Join us in the shop Tuesday night for a much needed reading by two fine, productive and relevant American poets. Together, they have just released a chapbook, DEER /A-WI (Mammoth Press, 2024).

Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate 2007-09, is author of House of Grace, House of Blood, archive-based poetry from the University of Arizona Press. Other recent publications are The Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival (University of Nebraska Press); Wing (Red Mountain); and Casino Bestiary (Spartan). Low is a founding board member of Indigenous Nations Poets, former board president of AWP, and literary programmer for The 222  an arts organization in northern California. At Haskell Indian Nations University she founded the creative writing program. She teaches for Baker University’s School of Professional and Graduate Studies. She blogs, reviews, and co-publishes Mammoth Publications, which specializes in Indigenous American authors. American Book Review wrote of her Jackalope (Red Mountain Press 2016): “an engaging and humorous read, one that reveals a great deal about the parallel, contemporary Native America that exists and thrives in ways largely invisible to many other Americans.” Other recent books are Jigsaw Puzzling: Essays (Meadowlark 2022), A Casino Bestiary (Spartan Press) and poetry from Red Mountain Press: Wing (2021), Shadow Light (2017 Editor’s Choice Award) and Mélange Block (2014). She posts commentary about poets and writers on her blog. Members of the Associated Writers and Writing Programs elected her to the national board in 2008-13, and she served as president of the AWP board 2011-2012. She is a founding board member of Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po). The Poetry Foundation selected samples of her work for its site.

Kim Shuck served as San Francisco’s seventh Poet Laureate, from 2017-2021. In 2019, Kim was awarded an inaugural National Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, and a PEN Oakland Censorship Award. Her poetry draws on her multiethnic background which includes Polish and Cherokee heritage, and her experiences as a lifelong resident of San Francisco. Her most recent book of poetry, Pick a Garnet to Sleep In, was published in 2024, and her book of essays, Noodle, Rant, Tangent, was published in 2022. In her term as Poet Laureate, she hosted scores of free poetry and art workshops for all ages at neighborhood libraries and schools and worked closely with San Francisco Public Library and the San Francisco Arts Commission to launch major citywide initiatives to honor Native American Indigenous Peoples’ heritage.

Kim embraces the fool and jester qualities of being a modern poet and artist. She is a devotee of San Francisco, whose hills she wanders nearly always on foot. Her maternal grandparents met at the Polish Hall on Shotwell and she spent many hours with her mother and grandmother wandering the Mission St. Miracle Mile, taking books out of the Mission Branch library and watching aquarium fish on the ground floor of what used to be Hale’s. She firmly believes in carrying a bubble wand, keys, pen and notebook and cats cradle string at all times.