Description: The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket traverses the Southwest landscape, exploring intricate relationships between Native peoples and the natural world, land, pop culture, twentieth-century music, and multi-generational representations.
Brief description: KINSALE DRAKE (Diné) is a poet, playwright, and performer based out of the Southwest. She is a winner of the 2023 National Poetry Series. Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Poets.org, Best New Poets, Black Warrior Review, Nylon, MTV, Teen Vogue, Time, and elsewhere. She recently graduated from Yale University, where she received the J. Edgar Meeker Prize, the Academy of American Poets College Prize, the Young Native Playwrights Award, and the 2022 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize. She was named by Time Magazine as an artist representing her decade "changing how we see the world," and is the founder of NDN Girls Book Club (www.ndngirlsbookclub.org).
Review Quotes:
These poems come at you with a million volts of every kind of verbal and poetic intelligence, illuminating every kind of love. Every kind of longing, joy, and drive toward justice, too. Each poem lights up a new terrain where human experience becomes a landmark for everyone we ever touch--ancestor, mother, family, lover, other--everyone who makes us who we become.
--Heid E. Erdrich "author of Little Big Bully"