Indigenous Poetry Residency
Our next Indigenous Poetry Residency is currently closed. Stay tuned for the next open call.
Thanks to the Witter Bynner Foundation, for making it possible to host funded residency opportunities for Native American, Native Hawaiian or Alaska Native poets.
Demian DinéYazhi was the 2022 recipient and spent their time wrapping up a book of poetry and seeding ideas for new exhibitions. They are a multidisciplinary artist and activist with a background in print and poetry.
Their work and advocacy focuses on indigenous and LGBTQ+ people and consists of photography, sculpture, text, sound, video, land art performance, installation, street art and fabrics art.
They founded and directed the artist-activist organization called R.I.S.E.: Radical Indigenous Survivance & Empowerment, and are the co-director of the LGBTQ+ and Indigenous Two-Spirit zine titled Locusts: A Post-Queer Nation Zine. They have published poetry books promoting Indigenous and queer advocacy, including Ancestral Memory and An Infected Sunset.
In 2020, Elsewhere hosted our first-ever funded Indigenous Poet Residency. The selected artist was awarded a one-month residency at Elsewhere Studios for June 2020, and the residency included a stipend and funds towards a chapbook publication.
Abigail Chabitnoy is the author of How to Dress a Fish (Wesleyan 2019), winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award for Poetry and shortlisted in the international category of the 2020 Griffin Prize for Poetry. She was a 2016 Peripheral Poets fellow and her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, LitHub, and Red Ink, among others. She is a Koniag descendant and member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak. Abigail holds a BA in Anthropology and English from Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado.
“At Elsewhere, I also rediscovered joy in the experience of discovery, of play, of listening to the work instead of speaking.”
“ In a capital-driven society, in the midst of calls for social justice revolution, as a pandemic makes painfully clear the inequalities and vulnerabilities of our current system, it may at first seem natural to question the wisdom of setting aside resources for illogically minded artists to step out of the world for a space and make art. But it’s in the artmaking we teach ourselves how to live.”
Check out Abigail’s chapbook “Converging Lines of Light” available now through Flower Press:
Flower Press is an equitable publishing practice centering historically marginalized womxn, femme, queer, trans, and non-binary artists and practitioners. Based in Detroit, Michigan.