Interviews with Six Native Women Writers, Part 3: Ruby Hansen Murray and Kimberly Blaeser

On October 9, 2017, World Literature Today sat down with six writers (in three groups of two) during the 25th anniversary “Returning the Gift: Native & Indigenous Literary Festival” held that week at the University of Oklahoma’s Norman campus. The theme for the festival was “Gathering at Our Headwaters,” and water was a prominent element in the May 2017 “New Native Writing” issue of WLT, to which all six authors contributed. 

Part three in our three part series features Ruby Hansen Murray and Kimberly Blaeser. You can watch an interview with Allison Hedge Coke and Arigon Starr in part one and Tiffany Midge and Linda Rodriguez in part two.

Ruby Hansen Murray (enrolled Osage) is a writer and photographer living in the lower Columbia River estuary. Her work appears in Yellow Medicine Review, Apogee, About Place Journal, and Indian Country Today. She is a Hedgebrook and VONA fellow who studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts and Warren Wilson College.

Kimberly Blaeser (Anishinaabe) is past Wisconsin Poet Laureate, a professor at UW–Milwaukee, and MFA faculty member for IAIA. Blaeser is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Apprenticed to Justice, and editor of Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. Her current project combines her photography and poetry in a new form she calls “picto-poems.”