Layli Long Soldier

Layli Long Soldier is an Oglala Lakota poet and writer whose work moves between lyric poetry, document, and political critique. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, she grew up across several US states and studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe and at Bard College. Her debut collection Whereas (2017) was published by Graywolf Press and became one of the most celebrated American poetry collections of its decade. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and the National Book Award for Poetry. The collection is a formal and political response to the 2009 Congressional Apology to Native peoples of the United States, using the legal and legislative language of the apology itself as a structural scaffold for poems that investigate sovereignty, land, and Indigenous identity. Long Soldier previously published a chapbook, Chromosomory (2010). She has received a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, and a Whiting Award (2016). Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The American Poetry Review, and many anthologies. She teaches in the MFA program at Syracuse University and continues to be active in Indigenous literary and political communities. Whereas has been widely taught in universities and high schools across the United States.