Maine Lit Fest Event - Day 5
Join us for a night of conversation and readings by three critically acclaimed Native writers working in different genres and coming from different nations. Morgan Talty (Night of the Living Rez), Terese Marie Mailhot (Heart Berries), and Joan Naviyuk Kane (Dark Traffic) will share their work and discuss how their experiences have shaped and inspired their stories, essays, and poems. This event is co-sponsored and co-hosted by USM’s Convocation.
Donna Loring, elder and former council member of the Penobscot Indian Nation, will introduce the event, and Libby Bischof, co-chair of USM’s Convocation Committee, will moderate the conversation.
This event is free, and no RSVP is required.
The livestream of this event can be accessed on MWPA’s YouTube Channel or by clicking here.
Books will be sold by Longfellow Books.
Morgan Talty is a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation where he grew up. He received his BA in Native American Studies from Dartmouth College and his MFA in fiction from Stonecoast’s low-residency program. His story collection Night of the Living Rez is forthcoming from Tin House Books (2022), and his work has appeared in Granta, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Narrative Magazine, LitHub, and elsewhere. A winner of the 2021 Narrative Prize, Talty’s work has been supported by the Elizabeth George Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts (2022). Talty teaches courses in both English and Native American Studies, and he is on the faculty at the Stonecoast MFA in creative writing. Talty is also a Prose Editor at The Massachusetts Review. He lives in Levant, Maine.
Terese Marie Mailhot is from Seabird Island Band. Her work has appeared in Guernica, The Guardian, Mother Jones, Medium, Al Jazeera, the Los Angeles Times, and "Best American Essays." She is the New York Times bestselling author of "Heart Berries: A Memoir." Her book was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for English-Language Nonfiction, and was selected by Emma Watson as the Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick for March/April 2018. Her book was also the January 2020 pick for Now Read This, a book club from PBS Newshour and The New York Times. Heart Berries was also listed as an NPR Best Book of the Year, a Library Journal Best Book of the Year, a New York Public Library Best Book of the Year, a Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year, and was one of Harper's Bazaar's Best Books of 2018. She is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, and she is also the recipient of the Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice in Literature. She teaches Creative Writing at Purdue University.
Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary's Igloo), Alaska. Dark Traffic (2021) follows The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife (2009), Hyperboreal (2013), The Straits (2015), Milk Black Carbon (2017), Sublingual (2018), A Few Lines in the Manifest (2018) and Another Bright Departure (2019). Kane has been the recipient of the Whiting Writer’s Award, the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, the National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the American Book Award, the Alaska Literary Award, the United States Artists Foundation Creative Vision Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, the Mellon Practitioner Fellowship in Race and Ethnicity at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University, multiple Individual Artist awards & Artist Fellowships from the Rasmuson Foundation, and residencies with the School for Advanced Research, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Millay Arts and Harvard's Radcliffe Institute. She raises her children in Cambridge, and currently teaches creative nonfiction in the department of English at Harvard University, poetry in the department of English at Tufts University, and creative nonfiction and poetry in the graduate creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is a lecturer in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts University, where she teaches courses in Native American and Indigenous Studies. At Scripps College, she was the 2021 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Creative Writing and Journalism.
Donna M. Loring is an elder and former council member of the Penobscot Indian Nation. She recently served as Senior Advisor of Tribal Affairs to Maine Governor Janet Mills. She hosts a monthly radio show “Wabanaki Windows” on WERU Community Radio. The University of New England houses her papers and sponsors an annual lecture series in her name. She is the author of In The Shadow of The Eagle: A Tribal Representative in Maine (Tilbury House, 2008), a memoir based on her time in the Maine State Legislature. She also serves on MWPA’s Board of Directors.
Libby Bischof serves as the Executive Director of the Osher Map Library and the Smith Center for Cartographic Education at USM and is the co-author of the 2015 book Maine Photography: A History, 1840-2015. In 2011, she co-curated the exhibition Maine Moderns: Art in Sequinland, 1900-1940 at the Portland Museum of Art with Senior Curator Susan Danly. The show won the critic’s choice award for best Historic Show in the 2011 New England Art Awards. Her other research interests include Maine history, modernism, how friendship informs cultural production, and nineteenth-century New England women writers. She is also a postcard nerd--follow her postcard adventures on Instagram: @themainepostcardproject. She resides in Gorham with her husband Steve and her son Gus and daughter Katie.