Native Lit Festival to feature Salish poet Heather Cahoon
Lake County Leader | Lake County Leader | UPDATED 3 hours, 5 minutes AGO
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louise Erdrich addresses the James Welch Festival in Missoula. (Photo courtesy of James Welch Festival)
The James Welch Native Lit Festival is returning to Missoula this summer and will feature Native writers and artists.
This year’s festival is July 16-18 and will offer free panels on fiction and poetry, readings, and writing workshops for high school students at the Missoula Art Museum and the Missoula Community Theater.
The headliner is Arthur Sze, the United States Poet Laureate, National Book Award winner and long-time director of Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. It will also feature other indigenous writers, including Heather Cahoon, a Salish poet and chair of Native Studies at the University of Montana who was raised on the Flathead Reservation, as well as Stephen Graham Jones, Sherwin Bitsui, Jake Skeets
"We obviously wanted Arthur because of his lifelong commitment to, and excellence in, the poetic form. But we also wanted him because of his tremendous work at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and his deep influence on contemporary Native poetry. Hearing him speak this summer with several of his former students, all of whom are important poets in their own right, will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” festival founder and director Sterling HolyWhiteMountain stated in the press release.
The Festival will highlight Native poetry in recognition of Welch’s early writing years and his first publication, “Riding the Earthboy 40.” Since its publication in 1971, it has guided and influenced decades of Native poets, according to the press release.
“Jim wrote ‘It is through stories that we live,’ meaning that engrossing, instructing stories place us ‘within the great scheme of things,’ transforming us as we listen. Poetry is the shorter, intense form, and fiction in the longer. Jim would be thrilled at the writers joining this year’s Festival, delighted that his Earthboy poems are still in print, still inspiring readers,” stated Lois Welch, Jim’s widow and the former director of Creative Writing and chair of the English Department at the University of Montana.
The festival’s mission is to celebrate Welch’s writing and body of work by contemporary indigenous writers across the country and beyond.