⋆˚✿˖°ORDER kinsale’s debut⋆˚✿˖°
⋆˚✿˖° Creation stories. The cyclical nature of time and memory. Country music. The blues of our loved ones. All these things collide + more in The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket, a dazzling & tender collection of poems that traverses the Southwest landscape with a keen and loving ear. ⋆˚✿˖°
˚₊‧☆ poems & Awards˚₊‧☆
Photo by Jireh Deng, LA Times.
˚₊‧☆ published work˚₊‧☆
note: funds from published work received from all magazines will go to Palestinian and other Indigenous mutual aid organizations for the foreseeable future. this is a personal decision, not reflective of any institutions.
“Ram’s Head, Blue Morning Glory, 1938,” winner of the Academy of American Poets Prize, Vanderbilt University, 2025.
“So many elements come together to lend a poem its particular grace. The most striking poems, to me, are those whose language seems to reveal a balancing act between authorial intention and a sacred communion with the poem itself. This poem embraces just that as it unfurls itself, couplet after couplet, paced by striking line breaks, magnificently crafted images of (seemingly) simplistic moments, and the tensions built by and hanging between words (“tea” follows “blood”, “gaping” follows “creamy”). It feels painted onto the page, brushstroke by brushstroke–until it arrives at the lightning bolt of a final line which lands, stuns, and forces us back to the title with a fresh and harrowing understanding.”
—Marissa Davis, judge and author of End of Empire
“Tennessee Birding” and “Warning signs of a coming disaster,” Poet Lore, forthcoming 2025, ed. by Kenzie Allen.
“Visiting Pahá Sapa” and “In the season of the Aurora Borealis,” swamp pink, May 2025.
“Pottery Fragment #2” and “Naal’eełi / Drake is the name for a male duck,” Poetry, March 2025.
“good fire” and “after Sacred Water,” NATURE OF OUR TIMES, January 2025.
“Making a Monument Valley,” The Atlantic, September 2024.
“Boy of Lightning, Girl of Fire;” “surviving a breakup, old Indian style;” “An Altar for Lost Girls;” Reprints of “Good Fire,” “Wax Cylinder,” “How to be born in a country that measures your blood in their hands,” “You survive the end of the world…,” “everything is weird in the NE,” and “song for the black cat…,” Only Poems, Poet of the Week, July 2024.
“First Date,” finalist for the James Welch Poetry Prize, in Poetry Northwest, Fall/Winter 2024.
“Baby Carrots,” Fugue Literary Journal, Spring 2024.
AS SHE RISES: POETS PAY TRIBUTE TO THE COLORADO RIVER BASIN
“Theme for the Nautical Cowboy,” winner of the 2023 Adroit Poetry Prize. Reprints of “EVERYTHING IS STRANGER IN THE NE BECAUSE THERE ARE NO MEMORIALS, ONLY NDN NAMES” ; “Navajo Mountain”
“The Adroit Prizes are awarded annually to two students of secondary or undergraduate status. We’re fortunate to receive exceptional work from emerging writers in high school and college, and the best of the best will be recognized by the Adroit Prizes.”
—The Adroit Journal
“Alabama, 1992,” The Chapter House Journal (IAIA).
“You survive the end of the world in Kayenta, AZ with your mother,” Third Coast, finalist for the Third Coast Poetry Prize.
“Navajo-English Dictionary,” winner of the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Cutthroat Journal (2023).
“Navajo Mountain,” Peripheries (Harvard University), Winter 2023.
“Theme for the Nautical Cowboy,” THE SLOWDOWN Podcast with Major Jackson:
“One of the reasons why I'm drawn to poetry is because it invites a scale of seeing that sometimes might go undetected. Your work kind of allows folks to engage in what might be hidden. Today’s poem invites that same scale of seeing and care, not only across universes, but also throughout time."
—Major Jackson, host of THE SLOWDOWN
“Everything is stranger in the NE because there are no memorials, only NDN names,” Frontier Poetry, finalist for Nature & Place Poetry Prize.
“Circadian Song,” Atmos Magazine, June 2023.
“Coming-of-age song,” The Worcester Review, 2023.
“August,” Poetry Northwest, 2023.
“How to be born in a country that measures your blood in their hands:,” Cincinnati Review.
“Wax Cylinder,” Superstition Review, Spring 2023.
“After Sacred Water,” AS SHE RISES, Episode 1.
“Ancestors’ wildest dreams” and “The year the An*sazi Inn burned down,” Poetry Magazine, March 2023.
“Sound of under-water,” The Adroit Journal, January 2023.
“let me be the Indian burial ground,” “everything is stranger in the NE,” “Put on that KTNN,” Yellow Medicine Review, Winter 2023.
“BLACKLIST ME,” Best New Poets Anthology, 2022.
“BLACKLIST ME,” Poets.org/ The Academy of American Poets, winner of the Sean T. Lannan Poetry Prize.
“The Greenhouse” & “Your Return,” Diode Poetry Journal, August 2022.
“Creation Story Blues” & “In the National Museum of the American Indian,” Poetry Online, July 2022.
“NDN B-Side Love Poem” & “love poem for my god-ugly xmas miracle,” Wax Nine Journal, June 2022.
“DINÉ GIRL DETONATES LOCAL UNIVERSITY GALLERY,” The Foundationalist, June 2022.
“After Sacred Water,” NRDC, November 2021.
“Good Fire,” To The People, November 2021.
“What We Cannot See,” NYU Gallatin, April 2021.
Awards
Winner of the Academy of American Poets College & University Prize (2022, 2025)
A winner of the 2023 National Poetry Series:
“The National Poetry Series is a literary awards program that sponsors the publication of five books of poetry each year. The manuscripts, solicited through an annual Open Competition, are selected by poets of national stature and published by a distinguished group of trade, university, and small presses.”
Winner of the 2023 Adroit Prize for Poetry.
2023 Aspen Institute Poetry Fellow.
2022 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, “Navajo-English Dictionary,” Cutthroat, a Journal for the Arts.
2022 Susan O’Connor Award, Timothy Dwight College, Yale University.
2022 Academy of American Poets Prize, Yale University Department of English.
2022 Collective Spirit Fund Grant Recipient, First Peoples Fund.
2022 Young Native Playwrights Award winner, As It Has Always Been, dir. by Tara Moses.
2021-2022 Yahoo! In the Know Changemaker.
2020 Cultural Capital Fellowship, First Peoples Fund.
2019 J. Edgar Meeker Prize for Best Essay in English, Yale University.
2019 Optimist, Time Magazine, curated by Ava DuVernay.
2017-2018 National Student Poet for the West.