Poet Layli Long Soldier at the Bainbridge Island Book Festival

The Bainbridge Island Poet Laureate Program is sponsoring a poetry reading and conversation with nationally acclaimed poet Layli Long Soldier at the September 26 Bainbridge Island Book Festival.

A citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, Long Soldier is author of the collection Whereas (Graywolf Press, 2017), which won the National Books Critics Circle award, the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her poems and critical work have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The New York Times, American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review, and BOMB, among many others. In 2015, Long Soldier was received 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 and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2018. In 2021, she received an Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature and the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize in the UK. Long Soldier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Bard College. She teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and served as the 2024-25 Endowed Chair at Texas State University. She resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Long Soldier will be joined by Rena Priest, the 2021–2023 Washington State Poet Laureate and a member of the Lhaq’temish (Lummi) Nation for a conversation on Native American poetry.

Eagle Harbor Book Co. will have copies of Long Soldier’s  newest poetry collection, “WE” (which is officially being published by Greystone Press in early October) and Whereas for sale at the event.