Seeing in Invisibility:
Poetry as revelation and recovery

February 26, 2020 and 12:30 p.m.

This lecture will discuss the poetics of in-seeing: what happens when we, as Native people locate ourselves, our stories, in the homeland that is, in this current geopolitical landscape of the United States and its perception and projection of itself, largely invisible.

Jennifer Elise Foerster received her PhD in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver and her MFA from the Vermont College of the Fine Arts, and is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Jennifer teaches in the IAIA Low Residency MFA Creative Writing Program and at The Rainier Writing Workshop. Jennifer is the author of two books of poetry, Leaving Tulsa (2013) and Bright Raft in the Afterweather (2018), both published by the University of Arizona Press. Foerster is of German, Dutch, and Mvskoke descent, is a member of the Mvskoke (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, and lives in San Francisco.

Sponsored by Milwaukee Native American Literary Cooperative (UWM Department of English, UWM Special Collections, Marquette University, Indian Community School of Milwaukee, Woodland Pattern Book Center) and the Electa Quinney Institute, and the National Endowment for the Arts.