The American Indian Culture and Research Journal is excited to announce an addition to our review practices. For decades, our journal has published scholarly essays and commentaries. We have allowed poetry submissions only as items within special issues. These poems were peer reviewed, but only by the same peer reviewers who were reviewing the contents of the full special issues. Due to the increasing number of poetry submissions within the special issues, the journal is honored to have four distinguished poets join our inaugural Poets’ Circle. Moving forward, poems submitted as part of special issues will go through a peer review process akin to poetry and fiction publishing. With this Poets’ Circle, we aim to provide our authors and readers a commitment to care. We welcome our first circle of poetry reviewers, four stellar Indigenous poets who have already made their marks in Indigenous studies, poetry, and fiction.
Kenzie Allen is a Haudenosaunee poet and multimodal artist and author of Cloud Missives (Tin House, 2024). An Assistant Professor in Creative Writing and Indigenous Literatures at York University in Toronto, she is the recipient of a James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets, a 92NY Discovery Prize, and fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Aspen Writers Foundation, and In-Na-Po (Indigenous Nations Poets). She is a first-generation descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin.
Esther G. Belin is the author of two poetry books and coeditor of The Diné Reader. She teaches in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Department at Fort Lewis College and the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She was raised in the Los Angeles area, where she learned to transplant and strengthen her Diné worldview with the help of her parents and the resilient Indian community that remains there. She is Tłógí born for Tó’díchʼiiʼnii and lives just east of the Dibé Ntsaa mountain range on the Colorado side of the four corners.
Casandra López is a California Indian (Tongva/Luiseño) and Chicana writer who has received support from CantoMundo, Bread Loaf, and Tin House. She’s the author of the poetry collection Brother Bullet and has been selected for residencies with Storyknife, Hedgebrook, and Macdowell. Her memoir-in-progress, A Few Notes on Grief, was granted a 2019 James W. Ray Venture Project Award. She is an Assistant Professor at UC San Diego and is a Tongva language learner.
Deborah A. Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation, with Santa Ynez Chumash ancestry. She is author of Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, and four poetry collections (currently finishing a fifth collection, maxana chempapisi: Blood Writing). Former Thomas H. Broadus Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, she now lives in Eugene, Oregon with her wife, writer Margo Solod, and two large rescue dogs.
We are honored that these distinguished writers are joining our review team!
