It started out as such a good year for Montana Poets Laureate Melissa Kwasny and M.L. Smoker.
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âMandy and I believe poetry is a necessary â a crucial â medicine for these times, because it is the language of the heart, of feeling, of connection between oneâs life and anotherâs.â
â Melissa Kwasny
Named Poets Laureate by Gov. Steve Bullock July 31, 2019, their inaugural event was the Billings Big Read in November 2019, where they gave a poetry reading and joined national poet laureate Joy Harjo, who was the focus of the Big Read.
It was such an exciting and auspicious launch which included Harjo playing her saxophone during her reading and later there was a salsa dance party, recalled Kwasny, who is based in Boulder.Â
Putting on the Dog: Animal Origins of What We Wear.
Melissa Kwasny
Her writings are also widely published in journals, including
Willow Springs, Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review,Orion, Bellingham Review, Kenyon Review, and
Boston Review. Kwasny s poems and essays are also included in the anthologies
The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral,
Montana Women Writers: A Geography of the Heart,
Poems Across the Big Sky, and
New Poets of the American West, as well as
West of 98: Living and Writing the American West.
Kwasny is the recipient of the Poetry Society of America Cecil Hemley Award and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for a work in progress, and the Montana Art Council s Artist s Innovation Award. She lives in Basin, Montana.