Melissa Kwasny and ML Smoker will serve simultaneously as Montana Poet Laureates for 2019–2021. Kwasny is editor of Wesleyan’s popular poetics anthology Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950.

Kwansy teaches English at Carroll College in Helena, Montana and previously taught at Eastern Washington University, the University of Wyoming, and the University of Montana. She is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Where Outside the Body is the Soul Today and Pictograph.

Mandy Smoker Broaddus (ML Smoker) belongs to the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes of the Fort Peck Reservation in north-eastern Montana. She currently works for Education Northwest as a Practice Expert in Indian Education.  Her current work focuses on the work of equity and inclusion for Native education in the Pacific Northwest. Her first book of poetry is Another Attempt at Rescue. She and Kwasny co-edited the anthology I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poets in Defense of Global Human Rights.

Read more about the poet laureates here!