For the Love of Poetry A Public Affair

April is National Poetry Month and as we approach the end of the month, we turn to the poets in our community. Host Douglas Haynes is joined by former Wisconsin Poet Laureate Kimberly Blaeser, current Madison Poet Laureate Steven Espada Dawson, and current Wisconsin Poet Laureate Nicholas Gulig. We hear a poem from each and discuss poetry in community, the impact of a poet laureateship, and what it’s like to be, as Steven puts it, poetry’s cheerleaders.



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Kimberly Blaeser, past Wisconsin Poet Laureate and founding director of In-Na-Po—Indigenous Nations Poets, is a writer, photographer, and scholar. She is the author of six poetry collections including Ancient Light, Copper Yearning, and the bilingual Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance. Blaeser edited Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry and wrote the monograph Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. Her photographs, picto-poems, and ekphrastic pieces have appeared in exhibits such as “Visualizing Sovereignty,” and “No More Stolen Sisters.” An Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, she is an enrolled member of White Earth Nation and grew up on the reservation. The 2024 Mackey Chair in Creative Writing at Beloit College and a Vassar College Tatlock Fellow, Blaeser is a Professor Emerita at UW–Milwaukee and an MFA faculty member for Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Her accolades include a Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. Blaeser splits her time between her home in rural Wisconsin and a water-access cabin near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota.

Steven Espada Dawson is a writer from East Los Angeles. The son of a Mexican immigrant, he received his MFA from Purdue University, where he studied under Kaveh Akbar, Marianne Boruch, Roxane Gay, Terese Marie Mailhot, and Donald Platt. He has served as a poetry editor for Sycamore Review and Copper Nickel. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize (XLVII), his recent poems have appeared in AGNI, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, POETRY, and Waxwing. He is a 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow and the ’22 – ’23 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Fellow in Poetry at UW–Madison’s Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, where he teaches creative writing. He is the Poet Laureate of Madison, WI.

Nicholas Gulig is a Thai American poet from Wisconsin. He is the author of Orient (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2018), winner of the 2017 CSU Poetry Center Open Book Competition; Book of Lake (CutBank, 2016); and North of Order (YesYes Books, 2015). In 2011, Gulig was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Bangkok. He is also a recipient of the Ruskin Art Club Poetry Award, the Black Warrior Review Poetry Prize, and the Grist’s ProForma Award. Gulig is an associate professor of languages and literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and lives in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. In 2023, he was appointed poet laureate of Wisconsin through 2024. In 2023, Gulig received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.

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