Join the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) on January 13, 2023, from 6 pm–7:15 pm for readings by Kelli Jo Ford (Cherokee Nation), Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota), and Raquel Gutiérrez as part of the Evening Reading Series. Presented by the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing (MFACW) from Monday, January 9 through Friday, January 13, the Evening Reading Series features program mentors and Lannan Visiting Writers. Each evening will engage its audience with poetry, memoir, or fiction from some of today’s most vibrant and vital writers.

Kelli Jo Ford (Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma) is a novelist, short story writer, and mentor in the MFACW program. She is the author of the novel-in-stories Crooked Hallelujah. Her work has been published in The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly, and The Missouri Review. She has received many awards, including an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize, and a Native Arts & Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship.

Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota) is a poet, IAIA alum, and mentor in the MFACW program. She is the author of the poetry collections Chromosomory and WHEREAS. Her work has appeared in POETRY Magazine, The New York Times, The American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review, and BOMB. She has received many awards, including the NACF National Artist Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize in the UK.

Raquel Gutiérrez is an arts writer, critic, poet, educator, and Lannan Visiting Writer at IAIA. Their first book of prose Brown Neon considers what it means to be a Latinx artist during the Trump era. Their criticism has been published in Art in America, NPR Music, Places Journal, and Hyperallergic. In 2021 they received the Rabkin Prize in Arts Journalism, and in 2017 they received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Evening Reading Series Events

• January 9, 6 pm–7:15 pm (MST): Screening of Reservation Dogs with Migizi Pensoneau (Ponca and Ojibwe)—CLE Commons
• January 10, 6 pm–7:15 pm (MST): Readings by Pam Houston, Esther Belin (Diné), and Keenan Norris—CLE Commons and livestream
• January 11, 6 pm–7:15 pm (MST): Readings by Bojan Louis (Diné), Toni Jensen (Métis), and Kimberly Blaeser (Minnesota Chippewa Tribe)—CLE Commons and livestream
• January 13, 6 pm–7:15 pm (MST): Readings by Kelli Jo Ford (Cherokee Nation), Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota), and Raquel Gutiérrez—CLE Commons and livestream

MFA in Creative Writing

The Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing is designed as a two-year program with two intensive week-long residencies per year (summer and winter) at IAIA. Students and faculty mentors gather for a week of workshops, lectures, and readings. At the end of the residency week, each student is matched with a faculty mentor, who then works one-on-one with the student for the semester. IAIA’s program is unique in that we emphasize the importance of Indigenous writers speaking to the Indigenous experience. The literature we read carries a distinct Native American and First Nations emphasis. The MAFCW offers four areas of emphasis: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and screenwriting.

The deadline to apply for the 2023 academic year is Feb. 1 by 5 pm (MST).