October 15, 2026

6:30p - 7:30p | Author Talk

Author Talk Tickets: $10  |  MMAM Members + Students: $5

This event is part of MMAM’s Third Thursday event series.

Presented in partnership with the Minnesota Humanities Center.

Join us for an engaging and interactive hybrid online and onsite poetry craft talk and workshop, featuring Winona’s poet laureates in conversation with Minnesota Poet Laureate, Gwen Nell Westerman. Part presentation, part participatory workshop, Westerman will facilitate a night of readings and creative engagements on the subject of water and waterways.  Whether you are a seasoned poet, just beginning, or a sideline poetry supporter, don’t miss this opportunity to write and learn more about community centered, collaborative poetry.

The Poet Laureate of Minnesota promotes and encourages appreciation of and engagement with poetry. Through poetry, the Poet Laureate celebrates the state’s rich and vibrant cultural heritages, engages young  people, and inspires all generations of poets and readers.

After receiving recommendations from Minnesota Humanities Center (MHC), the Governor must appoint a state Poet Laureate (Minnesota Statutes 2017 4.60). The person appointed as Poet Laureate continues to serve in this position until the Governor appoints a new Poet Laureate. In 2021, Governor Tim Walz appointed Gwen Nell Westerman Poet Laureate of Minnesota.

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About the Poets:

Gwen Nell Westerman

Gwen Nell Westerman is a poet, visual artist, and scholar. Her roots are deep in the landscape of the tallgrass prairie and reveal themselves in her art and writing. She is an enrolled citizen of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, and her father’s family is from the Heipa District. Her mother’s family is from the Flint District of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Neither of her parents spoke English when they were sent as small children to boarding schools in Oklahoma and South Dakota. Singing and writing for as long as she can remember, Gwen understands from experience the important ways language and the land shape who we are.

Westerman’s roots are deep in the landscape of the tall grass prairie, and reveal themselves in her art and writing through the languages and traditions of her family, including Dakota and English. She has two poetry collections Songs, Blood Deep (2023) and Follow the Blackbirds (2013). Her poems are included in the permanent exhibit “Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories” at the Field Museum in Chicago, and have been published in Yellow Medicine Review (Fall 2022), When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, edited by Joy Harjo (2020), POETRY (June 2018), and New Poets of Native Nations: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, edited by Heid E. Erdrich (2018).

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