Indigenous Poetics is a collection of essays by contemporary Native American poets in the United States who explore how the genre helps us to radically understand, contemplate, and realize something deeper about ourselves, our communities, and our worlds. The collection explores the creative process, identity, language, and the making of poetry. The contributors tell us, in their own words and on their own Indigenous terms, how they engage poetic expression as one would a tool, a teacher, a guide, a map, or a friend. Indigenous Poetics reveals poetry’s crucial role in the flourishing of Native American and Indigenous Studies.

Molly McGlennen was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is of Anishinaabe and European descent. She earned a PhD in Native American studies from University of California–Davis and an MFA in creative writing from Mills College. Currently, she is a professor of English and Native American studies as well as the Anne McNiff Tatlock ’61 Chair in Multidisciplinary Studies at Vassar College, where she has been responsible for building its Native American Studies program. McGlennen is the author of two collections of poetry, and her poems appear in Poetry, Academy of American Poets’ Poets.org (Poems-a-Day), Red Ink, Yellow Medicine Review, Prairie Schooner, and Sentence. Her critical monograph Creative Alliances: The Transnational Designs of Indigenous Women’s Poetry earned the Beatrice Medicine Award for Scholarship in American Indian Studies. From 2020–23, McGlennen served as president of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures. 

Inés Hernández-Ávila is Niimiipuu (Nez Perce) and Tejana (Texas-Mexican). She is a poet, visual artist, and professor emerita of Native American studies at University of California–Davis and one of the six founders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). She collaborates with the Library of Congress, Palabra archive, working to increase the recordings of Indigenous creative writers from Latin America. She is a member of Luk’upsíimey/The North Star Collective, which promotes Niimiipuu language revitalization through creative writing. A recent publication (poems and an essay) appeared in the anthology The Shared Language of Poetry: Mexico and the United States.  She contributed poems to wiic’íiqin hitoláaycix / “words going upriver” / palabras yendo rio arriba: Poesía de [Poetry from] Luk’upsíimey: The North Star Collective, a chapbook given to Mayan writers in Chiapas in 2022."