"Kinship is the First Art"

Award-winning poet and author Layli Long Soldier will offer a keynote address on Friday, May 29 as part of the second annual Kroc Institute Strategic Peacebuilding Academy, to take place May 26-30. The Academy is a thematically driven, multi-day intensive experience for peace practitioners, scholars, and those working in policy communities around the globe. Takeaways for participants include skills-building, networking and best practices related to strategic peacebuilding.

Complementing the Academy’s ‘Modes of Healing’ theme this year, Long Soldier will give an artist talk on kinship, as both a responsibility and an art practice. Using photos and poems, she will showcase kinship with family and human relatives, and likewise, with the land and all of creation. What language helps humans create kinship and relationship? How does kinship with the land heal people? How might this feeling of connection inform other endeavors? In a time that demands awareness and activism, perhaps humankind’s first steps begin with the art of being a relative.

Long Soldier is the author of the collection “Whereas” (Graywolf Press, 2017), which won the National Books Critics Circle award, the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her poems and critical work have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The New York Times, American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review, and BOMB, among many others. In 2021, she received an Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature and the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize in the United Kingdom.

Long Soldier's keynote presentation is free and open to the public. A book signing for "Whereas" will follow.

Originally published at kroc.nd.edu.