About
The Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies is honored to welcome poet Layli Long Soldier to the Tower View Barn on Friday, November 5, 2021 at 7:00 p.m. for a public reading as part of the Books in the Barn series. General admission tickets are $15 for the public and $5 for Anderson Center members and youth under 18.
A Happy Hour Meet & Greet with Layli Long Soldier is taking place at 5:30 p.m. at Tower View’s newly renovated East Residence. Tickets are $65 and include admission to both the reading and the happy hour event, which features complimentary cocktails and hors d’oeuvres. Space is limited.
Layli Long Soldier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA with honors from Bard College. She is the author of the chapbook Chromosomory (2010, Q Ave Press) and the full-length collection WHEREAS (2017, Graywolf Press), which won the National Books Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been a contributing editor to Drunken Boat and poetry editor at Kore Press; in 2012, her participatory installation, Whereas We Respond, was featured on the Pine Ridge Reservation. In 2015, Long Soldier was awarded a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. She was awarded a Whiting Writer’s Award in 2016. A citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, Long Soldier lives in Tsaile, Arizona, in the Navajo Nation, with her husband and daughter. She is an adjunct faculty member at Diné College
WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. “I am,” she writes, “a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.” This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.
Books in the Barn is a three-part reading series, sponsored by Graywolf Press and the Xcel Energy Foundation, that offers a wide-ranging look at the work of contemporary writers. Through diverse forms and world-views, each brings a sense of connection to place and the impact of landscape on storytelling and identity. Each writer is also presenting an outreach event in the Red Wing community, providing further opportunities to share their work with a broader audience. Books will be available for purchase and signing following each reading.
NOTICE: All patrons must provide proof of vaccination or a recent negative COVID-19 test at the door prior to the event. Phone photos of vaccination cards will be accepted. Further precautions may be taken pending state and county health guidelines.
This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.
ASL interpretation is available upon request. To request interpretation, please contact Stephanie at [email protected] or 651-388-2009 at least two weeks prior to the event.