For Native American Heritage Month, observed annually during the month of November, we asked our member presses and literary magazines to share with us some of the books and magazines they recommend reading in celebration.
Poetry
Copper Yearning by Kimberly Blaeser
Holy Cow! Press | 2019
ISBN: 9781513645612
Blaeser’s fourth collection “invests itself in a compassionate dual vision—bearing witness to the lush beauty of our intricately woven environments and to the historical and contemporary perils that threaten them.”
Glassful of Prayer by Anthony Ceballos
Trio House Press | 2026
ISBN: 9781949487534
Ceballos’s debut collection “wrestles with questions of identity against the backdrop of loss, heritage, family ties, addiction, nature, and urban Minneapolis.”
Sundress Publications | 2026
ISBN: 978-1-951979-97-3
“In an unflinching feminist reclamation,” Doe’s tarot deck-inspired poetry collection “rewrites each card’s colonial symbolism with Cherokee history, cosmology, and worldview.”
Dark Traffic by Joan Naviyuk Kane
University of Pittsburgh Press | 2021
ISBN: 9780822966623
This collection “creates landmarks through language, by which its speakers begin to describe traumas in order to survive and move through them.”
with snow pouring southward past the window by Joan Naviyuk Kane
University of Pittsburgh Press | 2026
ISBN: 9780822967668
In Kane’s latest collection, “public and personal archives work with literary translations across several dialects of the Inupiaq language, and re-complexify Arctics at a time when empires once again seem interested in flattening and erasing.”
Trio House Press | 2025
ISBN: 9781949487404
Kim’s debut collection “embodies the meaning of the word ‘mele’—a Hawaiian song or chant traditionally used to preserve history through the oral tradition.”
Museum of False Starts by Chip Livingston
Gival Press | 2010
ISBN: 978-1928589495
According to Joy Harjo, in this poetry collection Livingston “makes a distinct trail of poems, through Mvskoke ancestral country, through the maze of American myths, through bars and parties at the edge, through disturbance and awe.”
In the Hands of the River by Lucien Darjeun Meadows
Hub City Press | 2022
ISBN: 978-1-938235-99-3
In the Hands of the River “subverts traditional poetic forms to show how a childhood for a queer boy of both Cherokee and European heritage happens within and outside dominant narratives of Appalachia.”
Blood Wolf Moon by Elise Paschen
Red Hen Press | 2025
ISBN: 9781636282084
These poems grapple with “a dark period of American history, ‘The Reign of Terror,’ when outsiders murdered individual members of the Osage for their oil headrights.”
Through a Red Place by Rebecca Pelky
Perugia Press | 2021
ISBN: 9780997807653
Written in English and Mohegan, this story-in-poems “assembles the author’s research into her Native and non-Native heritage in the land now known as Wisconsin” and “relates narratives of people who converged on and impacted this space in myriad ways.”
Fat for Our Stories by Vivian Faith Prescott
Green Linden Press | 2024
ISBN: 978-1-961834-01-9
According to Mary Catherine Martin, this collection is “an intimate and authentic portrait of the deep, meaningful relationship between wild salmon and people in Alaska—and of the ways the rhythms of that relationship are changing.”
Lost Horse Press | 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9883166-4-5
According to M. L. Smoker, in this collection “the inner heart commotion of Henry Real Bird is poised in a physical and metaphysical terrain marked by the history, culture, language and identity of his Apsaalooke nation.”
Dragonfly Weather by Lois Red Elk
Lost Horse Press | 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9883166-5-2
According to Tiffany Midge, in this collection Red Elk “keeps to the tasks which enable Wiconi—the good way of life: keep busy, be thankful, pray.”
Proud Roads: Poems in the Aftermath of Hurricane Helene by Kelly Riedesel
Loblolly Press | 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9900730-8-1
In this collection Riedesel “chronicles the storm’s long wake: the hundred-year-old elders uprooted overnight, the X marks of rescue teams still on front doors, the way ‘every gust of wind, every snapping branch’ startles the body long after the rain stops.”
Milkweed Editions | 2026
ISBN: 9781639551521
Skeets’s second collection “patiently tracks the impacts of climate change on the land and its myriad inhabitants.”
Reconciliations by Mistee St. Clair
Empty Bowl Press | 2026
ISBN: 979-8-9952981-0-6
In this collection, St. Clair “writes of the loss of a parent, first through adoption and the cultural and ancestral loss that follows, and then, in a powerful sequence of poems, of the loss of her birth father to addiction and death.”
Indian Ice: Indigenous Witness by Deidra Suwanee Dees
Get Fresh Books Publishing | 2026
ISBN: 9798234199669
“Traversing a thirty-year span from 1994 to 2024,” this collection “addresses ice-cold colonial resistance alongside the fiery allurement of nature and nurture—decolonizing antidotes.”
Arcana Poetry Press | 2026
ISBN: 978-1-968451-09-7
“A swooning, lyrical meditation on longing,” this poetry collection “explores the intoxicating pull of limerence—where devotion meets fixation and desire thrives on everything just out of reach.”
The Choctaw Word for Crazy by Wakaya Wells
Holy Cow! Press | 2027
ISBN: 9781666406924
In these poems, Wells “captures and sustains the contradictions inherent in our existence: what we label as crazy, what we worship and what we deny.”
Nonfiction & Multi-Genre Works
A Generous Spirit: Selected Work by Beth Brant
Sinister Wisdom | 2019
ISBN: 978-1-77133-685-7
Edited by Janice Gould, this selection of Brant’s work is a “portrait of survival and empathy at the intersection of Native American and lesbian experience.”
Feminist Press | 2023
ISBN: 9781558612938
This memoir explores “how Indigenous activist strategies can be a crucial roadmap for contemporary truth and healing.”
Seven Stories Press | 2008
ISBN: 9781583227817
The updated edition of this book—“one of the founding texts of the anticivilization movement when it was first published in 1978”—includes a new chapter by the author and an introduction by Derrick Jensen.
Graywolf Press | 2026
ISBN: 978-1-64445-417-6
In these “poems, lyric essays, and her own visual artworks presented in full color,” Long Soldier “creates unique spaces of collaboration, mentorship, and shared knowledge.”
SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide by Cannupa Hanska Luger
Ayin Press | 2025
ISBN: 9781961814264
This hybrid work “seeks to reimagine Indigenous life and culture in a postcolonial world where space exploration has reduced and reconfigured the earth’s population.”
Native Voices: Indigenous American Poetry, Craft and Conversations
Tupelo Press | 2019
ISBN: 978-1946482181
This anthology, edited by CMarie Fuhrman and Dean Rader, offers “a diverse collection of stories told by Indigenous writers about themselves, their histories, and their present.”
Positively Uncivilized by Rena Priest
Raven Chronicles Press | 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9914032-3-8
This essay collection “examines the impact of human inhabitants on planet earth” and includes “personal accounts of the deterioration of salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest and the loss of Indigenous history.”
Feral House | 2025
ISBN: 9781627311571
Featuring archival film posters, set photos, and other images, Rhodes’s essay collection “examines dozens of movies and tv series, sold to the unsuspecting public as documentaries.”
Seven Stories Press | 2020
ISBN: 9781609809720
Focused on “race, culture, and the tenuous construction of identity,” these twelve essays explore “how these concepts have evolved, often by colonialist force, in the volatile history of the United States.”
Fiction
Agoodoodaa: Let’s Snare a Rabbit by Miskwaa Anang (Erik Martin Redix)
Hidden Timber Books | 2026
ISBN: 979-8-9873517-3-4
This bilingual children’s book “fosters language-learning in young and old alike, while connecting readers to Ojibwe harvest traditions in a multi-generational setting.”
Bitter Over Sweet by Melissa Llanes Brownlee
Santa Fe Writers Project | 2025
ISBN: 9781951631512
These stories “of resilience offer readers a glimpse behind the bird-of-paradise curtains and a look at what’s not in the travel magazines.”
Under Nushagak Bluff by Mia C. Heavener
Red Hen Press | 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59709-809-0
Heavener’s novel is “a generational saga of strong, stubborn Yup’ik women living in a village that has been divided between the new and the old, the bluff side and the missionary side, the cannery side and the subsistence side.”
Graywolf Press | 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64445-203-5
Set in and around Flagstaff, the stories in Sinking Bell “depict violent collisions of love, cultures, and racism.”
The Divining Season by Gwendolyn Paradice
Aunt Lute Books | 2026
ISBN: 978-1951874124
In this novel, eleven-year-old Emily’s “arrival in Larissa, Texas, changes the search for the missing children and the way the women of Larissa relate to each other.”
Pour One for the Devil by Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr.
Lanternfish Press | 2024
ISBN: 978-1941360712
According to Jeremy Robert Johnson, this horror novella “dives headlong into all the liquor, lies, and long-simmering moral horrors one could hope for from a Southern Gothic, and finds unique gravity in its lively layering of American atrocity.”
Literary Magazines
A Poetry Playlist for Native American Heritage Month 2026
Shō Poetry Journal | 2026
This playlist features poems by four Indigenous US poets recently published in Shō Poetry Journal, including Cheyenne C. Fletcher, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Casandra López, and Ruby Hansen Murray.
“Moonlit Slabs of Light on a Hernandez Church Floor” by Crisosto Apache
South Broadway Press | 2022
This poem begins, “a cemetery / is lit by the light / of the moon, while time / stands seemingly still, / lamenting a / timeless value…”
“It Took Us by Surprise” by Connor Braaten
Behemoth Magazine | 2025
This story begins, “It took us by surprise… A few days ago, the city looked much as it always had, its familiar streets enveloped by the Pacific fog and the familiar hum of coastal California.”
Tahoma Literary Review | 2026
This essay begins, “I had just gotten off the ferry in Seattle that day. For once, the sun was shining, poking out from behind the clouds like a mischievous child hiding in the Walmart clothing racks.”
beestung | 2024
The poem “Road to Deadhorse” begins, “Blind burst of a setting sun, / driving one-way / through an alley, / an asphalt afterlife, / boulevard of dead-end dreams.”
“Sequential Galleries” by Laura Da’
ANMLY | 2026
This poem begins, “I. Alert to anachronistic threats, / the triad of stuffed swans remain / forever vigilant behind the glass / in a bespoke coastal marsh.”
from The Lost Journals of Sacajewea by Debra Magpie Earling
Dark Matter: Women Witnessing | 2015
This poem begins, “in the fog-brutal days when backs of buffalo scab with ice / and the weak calves / fall to attendant wolves. / Lewis and Clark are shooting game…”
“Where to? / Naqmuŋaġataqpin?” by Joan Naviyuk Kane
The Hopkins Review | 2023
This essay begins, “To amaq a child is to carry them in your parka as you go about your day: gathering clean snow to melt for clean water, retrieving or redistributing food from a cache…”
“Plantcestors” by Rebecca Kinkade-Black
ALOCASIA | 2025
This poem begins, “Aren’t we all just seeds to start? / Seeds planted in the eyes of our creator / Progenitor of our existence…”
“How to Grow a Home” by Sasha LaPointe
Orion | 2022
This essay begins, “I’ve never been a gardener. Growing up on a reservation in the Pacific Northwest, I never had to be. My backyard was lush with old growth.”
“Museum Correspondence” by Beth Piatote
Epiphany | 2022
This poem begins, “Founded in 1901, the Museum of Anthropology / We write regarding / is dedicated to the study of cultures / the missing remains of our ancestor, a child.”
ANMLY | 2020
According to editor tanner menard, this folio—featuring Travis Hedge Coke, Noʻu Revilla, and more—seeks to “gently weave a space where Indigenous poets & artists who exist outside of heteronormative realms of gender & sexuality could reveal their wisdom & share their hearts.”
ALOCASIA | 2025
This poem begins, “I stare the yarrow down— / enviously, I watch it turn the awful dirt to oxygen.”
“The Edge of the Sacred” by Jake Skeets
Orion | 2023
This essay begins, “I was at Pizza Edge in Chinle, Arizona, contemplating the idea of the sacred. The air was warm for late autumn. I recognize this weather…”
The Antonym Magazine | 2021
The poem “Stars in the Stone” begins, “Rainwater caught in the fold of a leaf / I blow on the surface / Just a small wish / Remember / What unseen thing blows wishes across my surface?”
beestung | 2021
The poem “Matriarchs-To-Be In Mourning” begins, “driving around town with my best friend, showing each other the songs we love, the sounds that make the world sweeter. both of us sad…”
“Everything returns to salt” by Anangookwe Wolf
Adi Magazine | 2026
This poem begins, “I. our salted bodies were once sewn together with moose sinew / cladded in lichen | tongues parched / far beyond the estuary | beyond the brackish confines…”
