Update: Layli is unable to attend due to health reasons. Mentor will be Linda Hogan.

The Oak Lake Writers Society is pleased to announce Award-winning Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier as this year’s annual retreat mentor.

The annual retreat of the Oak Lake Writers’ Society for tribal writers will be July 31 to August 2, 2019, at SDSU’s Oak Lake Field Station, near Astoria, SD.

This year’s retreat focus will be poetry and publishing and culminate in finalizing pieces for the upcoming Oak Lake Writers Society anthology on Indian Humor.

Layli Long Soldier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA with honors from Bard College. She is the author of the chapbook Chromosomory (2010) and the full-length collection Whereas (2017), which won the National Books Critics Circle award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been a contributing editor to Drunken Boat and poetry editor at Kore Press; in 2012, her participatory installation, Whereas We Respond, was featured on the Pine Ridge Reservation. In 2015, Long Soldier was awarded a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. She was awarded a Whiting Writer’s Award in 2016.

The public reading and potluck for the SDSU and Brookings Community will be held Thursday, August 1, at 6 p.m. at the Field Station.

For more information or to RSVP, please contact us through the website at olws.squarespace.com or at oaklaketribalwriters@gmail.com.

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