Helen S. Lanier Poetry Reading with Kenzie Allen

The Creative Writing Program and Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing, Chigozie Obioma are pleased to welcome Kenzie Allen for a poetry reading on Friday, March 14th from 6-7pm at Ciné. Avid Bookshop will have Kenzie's debut poetry collection "Cloud Missives" available for purchase.

Kenzie Allen is a Haudenosaunee poet and multimodal artist, and author of Cloud Missives (Tin House, 2024). A finalist for the National Poetry Series, she is the recipient of a James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets, a 92NY Discovery Prize, and the 49th Parallel Award in poetry. Her work can be found in POETRY, Boston Review, Narrative, Best New Poets, and other venues. She is a first generation descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin.

Intimate, dissecting, and liberating, Cloud Missives is a poetry collection of excavation and renewal. Like an anthropologist, Kenzie Allen reveals a life from what endures after tragedies and acts of survival. Across four sections, poems explore pop culture—the stereotypes in Peter Pan, Indiana Jones, and beyond—fairy tales, myths, protests, and forgotten histories, before arriving at a dazzling series of love poems that deepen our understanding of romantic, platonic, and communal love.

Cloud Missives is an investigation, a manifestation, and a celebration: of the body, of what we make and remake, of the self, and of the heart. With care and deep attention, it asks what one can reimagine of Indigenous personhood in the wake of colonialism, what healing might look like when loving the world around you—and introduces readers to a profound new voice in poetry.