture, pouring song and hack into bleating skies, swirling sunrise and set. Once, high over the Arctic, she witnessed the pounding lights hammer horizon. Since that time her rendezvous with realtime has been a real ride.
Hedge Coke is a MacDowell, Black Earth Institute Think-Tank, Hawthornden Castle, Weymouth Center, and Center for Great Plains Research Fellow, and holds the Distinguished Paul W. Reynolds and Clarice Kingston Reynolds Endowed Chair in English as an Associate Professor of Poetry and Writing at the University of Nebraska, Kearney. She is a core faculty in the University of Nebraska MFA Program and Visiting Faulty of the MFA Intensive Programs at University of California, Palm Desert and Naropa University. Her books include: Dog Road Woman, American Book Award, Coffee House Press, 1997; The Year of the Rat, chapbook, Grimes Press, 2000; Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer, AIROS Book-of-the-Month, University of Nebraska Press, 2004; Off-Season City Pipe, Wordcraft Writer of the Year for Poetry, Coffee House Press, 2005; Blood Run, Wordcraft Writer of the Year for Poetry, Salt Publications, UK 2006-US 2007; and To Topos Ahani: Indigenous American Poetry, Oregon State University, 2007.
Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities Residency May 18th-June 1, 2009
September 24, 2009
Keynote “Many Souths: Remembering, Sustaining, Creating.”
Eighth Biennial Southern Women Writers Conference
Berry College
Mount Berry, GA
http://www.berry.edu/academics/humanities/english/swwc2009/bios.asp
Eastern Carolina University-North Carolina September 25-26, 2009
So Lit Conf
Ann Arbor, Reading with Jan Beatty at Shaman's Drum March 26th, 2009
Shaman Durm Bookstore
Women's Month University of Idaho March 2-3, 2009
U Idaho
Hosting-UNK Crane Festival March 14-25, 2009
Fredy Chicangana, Sherwin Bitsui, Cristina Eisenberg, Linda Hogan, LeAnne Howe, Laura Tohe, and Wang Ping.
Sandhill Crane Conference
World Affairs Conference Moderator March 9, 2009
WAC UNK
Environmental Policy, Macalester College, Panel with Will Steger, Mark Dayton, and Allison Hedge Coke, Organized by Wang Ping, February 18
Policy
Who Speaks for the Dead, Western Virginia University, Panel, February 17
WVU
Reynolds Series March 2008 Included the Honoring the Sandhill Crane Tribute Retreat. Hosted: Wang Ping author of numerous award winning books, includingthe Last Communist Virgin, LeAnne Howe, author of Evidence of Red, Shell Shaker, and Mikko Kings, exemplary poet Hugo Jamioy Juagibioy, oraliterature weaver Aty Janay, the prolific poet James Thomas Stevens who most recently authoredA Bridge Dead in Water and Janet McAdams Island of Lost Luggage and Feral. Ramon Palomares, Fredy Chicangana, and Jack Collom were unable to come at this time. March 7-14th during the 40 to 60,000,000 year annual apex of the Sandhill Crane migration to the Kearney, Nebraska area, where 600,000 cranes are expected to arrive in this season, these poets and writers came to retreat here with the migration and performed numerous presentations for UNK and the general public.
I am a descendent of the mound-builders. I say, Praise to the book that praises this mystery and beauty and history. Allison Hedge Coke is a woman who has fallen deep into the earth world and reveals its hidden truths. She is a mesmerizing artist, with work based on research chanted into poetry.
Linda Hogan
These poems bear witness to a difficult age, an age built on a spiral of earthliness. They make an honoring song for the earth. This honoring song carries joy, sadness, fury and grief. We need this gift, these poems.
Joy Harjo, Mvksoke poet and musician
“Blood Run” the name of an ancient site in an eastern corner of the US state South Dakota. Hundreds of mounds were built here by Native American Plains peoples and cultures, a thousand years before the arrival of the white intruders (e.g., settlers, military). The poems revive the history of the sites at “Blood Run” giving profound voice to humans, animals, plants and structures, also with political-ecological hope for the future to preserve ancient spiritual places.
Bernhard Widder
Purity in Poetry! Allison Hedge Coke has captured the true essence of the way of life, celebration of life enjoyed by all the many nations of Indigenous people(s) living here on our Makoce (land) which all indigenous nations call in unison Mother Earth. All Our Relations (Mitakuye Oyasin) is eloquently spoken and expressed by Allison. It is a true honor to have a kola (friend) a true Indigenous winyan (lady), to hold, keep and express the true spirit of all nations. I AM HONORED.
Irwin Sharp Fish, Sr.2003-04 NIEA Teacher of the Year
Dog Road WomanPoems by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
"These are songs of righteous anger and utter beauty." - Joy Harjo
"A welcome new voice in American Poetry." - Jessica Hagedorn
"Allison Hedge Coke is a skilled, spirited, young poet who is transforming and honing her social and personal experience and reflection to speak with the voice of a whole people. This is a very formidable task, but it is, finally, the work we’ve chosen. She’s up to it." - Amiri Baraka
In Dog Road Woman, an autobiographical sketch of a contemporary mixed-blood native life, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke weaves the shapes and patterns of her heritage into a magnificent tapestry of prayer, story and song. Dog Road Woman is winner of a 1998 American Book Award and a finalist for the 1998 Patterson Poetry Prize.
Hedge Coke recounts surviving domestic violence, racism, addiction, and an extraordinary number of challenges. By drawing upon a variety of poetic and prosaic forms, she simulates and transforms the rhythms and sounds of her people. Dog Road Woman is a sublime presentation of the strength, beauty, and spirit of the nations.
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, of Huron, Tsa la gi, French Canadian and Portuguese descent, grew up in North Carolina, Canada, Texas, and throughout the Great Plains. She is the author of the American Book Award-winning debut poetry collection Dog Road Woman, the new Off-Season City Pipe, and the memoir Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer. Instrumental in creating Native American and incarcerated youth mentorship programs throughout the country, Hedge Coke now teaches at Naropa University.
A. A. Hedge Coke Walk over Esk 1
A. A. Hedge Coke Drummond's Place
Full Month Long (May 24-June 21, 2008) Hawthornden Castle Writer Fellowship Residency.
A. A. Hedge Coke Bamboo 1 China July 2-July 16, 2008
A. A. Hedge Coke Fruit Bat 1
2008 Indigenous Poets & Writers Retreat, Soul Mountain Retreat, co-hosting with LeAnne Howe. Courtesy of the phenomenal poet and human being, Marilyn Nelson and her working group: Rhonda Ward and Giddeon, LeAnne Howe, Lara Mann, Santee Frazier, and I are all taking in the beauty of Old Lyme Connecticut here where dozens of turtles rise up and down the pond waters, split by skeins of Canadian Geese, alongside lush banks huddled over by an always eager marmot and several early robins. The air is ripe with poetry, writing, and much needed rest and community support. Santee has proven his worth as a chef as well as poet. LeAnne is providing great insight, intelligence, and terrific comic relief. Lara is ever-present with her Sedaris in-hand for belly laughs to carry her through the rigorous poetry drive she has committed to. We hope to see Orlando White within the next day or so and are reeling in the joyous gifts of retreat space in the meanwhile. We read in Central Gallery in Old Saybrook with Rhonda on Saturday. LeAnne's blog http://mikokings.wordpress.com/ has a photo and updates.
With what is happening in the world, with the weather turned on its head, people in turmoil and the over drawn-out campaign primary madness, this break is welcome welcome.
AWP Conference, two panels, February 11th-14th, 2009
BLACK EARTH INSTITUTE THINK TANK PANEL:
Patricia Monaghan (Chair), Annie Finch, Allison Hedge Coke, Linda Hogan, Richard Cambridge, Deborah Holton
Event Title #2: The Poet as Oracle. Oratory
Scheduled Day: Thursday, February 12
Scheduled Time: 12:00-1:15 pm
Scheduled Room: Chicago Hilton, Grand Ballroom
Title: Indigenous AWP Poets & Writers Read for the Chicago American Indian Center
Date & time: February 12th, 2009. 6-8:00 PM
Location: Chicago American Indian Center, Trickster Gallery
http://www.aic-chicago.org/trickster.html
www.aic-chicago.org
1630 W Wilson Ave
Chicago, IL 60640
(773) 275-5871
Free and open to the public
AWP Saturday February 14
Waldorf, 3rd Floor S167
Brain Power: Processing the Beautiful and the Horrendous. (Allison Hedge Coke, Peggy Shumaker, Linda Hogan, & Mira Bartok) Brain injury presents uniquely significant challenges to creative process, yet affords uniquely stimulating conceptualized possibility in a simultaneous manner. Each of the panelists included on this panel have cajoled memoir and life-story from revelations made apparent through their climb up and down the noodled rungs of brain trauma or neurological dilemma. We will consider the work presenting panelists and of Maxine Kumin and Floyd Skloot who support this panel.
Environmental Policy Panel February 18th 4pm
Ruth Stricker Dayton Campus Center
1600 Grand Ave.
St. Paul, MN
651.696.6249
http://www.citypages.com/events/environmental-policy-forum-will-steger-mark-dayton-allison-hedge-coke-763087/
Off-Season City Pipe
