Join the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) from Sunday, January 4, through Wednesday, January 7, 2026, as the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (MFACW) program presents the January Evening Reading Series. Visiting writers, acclaimed for their work in fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and screenwriting, will read and perform alongside several of our full-time mentors. Each evening will engage audiences with poetry, memoir, or fiction from some of today’s most vibrant and vital voices.
We are pleased to invite the public to attend the January Evening Reading Series events, held in the CLE Commons Room 201 on the IAIA campus at 83 Avan Nu Po Road, Santa Fe, NM 87508.
All readings are open to the public and free of charge, and will be held in person and virtually via livestream on the IAIA website and Facebook. See links below to watch the livestreams.
We hope to see you there! For questions, please contact IAIA MFACW Program Coordinator Veronica Bustamante at
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Evening Reading Series Events
Sunday, January 4 at 6:00 pm (MST): Readings by Joseph V. Lee (Aquinnah Wampanoag), Sherwin Bitsui (Diné), and Chip Livingston (Mixed-blood Creek)—CLE Commons, IAIA Campus
Monday, January 5 at 6:00 pm (MST): Readings by Kim Blaeser (White Earth Nation), Pam Houston, and Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota Nation)—CLE Commons, IAIA Campus
Tuesday, January 6 at 6:00 pm (MST): Readings by Arthur Sze, current Poet Laureate of the United States (Second generation Chinese American) and Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo)—Performing Arts and Fitness Center, IAIA Campus
Wednesday, January 7 at 6:00 pm (MST): Readings by Shane Hawk (Cheyenne & Arapaho Tribes of OK), Bojan Louis (Diné), and Kelli Jo Ford (Cherokee Nation)—CLE Commons, IAIA Campus
Biographies
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 five poetry collections, including Copper Yearning, Apprenticed to Justice, and Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance. Her scholarly work includes the monograph Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition, and she edited Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry and Stories Migrating Home. Her photographs, picto-poems, and ekphrastic pieces have appeared in exhibits such as Visualizing Sovereignty, and No More Stolen Sisters. Blaeser, an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, is an enrolled member of White Earth Nation who grew up on the reservation. A Professor Emerita at UW–Milwaukee and 2024 Mackey Chair in Creative Writing at Beloit College, her accolades include a Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. Blaeser lives in rural Wisconsin and, for portions of each year, in a water-access cabin near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota. Her book Ancient Light is forthcoming from University of Arizona Press in 2024.
Pam Houston is the author of the memoir Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, as well as two novels, Contents May Have Shifted and Sight Hound, two collections of short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, and a collection of essays, A Little More About Me, all published by W.W. Norton. Her stories have been selected for volumes of The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Travel Writing, and Best American Short Stories of the Century among other anthologies. She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA Award for contemporary fiction, the Evil Companions Literary Award, and several teaching awards. In addition to teaching in the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Houston is Professor of English at UC Davis and co-founder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing by Writers, which puts on between seven and ten writers’ gatherings per year in places as diverse as Boulder, Colorado, Tomales Bay, California and Chamonix, France. She lives at 9,000 feet above sea level on a 120-acre homestead near the headwaters of the Rio Grande. A book of letters between Pam and environmental activist Amy Irvine will be published by Torrey House Press in October 2020.
Layli Long Soldier holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and an MFA from Bard College. Her poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The New York Times, The American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review, BOMB, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an NACF National Artist Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award. She has also received the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Award, the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award, a 2021 Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and the 2021 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize in the UK. She is the author of Chromosomory (Q Avenue Press, 2010) and WHEREAS (Graywolf Press, 2017). She is currently pursuing a master’s in law at the University of New Mexico. She resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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 2026 academic year is February 1 at 5:00 pm (MST).
https://iaia.edu/event/2026-mfacw-january-evening-reading-series-blaeser-houston-soldier/
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