Interview with Kinsale Drake by Rey M. Rodríguez
Tomas Karmelo Anaya
One of the most exciting poets at the moment is Kinsale Drake. She is a Diné poet/editor/playwright whose work has appeared in Poetry, Best New Poets, Poets.org, Poetry Northwest, The Slowdown, Black Warrior Review, The Adroit Journal, Poetry Online, Yale Literary Magazine, TIME, NPR, MTV, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, THE SKY WAS ONCE A DARK BLANKET (University of Georgia Press, 2024), won the 2023 National Poetry Series.
From 2017-2018, she served as a National Student Poet, appointed by the Library of Congress and the President’s Committee on the Arts & Humanities. She received three national gold medals for her writing through the Art & Writing Awards and performed her work at the Library of Congress, Carnegie Hall, and Aspen Ideas Festival. In 2018, she was a poetry workshop instructor for Sherman Indian School in Riverside, CA. From 2022-2023, she was appointed as a judge for the national Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.
Kinsale graduated from Yale University in 2022 with B.A.s in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and English, where she received the Susan O’Connor Award, fellowships from Mellon Mays and the Richter Fund, the J. Edgar Meeker Prize, the Academy of American Poets Prize, and the Young Native Playwrights Award. She was a Bucknell June Poets Fellow and an inaugural Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow in 2022. She has served as a guest faculty member for the Emerging Diné Writers Institute (Navajo Technical University) since 2022. She is currently getting her MFA at Vanderbilt University.
Kinsale edited Changing Wxman Collective and currently, as mentioned, directs NDN Girls Book Club, a nonprofit organization that promotes Indigenous literature on every level.
She is the recipient of the 2023 Adroit Prize for Poetry, the Joy Harjo Poetry Award, and was the 2023 Aspen Institute Poetry Fellow. She has performed at Carnegie Hall twice, in 2018 and 2023. In addition, Kinsale has been recognized as a 2022 Yahoo! “In The Know” Changemaker, one of The Sunday Paper’s 2023 Changemakers, and one of Time’s People Changing How We See the World curated by filmmaker Ava Duvernay.
In this interview, we discussed how she got into writing, her experiences living all over the United States, including Tennessee, California, and Connecticut, her debut poetry book, whether she has a playlist to go along with it (she does, and it is listed at the end of the interview), and her involvement in NDN Girls Book Club, among many other topics. More importantly, we learned what a vital, fierce, and voice she is at this inflection point in United States history. We at Storyteller’s Blog had a blast getting to know Kinsale. We laughed and cried doing it. We hope that you enjoy it as much as we did.
Kinsale Drake, welcome to the Storyteller’s Blog of Chapter House, the Literary Journal of the Institute of American Indian Arts. We're so grateful to have you here, can you tell us how you got into writing?
Well, thank you for having me. I'm super excited. And I love Chapter House Journal, so I'm excited to be part of the Storyteller’s Blog.
I grew up surrounded by stories. My childhood was a lot of long drives, which I think is a shared experience for people who visit family often and travel long distances. My mom loves to tell stories. I was always in the backseat, later the passenger seat, listening to her. And I always liked writing stories myself. I was a huge reader as a kid. I remember being maybe like 7 or 8 trying to write romance and poems for the first time. My mom loved romances, so I think I got the love for these books from her. Writing was something more private, it was something that I didn't share.
I see.
But it was an important cornerstone of my childhood. This question has me thinking deeply about my memories. I experienced loneliness growing up as a mixed kid navigating spaces in school where I was the only brown kid in a class. There were those isolating experiences that drew me to reading, writing, watching a lot of movies, and hanging out with myself or with my siblings, or my family. Books were something that we all enjoyed. It felt very natural to explore storytelling through writing, specifically, poetry, which was never something I expected to do for a living or to do seriously. But I had a big imagination. I think that was where it started.
And when did you start writing poetry? I'm learning so much through these interviews about the power of poetry and what it means and doesn't mean.
It took a lot of being thrown into reading my poetry for me to think of myself as a poet.
And that happened when I was pretty young. When I was 17, I was selected as a National Student Poet for the Western Region of the country. In this literary ambassador position you do a community project and that was the year that I had to get really good at reading my stuff because I was going to be performing it. I had to. During that experience, I fell in love with the power of community in poetry because writing is stereotypically viewed as a lonely, solitary experience. I saw that year, as a very young person who was developing a sense of self who was craving community, how storytelling and, specifically, poetry could bring people together. It could unlock powerful conversations. And it could be so moving. Being in a lot of those spaces with other young people, talking about poetry, actively writing poetry, reading it, editing, and being immersed in it, I came to understand how important it was to have a support network that could help me continue writing.
That experience was something that forced me to come out of my shell. I also faced the very harsh realities of tokenization. I had to navigate all these white spaces, including academic spaces. Navigating them as a 17-year-old was a lot. It taught me what I didn't want to do in my poetry. At the same time, it taught me to ask, Who am I in conversation with? Who's in my canon? What even is a canon? What am I pushing back against?
But the chance to have those conversations was a great experience. It showed me that I had a lot to learn, and I could continue to develop my identity as a writer.
I'm proud of that growth. I’m proud of the writing itself. But more than anything I think I’m proud that I was brave enough to keep doing it.
It is important to think about those larger questions as someone who is going to be a mentor, like a professor. I want to be somebody who continues to teach poetry to young people. I need to be able to answer, What do I value? What is the value that poetry brings to our lives? These are important questions to consider when you're doing this professionally.
Where did you grow up?
I went to school in Southern California. My family moved around a lot, so there are references to that in the book. My oldest sibling was born in Page, Arizona. My second sibling was born in Montgomery, Alabama, and then my dad ended up getting a job out in California, where he had family. It was a very conservative place. It was not a place I wanted to stay in. I always had this thought in my head of getting out.
People see California as a bastion of more liberal-leaning people. And the reality is, there are a lot of hateful people there, too. There are literal Nazis. There was a kid my age murdered a few towns over for being queer. I grew up and went to school with these people, where maybe one kid is out in the whole school. I'm queer. Most of my siblings are queer. I'm coming from a family that is visibly different. My mom’s family is from a teeny, tiny town in Southern Utah, and I was constantly leaving for this town where we were related to everyone and then coming back to be in a lot of uncomfortable situations.
What's the town?
Navajo Mountain.
That's the title of your poem in the book?
Yes, Navajo Mountain is where my mother's family is from. My mother's family was a huge influence on my values, morals, and my stubbornness. I inherited that from them. My mindset, growing up, was to excel in school and overachieve, basically, to say, I am more than how you see me.
There is this notion of California being this progressive state, but the reality is that it and this country have to acknowledge its racist past and colonial history. It has this colonial narrative that is damning and damaging all of us. I'm sorry you went through that pain.
I talked to Deborah Miranda about this, because California is such a strange state. It labels itself as so progressive, and yet it’s a case study in a state trying to actively remove all traces of California Native peoples. The high school I went to, for example, was modeled after a mission. My school was literally across the street from a mission. In 4th grade, I had to build a mission model, like we all had to do. That project was how I learned the word rape.
I'm so sorry. It is analogous that if you're Jewish you had to build a concentration camp.
That's literally what Deborah Miranda says. And that was part of the required state curriculum.
But my experience is not unique either. Other Native kids had to experience that, and far worse. I’m very, very grateful to have been able to go to school and to have had the opportunities that I had access to. But at the same time, it's complicated.
Yes. What mission was it?
San Juan Capistrano. I remember feeling so much grief and sadness when I would go. Plus, they build tourism around the mission, like selling Indian wares at a fake trading post and talking about all this false history. It's an experience that I'm glad other Natives are writing about because I didn't have the language for that growing up, to express what I was feeling. And it's powerful to read. For example, Deborah Miranda's work says everything that I was thinking as a kid. It makes me feel seen and validated for feeling those things. You don't have the tools to understand. But you know that it’s wrong. You know what colonization is and what it looks like. You know your family history, so it's an embodied experience.
Wow! All right. So then you leave, and you go to a place called Yale. How is that?
It was so hard, but I met so many amazing people there. I am so glad to have figured out that I wanted to write while I was there, too. It was an experience that you don't get again. So, I wrote my book there.
Tell me about your experience of becoming a writer and what is poetry to you. And when does it become poetry? Did you know that you were writing poetry when you were 16?
In the academic sense, yes, I did. But the way poetry was taught made it seem like it wasn’t something from my tradition. I have an appreciation for beautiful things, I am moved a lot by beauty, sound, and landscape. I'm very lucky that my family comes from the most beautiful place in the world, which is Southern Utah.
Yes, it's great. It's really extraordinary.
And so I told you about the people I was going to school with and then leaving that and going to some place like Navajo Mountain.
There was a part of me that just wanted to capture even a little bit of that experience of returning there. I wanted to describe what everything would look like at dusk, the most beautiful time of day. Maybe to preserve that moment and those feelings, but also, because I respected that land so much. And I was always trying to write into my awe and wonder to pin down what exactly was moving me. So, I entered poetry on my terms through that, honestly, when I was starting to write poetry.
I wasn’t truly moved by language until I read Louise Erdrich, and I only started reading her in high school, because people don’t put Native writers on syllabi often. I read The Round House, and I was floored. I had no idea people could write like that about those subjects. The Round House changed my life, my brain, everything. And I think that was when it clicked for me what poetry was. My mentor, Major Jackson, says that good poetry changes something in you. You should come away from a poem a little bit changed in some way, whether it's how you see the world, or how you're feeling—something should change. And that's what happened when I was reading Louise Erdrich. That was poetry.
That is one heavy book.
It is a tough book, but I was 16. I was coming of age and that narrator is also coming of age.
Yes.
And coming of age as a Navajo woman, too, is such an important process. My book has a lot of those poems about coming of age, or about “womanhood,” and becoming and becoming. That was a formative moment for me, for sure— reading that book and realizing, There's a place for me in this, there's a place for me in this world. I want to make others feel like that; I want to accomplish something like this, something that gives me goosebumps and moves me but is real. It's a brutal book, but it's real.
I see it in a whole different light. As a father, you're thinking, well, this is too soon for my kids to deal with these types of issues. But your generation is so wise in that sense, you guys can take on some tough stuff.
Yeah. You grow up painfully aware of statistics and of stories like that because it is a lived experience you’re familiar with. You might have a family member or someone you care about affected by that kind of violence, too, or even yourself. And I think we don't get to choose how young we are when we hear those stories or experience those things. I was thinking about that a lot, too, as I was reading it. I didn't feel too young, if that makes sense.
Yes, it does. Okay, let's get into your book because I think we've been dancing around it. I love this poetry with Mildred Bailey. I felt you're an old soul if you're reading and writing about Mildred Bailey, but tell me how the book was constructed. Then we'll talk about individual poems.
So, I was writing five new poems every two weeks, and I decided to write about my obsession, which at the time was music, specifically, What is Native music? Besides, you know, stereotypical flute music that people try to label as catch-all Native music. What is “Native” music, really, and why? And then, there’s the humor, too, which is, like, how is George Straight not Native music then?
Yes! That's the beauty of it.
I was raised by a generation of women who grew up listening to music, going to rodeos, or dancing. They loved an urban cowboy. And so those influences filled me with joy, to hear those stories growing up. Music can open portals into time, space, and memory. I was studying a lot of Jeremy Dutcher at that point, too—he’s a First Nations musician, and he has this song called “Mehcinut”— the music video has Tantoo Cardinal and some other folks in it. But I was obsessed with this music video in college. And I wrote this whole essay about how Dutcher, as a queer Native musician, was opening these portals by revitalizing music that had until that point been trapped in wax cylinders, in archives, and how he was reanimating the music and language and riffing on it, creating something across time.
Wow!
He was creating a new portal. I'm not a musician, but I'm a writer, and poetry is my toolbelt. I loved what he was doing as an artist, and I wondered what writing poetry, which in itself can be lyrical and musical, could do in terms of talking about music. So that's where it started. But there was another part which everyone loves. The story. I had a professor in college who had a very specific taste in writers that they taught. My dad is always saying, don't shit talk anyone cuz they’ll put it in print.
That's very wise. That's very wise.
It's true, but they had very tense relationships with many students of color.
For the most part, we were reading predominantly white poets from the 19th and 20th-century canon. It's what I expected going to a place like Yale. But there was resistance to us bringing in certain writers to class to share their work, and they were all people from marginalized communities. I would have office hours, and the professor would point to things in my poems and say, I don't understand this. You need to take it out, and everything she would point to, I began to notice, was Navajo, or a reference to something Native.
And of course, I'm sitting there wondering, Why do we have to know all of these Greek myths? Why did I have to read the Bible? Why does everyone assume we have to know all these things to read poetry? Why do we have to understand your obscure references? But I can't put in a word in another language that maybe you could just Google or maybe you don't have to understand it and that's the whole point. She had a critique of my work one time where she said my poetry was too musical.
What?
I walked out of office hours and I was like, I'm going to write about music. I feel like some of these poems are so musical, so lyrical because I wanted to say that my poems can be meaningful and musical. This is my canon. It's a truck full of Indians like exploding the old canon and listening to mixtapes building their mythology and telling their stories on their terms. That is the attitude entering into the collection, too. It is a form of defiance and resistance but on my terms. I wanted to do it in a way that still could be funny and fun at times.
This humor is very important, right? You're having fun while you're doing it. Do you have a soundtrack for your book?
I have a playlist. Yes.
Okay, would you send it to the Storyteller’s Blog? Ramona has a playlist for her book.
Well, that's awesome.
Okay, great. How do you craft your poems?
I love poets that consider sound when they compose and format poems. Some of these poems take on conventions like quatrains, especially those having loose rhymes; I have poems in syllabics, which are very measured in terms of language. So a lot of them are leaning into the sound. I'm always interested in what white space is doing on a page as well—what the eyes will do when they're scanning a page, how they can jump, or maybe they'll be tempted by another line. For this book, it changed a lot from poem to poem, but I was thinking a lot about songs and the composition of songs when crafting these pieces.
I'm curious about that story as well. You made [your book] in four parts so that it’s like a symphony.
Four parts. That's a Navajo thing.
Oh, it is.
Four is a sacred number. Four directions, four mountains… It correlates to periods of life, like the times in a day. In a way, I was able to compose each section around themes. The first section does reflect a lot on origin. So poetic ancestors, like Mildred Bailey. There's an orientation that's happening. You have to orient yourself when you're entering the book. And then the second section was about water and memory. I'm thinking a lot about space and time in that section as well because it's just very fascinating to me. I could talk forever about geography. But the Southwest, like the area itself, which is now a desert used to be an ocean. And the way you can time travel by being there and examining the land is fascinating.
Yes.
Just amazing, and Jake Skeets has a phenomenal essay about time travel, place, and writing. Poetry is a way of time-traveling when you're in that region. There is a sense of a beyond. You know that so many living things have had whole lifetimes there and are still there. You feel them. There are fossils everywhere. There are dinosaur tracks. There are so many different levels of time and place, all present, and also visually presented, which is so incredible.
It makes you feel very cosmic and very cool. And so some of those poems were getting into that kind of cosmic sensibility.
Yes.
Yes, getting into that weirdness. That is also so beautiful. You are entering a space and time that becomes wibbly, wobbly weird. What does that look like? Well, maybe you're in a truck time traveling with your girlfriend playing George Strait. So that was the second section, which was a lot of fun. The third was a lot of moving between spaces and places. So there's a lot of urbanscapes which I was thinking a lot about post-There, There by Tommy Orange.
So Creation Story Blues is really the basis for the title of the book.
Yes.
That's what I wondered because I was curious how LA got into the book.
My family lived there for a while. And in high school, I worked in downtown LA and there were a lot of urban Natives that I met in that community. I hadn't interacted with urban Natives from an urban Native community like that before, outside of maybe relatives closer to my rez.
I associate Los Angeles with a lot of questions I was having about identity. I met a lot of urban Indians, who had their own stories about place and the city. And there were California Natives, too, in that group. So I had this conscious feeling of moving through a city that is not my homeland, but I am a Native person.
I was always wondering, How do you talk to the land? You have a respect for it. At one point, Diné people migrated very far West. At some point, there is a connection that you may want to explore. But most of these poems explored the complexities of belonging to a city where there are a lot of people who have carved existence and survival in those spaces. They’re fighting all of these forces that are extensions of colonization, like gentrification. So I was listening and trying to learn as a young person. But I think it transcends Los Angeles. There are just a lot of touchstones for LA in those poems.
When you mentioned Puvunga I didn't even know about Puvunga.
There are so many sacred sites around LA and Long Beach. People are fighting to preserve a lot of those sites because the city is still trying to destroy them. In one of the productions I worked with as a teenager, we were advocating to save and continue preserving a village, a Tongva village in Los Angeles. And so that awareness plays into the poems. It is important to know the original names of places moving through them as a contemporary person. It is really strange and startling, in the same way that in “Hollywood Indian,” the speaker is talking about dating and kissing in parking lots but is also moving through incredibly sacred spaces.
I was very much whipsawed in that poem but in a very good way. Why is the poem for Layli Long Soldier?
Because I was obsessed with grasses. It’s a little love poem for her. After I read Whereas, that was another thing that I think changed my brain—grasses, the sounds, the hushing. She's the poet of grasses for me. Good writing makes you look at something differently. Grasses for me are part of her image ecosystem. And I also was thinking of sound in this place that is supposedly so developed. My poem is a little shout-out to her because of how embedded her image ecosystem had become in my subconscious. I couldn't write grasses and not think of Layli Long Soldier while writing that poem.
That makes perfect sense. That's great. What do you want people to take from your book of poetry?
I hope that it makes people want to write, but I hope that it invites a scale of seeing that we don't normally undertake in our everyday lives. I hope they see the generosity that poetry affords to the world. There are so many small things that I love. I'm a person of small things. I appreciate small details. Each poem I write is a love letter to a small thing, a small obsession I have, and to know that people connect with any part of it is really beautiful. And you realize that it's okay to write about small things and small obsessions, and even the weird stuff.
Yeah, I think that's the power of this book. If you read a lot of Chicano or Indigenous poetry, then there's a lot of having to deal with grief, right?
Yes.
What I love about this book is the music. There's a joy in it.
Yes.
There's a depth to it, and there's also a lightness to it. You throw in humor into it. But there's also this element of that things are going to be all right.
Yeah, I think you just reminded me. What made me start writing poetry, and take it seriously, was my grandmother. I was brought into poetry because of grief. I think we just repress it. You know, the sad things, and growing up Native, holy smokes. There's so much grief you have to deal with and sometimes it just feels like it never stops. I entered poetry through grief. I was writing because I didn't know or understand how to handle it. My grandmother passed when I was 16, so I was reading, writing, and trying to understand some really heavy things, like what it meant to lose a matriarch, and people from a certain generation. My grandmother had such a hard life. I have her life story. But knowing I wasn't there in her life to hold her or make it easier is a devastating feeling.
Hmm.
Poetry was my small offering. Grief was this huge thing, and I was like a little mouse that was saying, This is what I have. Remembering the joy and remembering the beautiful things is also so important because we can't survive without joy and without beauty. And there are so many things I'm grateful for in this life. I'm grateful to be alive and to tell these stories. But there's that feeling every single day that I wouldn't be here if my family had not survived actual genocide, and knowing that they suffered, and that is a grief you face every single day. You also remember that there are people who are not here because of that genocide. My God! I haven't cried during an interview in a long time.
I cry all the time, so I'm a big fan. I was talking to my boys, and I was telling them how much I loved them, and I started crying.
You can’t separate the two things. These poems are full of joy, but they honor those before us, too, who have suffered.
It's a reflection of how much you loved them all.
Yes.
And it's a gift, and they would only want you to be joyful. They would all want you to be your best self, and to see beauty in life. That's the power of poetry. Now you're making me cry.
That's when you know the interview is good. Oh, God! Crying and laughing! That's what I want people to get from this book. Crying and laughing.
Okay, there, you go. That's great. Okay. Tell me about the NDN Girls Book Club.
Yes, NDN Girls Book Club is an organization that I run with my best friends, who are also writers and artists. We care a lot about books. We care a lot about getting Native books out to Native people. I told you the story about The Round House. If I had read that earlier, I probably would have known what I wanted to do a lot earlier, and maybe things would have kicked into high gear earlier or something. Native people deserve Native literature, so we send care packages out to tribal libraries, reading circles, students. We connect Native authors with opportunities. We uplift Native literature on our social media platforms, and we do free writing workshops every month. And we make cute merchandise.
Okay, so I have to tell you. I asked Ramona Emerson how she would decolonize Gallup. And do you know what her answer was?
Please tell me.
She said she'd put a bookstore in Gallup.
Awesome.
She tried to release her book in Gallup but there is no bookstore. She has to go to the flea market.
Yeah. That’s real.
She was talking to Jake Skeets, too. And she was saying, Yeah, that's how we do it. In a sense, you're doing that. But you're doing it on a bigger scale.
We have totally had our stuff at flea markets! It's a lot of trying to strengthen the ecosystem that already exists. I use ecosystem a lot, because people call everything a book desert, and I'm always of the mindset that deserts are the most resourceful places.
Beautiful. I love it. Deserts are all beauty.
Yes, it doesn't mean there's any shortage of people who love to read or people who deserve those stories.
Or storytelling. Just like your mom telling you a story in the car.
Yeah, exactly. So we try to uplift the ecosystem that already exists. So that's the tribal libraries, and showing publishers that there is a real demand for accurate representation of Native peoples in literature so they can publish way more of our voices, which is happening more now. And that’s awesome. Seeing everyone writing just makes me excited. I know that there are going to be so many great stories that we can hopefully do a good job in getting out to people who deserve them.
Well, that’s what we want to do at Chapter House. So send them our way, too. We want to uplift Indigenous voices and change the narrative because we feel that it's a question of life or death.
Yes!
For example, in El Paso, those people were slaughtered by a white nationalist in the Walmart because he had heard a narrative from a president that said it's okay to kill Mexicans. We need a counter-narrative to all of that.
That is what is so important that gets lost in a lot of talks about what representation is like for Native peoples. Our visibility means that we have basic human rights. There is a direct tie to accurate representation and real legal and political rights. An empire that thrives on making us invisible and disappearing us means that we do need very active efforts to amplify these diverse narratives because there's a very real impact on policy. And sovereignty extends to our stories.
A perfect place to end this beautiful interview. Thank you so much for your time and good works.
Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a non-fiction history of a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He also participates in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a first-year fiction creative writing student at the Institute for American Indian Arts' MFA Program. This fall, his poetry is published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews can be found at La Bloga, the world's longest-established Chicana-Chicano, Latina-Latino literary blog, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Blog, Pleiades Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review.
Kinsale Drake’s playlist is https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1YOOy6orlW46RnV1UfS9Cb?si=aaf807ec9c21419e&nd=1&dlsi=3c013632e86f4180
