A Homecoming Farewell—A Weekend of Readings and Reunions in Riverwest

7 pm CDT: Native Writers in the 21st Century—Befittingly, Woodland Pattern’s longest-running reading series will close out this special weekend and represent our final curated program on Locust Street. Please join us for readings by Sherwin Bitsui, Kimberly Blaeser, Franklin K.R. Cline, and Jake Skeets—all returning writers of this series, which has featured more than 100 Indigenous writers—both emerging and established—since 2007.

Sherwin Bitsui is the author of three collections of poetry, Dissolve, Flood Song, and Shapeshift. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, an American Book Award, and the PEN Book Award. His poems have appeared in Narrative, Black Renaissance Noir, American Poet, the Iowa Review, LIT, and elsewhere. He is Diné of the Todí­ch’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tlizí­laaní­ (Many Goats Clan), and has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the Native Arts & Culture Foundation.

Kimberly Blaeser—founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets, a past Wisconsin Poet Laureate, and a longtime collaborator with Woodland Pattern—is the author of six poetry collections including Ancient Light, Copper Yearning, and Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance. Blaeser’s honors include the 2026 Science and Literature Award from the National Book Foundation, 2025 Poets & Writers’ Writer for Writers Award, Hayden’s Ferry Review’s Indigenous Poets Prize, the Masters Review Short Story Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. An enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, Blaeser is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, a Professor Emerita at UW–Milwaukee, and an MFA faculty member at Institute of American Indian Arts. She lives in the woods and wetlands of Wisconsin and, for part of each year, in a water-access cabin near the Boundary Water Canoe Area Wilderness where she follows poems, photos, stories, and river otters—sometimes all at once. Her debut collection of fiction, Red Ants, is forthcoming from Counterpoint Press in October 2026.

Franklin K.R. Cline, a former member of Woodland Pattern’s Board of Directors, is the author of So What and The Beatles’ Second Album, both published by VA Press. An enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation, he is a graduate of UW–Milwaukee’s Creative Writing Program. He is based in Kansas City, Missouri, where he lives with Six and Olivia.

Jake Skeets is the author of two books of poetry, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers (Milkweed Editions, 2019)—winner of the National Poetry Series, an American Book Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a Whiting Award—and his highly anticipated second collection, Horses (Milkweed Editions, 2026). His work has appeared in journals and magazines such as Poetry, the New York Times Magazine, and the Paris Review. Other honors include an NEA Grant for Arts Projects, a Mellon Projecting All Voices Fellowship, and the 2023–24 Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. He is the third Navajo Nation Poet Laureate and teaches at the University of Oklahoma.

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Reading: A Homecoming Farewell—Saturday @ 7 PM CDT