Award-winning poet beginning spring schedule of Visiting Writers Series

An award-winning American poet, educator and activist whose work weaves documentary poetics with ecological and social justice themes will visit Northwest Missouri State University this month as the next guest of the Visiting Writers Series.

Teresa Dzieglewicz will present her work from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 27, in the J.W. Jones Student Union Boardroom. The event is free and open to the public.

Dzieglewicz’s debut poetry collection, “Something Small of How to See a River” (Tupelo Press), was published last year and selected by Pulitzer Prize-winner Tyehimba Jess for the Dorset Prize for Poetry. The book centers on her experience co-running a school at Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and interrogates narrative, power and environmental struggle.

“Writing from inside that moment and her own personal experience, her book teaches us not just about Standing Rock but how to see more clearly the world before us — how water shapes life, how stories shape justice and how poetry can create solidarity among people fighting a just cause,” Daniel Biegelson, the director of the Visiting Writers Series and a senior instructor of English, said. “Her reading is a chance to hear a voice that blends witness, care and truth in a time when all three feel urgently needed.”

Dzieglewicz’s poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Pleiades and Ninth Letter, among others, and her first children’s book, “Belonging,” co-written with Kimimila Locke, is forthcoming from Chronicle Books.

She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Gingko Prize, the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize and the Palette Poetry Prize, and she was named a Best New Poet of 2018. She also is a Black Earth Institute Fellow, a poet-in-residence at the Chicago Poetry Center, an associate editor at RHINO Poetry and part of the founding team of Mní Wičhóni Nakíčižiŋ Wóuŋspe (Defenders of the Water School).

The Visiting Writers Series is designed to enrich Northwest’s educational mission while promoting the values of community, civil discourse and self-expression. Northwest’s Green Tower Press and the School of Language, Literature and Writing sponsor the series.

The Visiting Writers Series continues this spring with appearances by 2025 Maya Angelou Award recipient Alison C. Rollins on March 12 and GreenTower Press Chapbook Winner Anthony Robinson on April 16.

For more information about the Visiting Writers Series, contact Biegelson at dbiegel@nwmissouri.edu or 660.562.1266.