MoMA welcomes Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po), a collective committed to mentoring emerging writers, nurturing the growth of Indigenous poetic practices, and raising the visibility of all Native writers past, present, and future. In-Na-Po’s work recognizes the role of poetry in sustaining tribal sovereign nations and Native languages.
Poets Luci Tapahonso (Diné) and Annie Wenstrup (Dena’ina) join filmmaker and poet Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) to share creative work and explore ways spirit lines inspire or weave through their practice. The conversation will be moderated by poet and Indigenous Nations Poets founding director Dr. Kimberly Blaeser (Anishinaabe).
This event is part of the 2025 Indigenous Nations Poets’ mentoring retreat, which brings together younger poetic voices with poet mentors. This year’s retreat theme, Spirit Lines and Visual Poetics, considers the many ways Indigenous poetics allude to and embody spiritual knowledge and traditions, and the visual experimentations poets employ to break the bounds of text.
Participants
Kimberly Blaeser (Anishinaabe), founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets and past Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is the author of works in several genres, most recently a sixth poetry collection titled Ancient Light. Blaeser is enrolled at White Earth Nation and grew up on the reservation. Her narratives, photographs, and ecopoetics re-story tribal lives and embody Indigenous land knowledge. A professor emerita at UW–Milwaukee, and MFA faculty member at Institute of American Indian Arts, Blaeser is a 2025 recipient of the Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers award.
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington, and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, CA, Portland, OR, and Milwaukee, WI. In Portland, he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape-designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal and nonfictional forms of media. His work is represented in MoMA’s collection.
Luci Tapahonso (Navajo Nation/Diné) is professor emerita of English Literature (University of New Mexico, 2016) and served as the inaugural Poet Laureate of the Navajo Nation (2013–15). She has published three children’s books and six award-winning books of poetry.
Annie Wenstrup (Dena’ina) is the author of The Museum of Unnatural Histories and a 2025 Whiting Award recipient. She held a Museum Sovereignty Fellowship with the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center (Alaska office) supported through a Journey to What Matters grant from the CIRI Foundation, and was an Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow in 2022 and 2023. Her poems have been published in Ecotone, New England Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She received her BFA in creative writing from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and her MFA from Stonecoast, the University of Southern Maine’s low-residency MFA program. She lives in Fairbanks, Alaska.
This program is co-organized by MoMA’s department of Research Programs and Indigenous Nations Poets.