Poetry Reading | Layli Long Soldier

Layli Long Soldier is the author of the collections We (Graywolf, 2026), and Whereas (Graywolf Press, 2017), which won the National Book Critics Circle award, the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She also wrote the chapbook Chromosomory (Q Ave Press, 2010), and her work has been widely anthologized in books like Native Voices (Tupelo Press, 2019) and The Larger Voice (NACF, 2022).

On Whereas, poet Dean Rader remarks, “What is especially compelling about Long Soldier is that she not only undermines language, she undermines form as well. Elsewhere, I have written about the importance of ‘compositional resistance’ for Native poets. By this, I refer to how a poet composes her poem, the form it takes, how it looks on the page, how its typography expresses itself. Whereas is a masterful example of compositional resistance.”

Her poems and critical work have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The New York Times, American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review, BOMB, American Indian Journal of Culture and Research, PEN America, and The Brooklyn Rail, among many others.

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 and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2018. In 2021, she received an Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature and the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize in the UK.

Long Soldier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Bard College. She teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and serves as the 2024-25 Endowed Chair at Texas State University. She resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.