Kenzie Allen
Current Season Poet
Kenzie Allen’s acclaimed debut collection—Cloud Missives—unpacks the hypersexualized, exoticized image of the Indigenous woman which has been burned into American culture and media. Deemed “a masterwork” by Diane Seuss, the poems in this collection push back against colonialism, any abridgement of the Indigenous experience that’s devoid of individuality, and the commodifiable stereotypes found in pop-culture such as Peter Pan and Pocahontas which are intended to be legible to majority-white audiences. As poet Asa Drake writes, “the commercial image of The ‘Real Indian’ is obviously manufactured, but [Allen] poses the more interesting question of, by whom? Who sells the speaker the image of herself? How much of that image is made piecemeal, digestible to everyone else?”
Kenzie Allen is a Haudenosaunee poet and multimodal artist, and the recipient of a 92NY Discovery Prize, an inaugural James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets, and fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Aspen Writers’ Foundation, and In-Na-Po (Indigenous Nations Poets). A finalist for the National Poetry Series, her poems have appeared in Poetry, Boston Review, Narrative, Poetry Daily, and Best New Poets, among many other venues. With this debut collection, Allen offers a radical reclamation of self, a profound rejection of assimilation, and a body of work that is now more crucial than ever. She is a first-generation descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin.
Allen’s reading will be followed by a conversation with Michael Mercurio in Weinstein Auditorium in Wright Hall on Tuesday, October 28 at 7 p.m. Free & open to the public. Books will be sold and a signing will follow. Livestream also available on the BDPC YouTube page.