Join three former Montana Poets Laureate M.L. Smoker, Melissa Kwasny, and Tami Haaland for a free public reading entitled Writing the Prairie, exploring themes of time, landscape, environmental change, and the important role of Indigenous people in the prairies of Montana.

M.L. Smoker’s poetry collection, Another Attempt at Rescue, and her graphic novel Thunderous engage questions of Native American identity, history, language, and culture. Tami Haaland’s latest book, If I Had Said Beauty, is dedicated to “known and unknown” ancestors, exploring all that lies behind one’s sense of self while being grounded in encounters with wild and domestic life and intimate moments of loss and connection. Melissa Kwasny, a recent Artist in Residence at the Enrico Science Center near the Missouri Breaks, will read from her essay “The American Prairie”  and a new series of poems entitled “What the Prairie Knows”