Laureate Writers Series Presents Minnesota Poet Laureate Gwen Westerman

Tuesday | August 1 | 7 pm
Blue Heron Coffeehouse | 162 W 2nd St.

Minnesota’s Poet Laureate Gwen Westerman will read from her work at the Blue Heron Coffeehouse on Tuesday, August 1st at 7 pm. The reading is free and open to the public and will be followed by a book signing and an open mic. Please bring some of your work to share with us. 

Gwen Westerman is a Dakota educator, writer and fiber artist. She is a professor at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and the Director of the Native American Literature Symposium, as well as Director of the Humanities Program. She was appointed by Governor Tim Walz as Poet Laureate of Minnesota in September 2021, the first Indigenous poet to be so honored. Westerman is an enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate and a speaker of the Dakota language. Through her mother, she is also Cherokee. 

Westerman has won two Minnesota Book Awards for her work about the Dakota people, Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota, and her first poetry book, Follow the Blackbirds which was written in English and Dakota. Gwen’s poems, essays, and short stories appear in numerous publications, including the Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, and New Poets of Native Nations. Songs, Blood Deep, a book of her poetry, will be released in September of this year from Holy Cow! Press. In addition, she has been awarded three Artist Initiative Grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board as a quilt artist and her quilts have won several awards at prestigious juried shows and are part of the permanent collection of the Minnesota Historical Society and other museums. Poet Carter Revard says of her work, “The poems are quiet and powerful, understated and deeply moving.”

This First Tuesday Laureate Writers Series event is co-sponsored by the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest and the Blue Heron Coffeehouse. To learn more about the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest, please visit sonnetcontest.org or email entries@sonnetcontest.org.

Photo: Gwen Westerman.

River Arts Alliance serves as fiscal sponsor of the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest.