LitFest 2025: Indigenous Language Acts with Erin Marie Lynch, Julian Talamantez Brolaski & Layli Long Soldier

In this program, Indigenous authors Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Erin Marie Lynch, and Layli Long Soldier (joining virtually) explore Indigenous language and ways of languaging in conversation with Eulalia Books founding editor Michelle Gil-Montero. This dynamic discussion will traverse hybrid and experimental poetic forms and translation as a means of both language preservation and play. It will also inspect the various meanings and possibilities of translation, tackling the translation of native language to English; the translation of oral, anti-disciplinary language forms to the page;  and the translation of what can’t be, or is not meant to be written, into writing. 

About the Artists:

Julian Talamantez Brolaski (it /xe/ they) is a poet and country musician. They are the author of Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books, 2017), Advice for Lovers (City Lights, 2012), and gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011). Julian plays with the band Juan & the Pines, and their first full-length solo album, It’s Okay Honey, came out in 2023. Julian was the 2023–2024 Bagley Wright lecturer, a 2021 Pew Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of the 2020 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry. Its poems were recently included in Queer Nature (2022), When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020), and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020). Julian is the co-editor of The Glittering Field: A Gathering of New Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Poetry with Crisosto Apache, forthcoming from Litmus Press in 2026.

Erin Marie Lynch is an artist and educator whose practice spans writing, digital media, performance, and archival materials. Her book Removal Acts (Graywolf Press, October 2023) was a finalist for the John Pollard International Poetry Prize and the CALIBA Golden Poppy Award. Her poems appear in POETRY, New England Review, DIAGRAM, Narrative, Poetry Daily, Best New Poets, and other publications. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Wurlitzer Foundation, Indigenous Nations Poets, and Hugo House. Born and raised in Oregon, she is a direct descendant of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe (Ihánktoŋwan Dakota). Currently, she is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. She lives in Los Angeles.

Layli Long Soldier is the author of the collection Whereas (Graywolf Press, 2017), which won the National Book Critics Circle award, the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her poems and critical work have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The New York Times, American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review, and BOMB, among many others. In 2015, Long Soldier was awarded a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. She was awarded a Whiting Writer’s Award in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2018. In 2021, she received an Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature and the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize in the UK. Long Soldier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Bard College. She teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and serves as the 2024–25 Endowed Chair at Texas State University. She resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

About the Moderator:

Michelle Gil-Montero (she/her) is an Argentine-American poet-translator. She has translated several books of contemporary Latin American poetry, hybrid-genre work, and criticism. Her recent books include Berlin Interlude (Black Square Editions, 2021) and Exilium (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2022) by Argentine writer María Negroni, and her own poetry collection, Object Permanence (Ornithopter Press, 2020). Her work has appeared widely and has been supported by the NEA, the Howard Foundation, PEN, and Fulbright. At Saint Vincent College, she directs the minor in literary translation and is the founding editor of the translation press Eulalia Books.

About Your Visit: 

The in-house restaurant, Cucina Alfabeto, is open for brunch from 9:30 to 2 p.m. and for dinner from 5 to 10 p.m. Please call 412-435-1111 to make a reservation.