Denise Low

Denise (Dotson) Low is 2007-2009 Kansas Poet Laureate, with 30+ published books of poetry, personal essays, and scholarship. Her writings explore interactions of historic and natural time with individual imagination. Red Mountain Press (Santa Fe/Seattle) awarded her the Editor's Choice Award for Shadow Light. They also published Wing: Poems (2021), Jackalope (short fiction, 2016) and Melange Block (poetry, 2014). The Turtle's Beating Heart, a memoir about her Lenape and Munsee Delaware grandfather, is from University of Nebraska Press. The Poetry Foundation features her work. She is a 2008-2013 member the national board of the Associated Writers & Writing Programs and president 2011-12. For 25 years she taught at Haskell Indian Nations University, where she founded the creative writing program. She has been visiting professor at the University of Kansas and University of Richmond. Currently she teaches courses for Baker University's School of Professional and Graduate Studies. Her essays about Black Mountain-related poets Kenneth Irby and Ronald Johnson are online (Jacket2 and Numéro Cinq). She has awards from the NEH, Lannan Foundation, The Newberry Library, Academy of American Poets, and Ks. Arts Commission. Her academic books include prose about Native and settler literatures of the middle plains region. She co-authored Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors with Ramon Powers (University of Nebraska Press, 2020, Kansas Notable Book). Her web site is www.deniselow.net, and she maintains a writing-related blog, http://deniselow@blogspot.com. She also is on Twitter. The Kansas City Star had this to say about her _Ghost Stories_: "Let Denise Low, a former Kansas poet laureate (2007-2009), tell you tales of the Great Plains with her recent book "Ghost Stories of the New West." Her poems take readers through the natural tapestries and landscapes that we Midwesterners are lucky to have. With the poem "Trailhead," we observe the plight of travelers on the Oregon Trail: "Watch for travelers/ who risk what they have/ for what might happen." Read "On Thompson River" or "Flint Hills Twilight" to the one you love and let their vision of this land and the hopes that endure within it resonate." "Jackalope Walks into an Indian Bar" is a Pushcart Prize nominee (Cream City Review 2014).