winner of the 2023 National Poetry Series
selected by Jacqueline Trimble
about kinsale ⊹ ࣪ ˖
Kinsale Drake (Diné) is a writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Best New Poets, Poets.org, Poetry Northwest, The Slowdown, Black Warrior Review, Teen Vogue, MTV, NYLON, TIME, NPR, and elsewhere. Her first book, THE SKY WAS ONCE A DARK BLANKET (University of Georgia Press, 2024), won the 2023 National Poetry Series. She teaches mental health and storytelling programming for Native youth as the director of NDN Girls Book Club and lives in Nashville, TN.
Author photo by Anna Letson.
⊹ ࣪ ˖ FULL BIO HERE. ⊹ ࣪ ˖
Listen
poetry unbound
Season 9, Episode 1: In Kinsale Drake’s poem “Put on that KTNN,” she writes about driving to a hometown as a familiar station crackles to life on the car radio. From this corner of America, she creates her own country music — of Navajo voices alongside Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn, of drumbeats and guitar licks, of things wrought by nature and things made by humans, all of them rooted in the desert sand.
the slowdown
“One of the reasons why I'm drawn to poetry is because it invites a scale of seeing that sometimes might go undetected. Your work kind of allows folks to engage in what might be hidden.
Today’s poem invites that same scale of seeing and care, not only across universes, but also throughout time.” — Major Jackson on “Theme for the Nautical Cowboy.”
₊˚⊹♡ order the sky was once a dark blanket
₊˚⊹♡ goodreads
This debut collection is a book of time, lineage, dreams, and all the cosmic beauty we hold in our 'language full of light.'
—Jake Skeets, author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers
The ferocity of the push back against this cultural violence is equaled by the beauty of poems which are as astonishing as they are seductive, announcing Drake as a literary force and, in the words of her ‘Wax Cylinder,’ ‘a woman remembering her place among the stars.’
—Jacqueline Allen Trimble, author of How to Survive the Apocalypse
2024 Book Drop
Yahoo! in the know
Check out NDN Girls Book Club in Yahoo News and In the Know, profiled by Laura Clark (Mvskoke/Cherokee).