Skip to content
Lucy Writers Platform

Lucy Writers Platform

  • Home
  • About us
    • About LWP
    • Editors
    • Writers
    • About Lucy Cavendish
    • Constitution
  • My Cambridge
    • Lucy Interviews
    • Lucy Features
    • Postgraduate Corner
      • My Research Articles
  • Write for us
    • Submissions and Contact
    • Special editions
    • Directory
  • Writing
    • Arts
      • Art and design
      • Books
      • Dance
      • Fashion
      • Film and Media
      • Music
      • Theatre
    • Creative Writing
      • Fiction
      • Flash Fiction
      • Poetry
      • Resources
    • Environment
    • General
    • Health and Wellbeing
      • Lucy Features
      • Short read
    • Interviews
    • Opinion
    • Politics
      • Features
      • My Feminisms
    • STEM

Matwaala’s Poets of Colour Series: Native American Women Poets

8th August 20229th August 2022  Lucy Writers

Matwaala’s latest Poets of Colour series brings together four poets and one artist whose work explores the lands, rivers, culture and histories belonging to and inherited by contemporary Native Americans.

NATIVE AMERICAN POETS

March 3, 2022

No time when my poetry end and my storytelling begins

–Andrina Smith

Introduction by Usha Akella & Pramila Venkateswaran

Usha’s opening remarks: Good evening. We acknowledge that, in Austin, Texas, we are on the occupied ancestral territory of the Tonkawa Lipan-Apache, Karankawa, Comanche, and Coahuiltecan people.

I open this evening’s event on a note of gratitude for the land we live on, to Poets and Writers, the Academy of American poets, to Pramila who has worked very hard to make this event happen, to Anannya Akella and Francisca Li our young graphic designers – and our guests of honour this evening, the invited artist, scholar and poets. We thank our audience for thinking it important to be here.

It seems that poetry must find its roots in repeated bruises of unlearned lessons. It is unfortunate yet uncanny that today’s reading is unfolding in a political event again of invasion, occupation and terror. I’d like to ask for a few seconds of silence from all of us in acknowledgment of the war on Ukraine.

Matwaala will continue to strive to open corridors of dialogue, and extend a hand of solidarity through our initiatives like these poets of colour series – a series that began in empathy and ended in tremendous enrichment and education of our own minds. I welcome all of you to our third reading in the series.

Pramila’s introduction: Welcome to Matwaala’s Native American poetry event. We had to postpone this program which was set for December, on account of my mum’s passing. I wish to thank Bonnie Marcus of Poets and Writers who so graciously renewed our grant funding so we could hold the program today.

I begin with my acknowledgement that I am hosting this program on Paumanok, as Long Island was originally called. This is the territory of 13 indigenous tribes. I live in the indigenous land of the Setalkott, who were part of the underground railroad. The island stretches all the way east to the Shinnecock Nation and the Montaukets.

On the program flier we have used the terminology “Native American” as one that is easily recognized by people. As poet Joy Harjo says in her intro to When the Light of the world was subdued, our songs came through, the term Native American coined in the 1990s, and other nomenclatures used earlier, do not capture the thousands of nations in the US, Hawaii, American Samoa and the multitudes of languages, as the word “indigenous” does.

The reading today is one that Usha and I feel is central to our mission at Matwaala, which is to build solidarity among South Asian poets and the different cultures around us. Since the past two years we have expanded our focus to building solidarity with Black, Indigenous and Poets of Color. We feel that poetry can build community and friendship, since poetry is evocative and reaches people’s hearts; it is beyond sloganeering. To quote Joy Harjo, we believe in the “power of language to create, to transform, and establish change.” Poetry brings harmony and respects difference; it is the quiet pulse that beats in the midst of cacophony and dissonance.

As part of my solidarity work, I write about indigenous poets in South Asia as well as those in the US. The latest issue of Anangu, the Tamil literary magazine, carries a section of translated works of indigenous poets, among whom are our three poets from today, that I had put together.

I teach indigenous poets in my classes, so students become aware of the layered history of this country that is imbricated into the poems we read. Teaching marginalized writers is part of the solidarity work that I do. It is a continual learning process.

For our programs, Usha and I scour mags for BIPOC poets, watch videos of readings, attend conferences in our effort to invite poets to Matwaala. We invite our audience to do the same after they attend our programs. 


Kamala Platt’s Introduction to Native American poetry: I am speaking on zoom today from San Antonio, TX, a city that has been a gathering place for traveling peoples such as the Payayas and other Coahuiltecan communities for millennia. Their names are from Spanish, revealing our gap in knowledge of and connection to those who peopled this land in the past. The ancestors of these peoples and those Native tribes who came later, deserve not only acknowledgement, but land, and all the rights of first citizenship on this continent. I also recognize that the very concept of land ownership runs counter to responsible, reciprocal relationships that many Indigenous peoples hold toward the lands where they live, and that the North American continent has always been a place of movement, and traveling across the continent is the rightful inheritance of all who are indigenous here.

As I thought about what to share as an introduction to Matwaala’s Native American poetry panel, I kept returning to Native connections and concepts that have been grounding for me, going back to my early childhood. My first such memory is of accompanying my parents to a meeting of a Kansas Native group who had invited them to speak: my parents had spent several years as part of an AFSC village project in then-Orissa, India, and the group was interested in learning more about the Indian people from South Asia that their people had once been mistaken for. The beaded pin they gave my mother is a keepsake she gave me. This gift has significance as an example of what I’d later learn about as “cultural poetics” – artistic expression, sometimes also addressing social and environmental justice concerns – often, but not necessarily, in words. In this case, it was a poetry of colored beads, a time of cultural exchange and reciprocity, and the memory seems right for telling, this evening.

Subsequent interweaving events come together for me, as Native American poetics-in-action, presenting historical/political concerns and land experience that reaches back over the decades and forward with wise words for our future: during high school, I spent much of a summer in Hammon, Oklahoma, a Cheyenne Arapaho community. Lawrence Hart and his family, hosted a community voluntary service camp for young people. As a Cheyenne Peace Chief and a Mennonite pastor he enjoined traditions of peace in his life and teachings – helping with summer school there was my first formal teaching experience. The name of my 2010 chapbook Weedslovers comes from the translation of the name in Cheyenne my friends gave me when they saw me exclaim over the roadside wildflowers when we went walking.

In 1978, one branch of The Longest Walk came through my hometown of Newton, Kansas, and I joined a group of local supporters who shared a potluck meal and fellowship with the walkers. Thirty years later, one group of walkers with The Longest Walk 2 would stop at the Meadowlark Center for a night’s rest. These walkers precede the Water Protectors currently standing against Line 3 and other fossil fuel pipelines, and Climate Justice walkers, often led by Indigenous people, worldwide.

I was in a small group led by Joy Harjo, now our National Poet Laureate at one of the first conferences I attended: her mentorship and her reading were the memorable element of that conference – later, as a colleague of Pramila’s, at Nassau Community College, I was teaching from Joy Harjo’s book The Spiral of Memory when I learned she was going to be playing and reading with her band in Manhattan – a few creative writing students accompanied me to the poetry concert and the inspiration and mentorship I’d felt spiraled out to my students.

Some of the first written Native poetry I read was in the pages of Akwesasne Notes, published by the Mohawk Nation. I first read Chicano/a poetry that I now teach and study and love, in that publication also. Later, I worked with Raúl R. Salinas, at Resistencia Bookstore, as a graduate student, in Austin, Texas. Raúl, who got his start as a poet in prison had been able to leave prison on the stipulation he could not go back to Texas for some time, and he found both a welcoming and solidarity work with Indian communities in Washington State. His work with Native brothers and sisters, and his Indigenous heritage, led him to identify as XicanIndio poet and in his book, Indio Trails: A Chicano Odyssey Through Indian Country, his poetry shows us, “the true nature of solidarity as a communion of mind, body and spirit in concordance with something larger than our individual selves”(Louis Mendoza in the Introduction).

When I reflect on what brings these and other experiences together for me, as, in a broad sense, poetry, I discern the wide parameters of poetry and its connections to lived experience and politics and cultural expression. In these instances, there is the common presence of what I would call “lyric testimonio” – a community story told through someone that has lived the experience in full. Reading about the work of the poets we are about to hear, I felt the same excitement that came with the connections I’ve related. I am excited by the network of connections these poets bring. This is fitting, given the multiple tongues/ languages that make up the antecedents to Native American poetry. Their numbers were made real to me when I decided to make a placard for a protest march against a push for “English Only” in Texas. I decided on the phrase “Aztlan preceded America,” drawing on the name of the northern homeland of those who settled in now Mexico City. To get my point across, I would darken the letters with names of languages from Indian Nations here. I nearly missed the march and never finished the lettering – there were so many languages, I could not fit them all in. This is what I’d like to leave you with; this reality of the many, many languages in which poetry has been spoken, written, beaded, marched, walked, danced, and read on this continent for millennia.

YouTube Video of Event Featuring artwork by Jeremy Dennis


Poems and Exchanges

Content Warning: Please note that some of the poems below use derogatory terms when depicting colonial oppression and racial prejudice.

Welcome Home

by Lucille Lang Day

Welcome home to Mashpee

where snapping turtles and painted turtles bask

on logs in the marsh amid water willows,

ferns, and pickerel weed with purple flowers

reaching up from the shallows.

Welcome home to the place

where your great-grandfather whispered

to trout he caught at Santuit Pond,

then sat in a circle

and offered his pipe to Earth, Sky

and the Four Directions.

Welcome home to the coast

where your ancestors built wetuash

and gathered cranberries,

to the woods where they hunted

turkey, deer and bear,

and to the clearings clad

in goldenrods and asters

where they danced for 10,000 years.

Welcome home.

The elders have been waiting for you.

Listen to their drums, the beat

of your own heart.

Take this wampum necklace

made from the sacred shell

of the quahog clam.

When you wear it, walk through

redroot and wild lupine, hear

the quickening rhythm

of the field sparrow’s song.

From Becoming an Ancestor (Červená Barva Press, 2015).

First published in The Tower Journal.

Names of the States

By Lucille Lang Day

Alabama, for the Alibamu tribe, forced from Alabama to Texas

when white people claimed their land in 1805

Alaska, for the Aleut word alyeska, meaning mainland, the place

toward which the sea flows

Arizona, the word for “small spring” in the O’odham language

of a Southwest desert people who couldn’t vote until 1948

Arkansas, another name for the Quapaws, the Downsteam People,

who were removed to Oklahoma from their ancestral lands

Connecticut, from the Algonquian word for “long river place”

Delaware, from Baron De La Warr, Virginia’s first governor,

whose name rechristened the local Lenni Lenape, the first tribe

to sign a treaty with the US

Hawaii, for “Hawai’iloa,” discoverer of the islands

in Polynesian myth

Idaho, maybe Shoshone for “the sun comes down the mountain,”

or the Apache name for the Comanches, who drove them

from the southern Plains

Illinois, a French transliteration of ilinwe, the Ojibwe word

for the Inoka, whose thirteen tribes were reduced to five

by European disease

Indiana, Land of the Indians—the Delaware, Piankashaw,

Kickapoo, Wea, Shawnee, Miami, and Potawatomi—who were

mostly removed by 1846

Iowa, from the Dakota name for the Ioway tribe, meaning

“sleepy ones”

Kansas, the Dakota word for the South Wind People, whose last

fluent speaker of the Kansa language died in 1983

Kentucky, derived from the Iroquoian word for “on the meadow”

Massachusetts, People of the Great Hills—that is, the Blue Hills

south of Boston Harbor—who were decimated by smallpox in 1633

Michigan, from mishigamaa, “great water,” in the language

of the Ojibwe, who like so many others, didn’t understand

the treaties ceding their land

Minnesota, from mni sota, the name the Dakotas gave

the Minnesota River, whose clear blue water reflected clouds

Mississippi, from misi-zibi, Ojibwe for the “great river,” along

which more than twenty tribes lived and fished

Missouri, for the Missouria tribe that lived on the Missouri River,

a Siouan people whose name means “town of the big canoes”

Nebraska, from nebrathka, the Omaha word for “broad water,”

a description of the Platte River, by which the tribe lived

New Mexico, named for the Mexicas, a Nahuatl-speaking people

who ruled the Aztec Empire until the Spanish conquered them in 1519

North and South Dakota, named for a Sioux tribe whose men

were sentenced in 1862 to the largest mass execution in US history,

though Dakota means “friend”

Ohio, from ohi:yo’, “continuously giving river” in the language

of the Senecas, whose land was flooded in 1965, following

construction of Kinzua Dam

Oklahoma, from okla humma, Choctaw for “red people,”

a name proposed by the chief of the Choctaw Nation

during treaty negotiations in 1866

Oregon, maybe from wauregan, an Algonquian word

for “beautiful river,” but so many Native words and languages

have been lost that it’s hard to say

Tennessee, for the Cherokee town Tenasi, a village

on the Little Tennessee River until the Cherokees were marched

to Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears

Texas, meaning “friends” or “allies” in the language of the Caddos,

who were removed to Oklahoma in 1859

Utah, from yuttahih, an Apache word meaning “people

of the mountains”

Wisconsin, from meskonsing, the name for the Wisconsin River

in the Miami language: “river running through a red place”

Wyoming, a contraction of mecheweamiing, a Delaware word

first used for a valley in Pennsylvania, meaning “at the big plains”

And yes, every part of this land is Indian country, from forest

to desert, mountain to prairie, Manhattan to Yosemite,

Tallahassee to Seattle—all the fields, rivers, hills and canyons

between the two shining seas

From Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place (Blue Light Press, 2020), by Lucille Lang Day.

First published in Yellow Medicine Review.

Exchange between Usha Akella and Lucille Lang Day

Usha: Thank you, Lucille. You have a line in ‘Tooth painter’ that says ‘A gallery opens when I smile.’ I’d like to play on that and say a gallery of nature opens its art in your poems. You have welcomed us to reimagine land as the space of one’s heart, in the boundaries of memory and history; your poetry of lush images are odes to nature, place and land; they are songs of dignity, but are also simultaneously gritty and celebratory, and rooted in contemporary life. Indeed, the body of your poetry is a golden chalice filled with guts.

When I say gritty, I am thinking of poems like ‘reject jello, applying for AFDC. I am thinking of lines of celebration from poems like, ‘In aubade in red’:

Each morning let us applaud
the brightness that unfolds
to show the abundance
of all things red

And in ‘Winter Nap’:

Love, I wanted a tropical country,

a lush jungle, a profusion

of ginger and jasmine, nothing harsher

than the macaw’s shrill call.

Where is the power of summer?

My question to you is about the anthem of celebration in your poems: the grit to celebrate life, not to let that right be taken away—how do you do that with poetry while keeping it experiential?

Lucille: I find it restorative to spend time in nature. Being outdoors brings inner peace and renewal. Here in Northern California, I am close to the ocean, the Sierra Nevada, and the redwood forests, all of which give me joy. Also, I can enter a meditative state and find hope through reading and writing poetry. Despite the wars and the terrible things that people do to each other, I believe that most people have an innate goodness, and that we can tap into that goodness and work together to create a better world.


God is the Water

By Lyla June

When I close my eyes at night

I can feel the rock being cut open

by water.

I hear a grandfather song

and it sounds like

sand

walking down

the river bottom.

In this song they talk about how even

the mighty canyon walls are formed

by meandering streams.

Beneath the gentle waters there are people.

Not people like you and I.

Stone people.

When I close my eyes at night

I am one of them

and God is the water.

Over lifetimes

She runs over me

until I am polished

and smooth.

She teaches me

about patience and commitment.

She teaches me 

How to be gentle yet persistent,

When I close my eyes

she speaks to me

in a language of

trickles and bubbles.

She says:

“Journeys.

Take them.

But try to remember

who you are

along the way.

I have nothing for you

but these words.

Take them with you

and I will see you again

when you arrive

at the ocean’s throne

as one million kernels of

sand.”

Her voice

hums in my blood

quiet as a stream in the night

and it is a song about how

we are all

just

so loved.

The eagles dip their talons into Her soft body

and pull from it

a fish

a fleshmeal

for their children.

They sing this grandfather song with her

and it sounds like feathers

cutting into the sky.

In this song they talk about how

even hatred surrenders to wonder!

She is breaking my heart apart like

a stubborn, granite puzzle of problems.

Even the hardest

doubts and sorrows

give way to

Her infinite grace.

And who knew that sometimes

grace can come from

standing in the raging river

until everything we think we own

is ripped away from us

and replaced with a weightlessness

so profound that

we can’t not cry

tears of absolute praise

and run all around the

river banks shouting

to the cattails

and the minnows

and the willows

about the truth of beauty!?

About the truth of a God that breathes

through the trees;

The truth of a God that weaves

winter from water and night;

The truth of a God that weaves

bodies from dust and light;

and carries us down the river of life

over and over

and over again

until we finally understand

the meaning

of forever.

Forever.

In the language of the stones

there is no word for regret.

Only the complete understanding of what it

means to be a beloved son

or daughter.

We are the rock

and God, She is the water. 

Exchange between Pramila Venkateswaran and Lyla June

Pramila: Nature animates your poetry. It is a steady presence offering answers to questions. When you are writing or singing your lyrics, do you seek nature images to help you get deeper into your ideas? Are the images particular to the places or myths that you know? What does nature mean to you and your poems?

Lyla: The most readily form of inspiration creator’s creation, a reflection of genius. How could you not be inspired. A big river, to dip your cup into. When I am in nature, it’s in your face. I like poems that are non-Nature base too, you have to find beauty in yourself, reach in there, the world has not made it easy to love ourselves, you find the beauty in your own people, in your own resilience…. The beauty of our human nature, it is harder to get to but both are important sources.


One Indian, Two Indian, Red Indian, Blue Indian

By Andrina Wekontash Smith

Oh,
She thinks she’s Native. Or something

Yeah,

Or something.
Because sometimes something is all you can muster to be
Some disproportioned mud blood anomaly
That is Indian by name and not face

I am a black native and isn’t that ironic
Who knew identity could be oxymoronic
Honey don’t try and pose as anything exotic
Cuz leaky old faucets drip one-drop rules that label your water
toxic And your Shinnecock blood is the crack of narcotics
A dirty wanna-be without the purity of its still cut up brethren
cocaine Because all native blood aint processed the same.
And all native blood aint taken the same

The first time she got called a n****r, it was by a native
Stoic eyes discriminate louder than any pro-Jim Crow picket signs
and fuckin a n****r is a punishable crime
because diluted blood makes it harder to place
when sovereign nations compete in a white mans foot race

Wampeshau slave trades implemented racist ideals
400 plus oppressed years were xenophobic attempts to conceal
the fact that we never had a segregated medicine wheel
When slavery went bankrupt the US never drew up a new deal,
to tell a country exactly how much blacks were worth
Reinforced stereotypes trickled down Indian country like honey
trickling down fry bread We swallowed amnesia alongside lies
that were spoon fed
Forgetting that in the beginning side by side stood black and red
So we continue to take smallpox blankets with us to bed
and wonder why we wake up feeling feverish.
I am tired.
Im tired of having to constantly defend
a culture thats a birthright and not a new age trend
Since apparently a dreamcatcher makes everyone indians
or a least have great great great grandmother who was a chiefs
daughter..
My ancestors are weeping the salt tears only the “people of the
shore” could create. Shinnecock youth develop chips saltier than
Pringles could generate
And I’m feeling so salty let this be my probate
That boldly stands before you and chants not just states
I am not Indian for you.
I’m not your injun whom you give gifts and then take away I’m not
your succotash du jour that makes you feel hip today I’m not your

n****r lipped darkie that makes it easier to say Psssshhh, she
thinks she’s native.
Im Indian for the kids who know the smell of beer before they’re old
enough to spell it For the youth who see women they love beaten,
but know they can’t tell it
For Rez dirt that knows how to permeate down to your veins
For rawhide regalias, and long winded names
that define more than a person but an entire nation I am indian for
that seventh generation

Thats all I am and all Ill ever be
A disproportioned mud-blood anomaly
But thats okay, because they don’t determine what I do Nashota,
Go gi sgk, Issaiah, Nashay
I’m doin this babies for no one but you.

Pramila: The personal is political in your poems. History is your story; you show how Native Americans and African Americans live it daily. You are a beautiful storyteller, crafting and building your narrative with dynamic and sharp words, a language of resistance. What challenges do you face in telling your stories?

Andrina: Yes. It was hard to admit growing up I spent more time around white people. I went to a private school first; we were only 2-3 people of color. Then again, to a private school in East Hampton between 13-18, and then I went to a small liberal arts college, Emerson. There were 2 other natives in the whole school. Then, I lived in the Czech Republic. I was never not accepted in the communities I went into. But the things I had to swallow or bury as part of myself, to make other people comfortable – I was sacrificing of myself and my personal comfort did not come up. I am grateful that I now have the ability to make people comfortable in my space. It took a long time to be comfortable with myself. The constant anxiety of who I am supposed to be in a given space. I’ve been able to reclaim my energy.


Closing Remarks by Usha Akella and Pramila Venkateswaran

Usha: What a remarkable evening. When we began this series of readings, we had no idea what it was going to become. Each reading becomes a reaffirmation and re-imagining of names, history, and indeed of us as the human race. It is a time for recalibration, your poetry and art tell us. Thank you, Lyla, Lucille, Adrina, Jeremy and Kamala, for showing again our vulnerability and oneness. You have inspired us to keep at our work.

Pramila: I felt goosebumps all through the readings. Thank you, Lucille, Lyla and Andrina; your poems interweave joy and beauty, the wonder of the natural world that brings healing to all of us. Jeremy, thank you for sharing your artwork and showing us your creative restoration of a dilapidated house into an artist residency in the Shinnecock Nation. It is inspiring. Thank you, Kamala, for a beautiful narrative of your personal journey based on Native American and Chicana literature and activism. Usha and I are inspired to build solidarity with all of you.

About All Poets and Artists

About Kamala Platt

Kamala is an author, artist, independent scholar and contingent professor living in South Texas and at The Meadowlark Center, Kansas, where she currently teaches creative writing, Chicana Poetry, Environmental Justice Poetics and Pen Project Prison Teaching for the School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies in Arizona State University’s Online Program. Her scholarship shares women’s environmental justice poetics creating a lens through which to understand visions of a “sustainable” future. She is preparing her manuscript Environmental Justice Poetics: Cultural Representations of Environmental Racism from Chicanas and Women in India for publication with De Gruyter in Berlin.

Her Westside Barrio, San Antonio home and nearby “Garden of Good Trouble” hosts native habitat, garden, and orchard, which offers seasonal produce (mones, loquats, nopalitos, tunas, figs, and pomegranates) to share when climate chaos does not prevail. Family roots in ecology and human rights and a cross-cultural childhood among Mennonites in Kansas, & family friends/coworkers in Orissa (Odisha), India, provides a foundation for her work. She currently works in solidarity with groups supporting immigrants and other marginalized and displaced communities. Her poetry books include Weedslovers: Ten Years in the Shadow of September, On the Line, and Gravity Prevails.

About Jeremy Dennis

Jeremy Dennis (b. 1990) holds an MFA from Penn State, he is a contemporary fine art photographer and lives and works on the Shinnecock SHI NA KAAK Indian Nation in Southampton, NY. In his work, he explores indigenous identity, culture, and assimilation. Dennis was one of 10 recipients of a 2016 Dreamstarter Grant from the national non-profit organization ‘Running Strong for American Indian Youth.’ He was awarded $10,000 to pursue his project, On This Site. Most recently, Dennis received the Creative Bursar Award from Getty Images in 2018 to continue his series Stories. He has participated in numerous residencies such as Yaddo and exhibited extensively as group and solo.

About Lucille Lang Day

Lucille is the author of four poetry chapbooks and seven full-length poetry collections, including Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place and Becoming an Ancestor. She has also co-edited two anthologies, Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California and Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California, and published two children’s books and a memoir, Married at Fourteen: A True Story. Her many honors include the Blue Light Poetry Prize, two PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Awards, the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, and eleven Pushcart Prize nominations. The founder and publisher of a small press, Scarlet Tanager Books, she lives in Oakland, California. She is of Wam-pa-no-ag, British, and Swiss/German descent. For more information, see her website: https://lucillelangday.com

About Lyla June

Lyla is an Indigenous musician, scholar and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages. Her dynamic, multi-genre presentation style has engaged audiences across the globe towards personal, collective and ecological healing. She blends studies in Human Ecology at Stanford, graduate work in Indigenous Pedagogy, and the traditional worldview she grew up with to inform her music, perspectives and solutions. Her recent performances include Indigenous Solutions Festival, Dream Warriors Heal it Tour at ASU, Arizona, Body and Earth Conference in Minneapolis; Parliament of World Religions in Canada, Unity Earth Lift Off Festival in New York City, Compassion Camp Festival in Seattle, Voices of Sacred Earth Festival in Auckland, New Zealand, California World Festival and Sister Space Festival in Maryland. Her university appearances have included University of Colorado, Denver, Seattle State University, Stanford University, Stony Brook University, and University of Oklahoma, among many others. She is currently pursuing her doctoral degree, focusing on Indigenous food systems revitalization.

About Andrina Smith

Adrina is a storyteller, poet, writer, director, and performer whose work frequently explores race and racism. She trained and performed at comedy theatres, such as the Upright Comedy Brigade and The PIT, to learn how to explore these themes in a funny way. As a Shinnecock Native and East End local, her work has been featured at Guild Hall, The Watermill Center, and in the National Organization for Women, Mid-Suffolk chapter.  She was a 2019 Watermill Center Artist-in-Residence, 2021 Native American Writers Lab fellow, and a 2021 Guild Hall Community Artist-in-Residence. As a storyteller, her work spans multiple platforms. She is a Native American Media AllIiance writer fellow and a Native American Media Alliance grant accelerator recipient. Her works were featured in Edible East End and in Native Max Magazine.

About the Directors of Matwaala

Usha Akella

Usha Akella is one of the Creative Writing editors (for Poetry) at Lucy Writers. She earned an MSt. in Creative Writing from Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, in 2018. She has authored four books of poetry, one chapbook and scripted/ produced one musical drama. Recent collections of poetry have been published by Sahitya Akademi, India’s highest literary authority, and Spinifex, for her work I Will Not Bare You Sons (2020). Usha’s work has been included in the Harper Collins Anthology of Indian English Poets; she was selected as a Cultural Ambassador for the City of Austin in 2015, and has read with a group of eminent South Asian Diaspora poets at the House of Lords in 2016. Usha’s work is published widely and she is often invited to international poetry festivals in Trois Riviere, Slovakia, Nicaragua, Macedonia, Colombia, Slovenia, India etc. She is the founder of ‘Matwaala’, the first South Asian Diaspora Poets Festival in the US. She has won literary prizes and enjoys writing quixotic prose articles and interviewing poets and artists. She is the founder of the Poetry Caravan in New York and Austin which has offered several hundreds of poetry readings to those in women’s shelters, senior homes and hospitals. In response the City of Austin proclaimed January 7th as Poetry Caravan Day. To contact Usha and find out about the Matwaala Festival, contact her via this address: reachmatwaala@gmail.com

Pramila Venkateswaran

Pramila Venkateswaran, poet laureate of Suffolk County, Long Island (2013-15) and co-director of Matwaala: South Asian Diaspora Poetry Festival, is the author of Thirtha (Yuganta Press, 2002) Behind Dark Waters (Plain View Press, 2008), Draw Me Inmost (Stockport Flats, 2009), Trace (Finishing Line Press, 2011), Thirteen Days to Let Go (Aldrich Press, 2015), Slow Ripening (Local Gems, 2016), and The Singer of Alleppey(Shanti Arts, 2018). She has performed her poetry internationally, including at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival and the Festival Internacional De Poesia De Granada. An award-winning poet, she teaches English and Women’s Studies at Nassau Community College, New York. Author of numerous essays on poetics as well as creative non-fiction, she is also the 2011 Walt Whitman Birthplace Association Long Island Poet of the Year.

About Matwaala

The name Matwaala evokes bonding and bonhomie, fun and funk, creative adventure and freedom, artistic assertiveness and non-conformity. A Hindi/Urdu word, it was the name of a radical literary magazine edited by the poet Nirala from Kolkata a century ago. Matwaala is used for someone who is drunk, but the word is used more often in a transferred sense, for someone who is a free spirit. 

Concerned about the visibility of South Asian poets in the American poetry scene, university reading series, and representation in anthologies and syllabi, we were inspired to initiate a collective. Though the core mission may be perceived as idealistic or even somber, Matwaala, materialized in a weirdly magical way in Austin. The idea of a poetry festival emerged after an editorial project we co-edited for www.museindia.com.  The issue focused on a project involving Diaspora artists and poets that generated the idea for sustained collaboration and initiatives. A festival was its magnification, and appeared, erected on a shoestring budget propelled by enthusiasm and faith in 2015. The first festival/collective drew to its fold a group of poets, Saleem Peeradina, Pramila Venkateswaran, Ravi Shankar, Sasha Parmasad and Varshs Saraiya Shah. Joie de vivre, friendship and a sense of community have become the hallmark of the festival that seeks to establish a paradigm based not on hierarchies but on solidarity, offering readings by established and emerging poets, youth forums, papers and panel discussions.

​In 2019 Matwaala launched its website, branding, and e-anthology, hosted readings in NYU, Hunter College and NCC. It received sponsorship from Poets & Writers and hosted South Asian diaspora poets from the UK.

Lucy Writers would like to express their heartfelt thanks to Usha Akella and Pramila Venkateswaran, and all at Matwaala for allowing us to all work in their Poets of Colour series; we would also like to extend our heartfelt thanks to all poets in this current edition, whose work is breathtakingly brilliant: Kamala Platt, Lucille Lang Day, Lyla June and Adrina Smith, thank you all immensely.

Feature image is a detail from the promotional poster by Anannya Akella

Posted in Creative Writing, PoetryTagged: Andrina Smith, Indigenous peoples, Jeremy Dennis, Kamala Platt, Lucille Lang Day, Matwaala, Native American Poets, Pramila Venkateswaran, Usha Akella, women poets

Post navigation

Weathering Inertia: RA Summer Exhibition 2022
You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Awaeke Emezi – a bold romance novel with a poetic twist
  • Magic by Moonlight: Kirsten Glass’ Night-Scented Stock at Karsten Schubert, London
    By Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
  • Picturing Loss: On Francesca Woodman by Lisa Goodrum
    By Lisa Goodrum
  • Beyond the Confines of Nell Brookfield’s Canvas
    By Rachel Ashenden
  • About us
  • Writers
  • About Lucy Cavendish
  • Write for us
  • Submissions and Contact
  • Special editions
Top