Emerging BIWOC Poet Spotlight: Kenzie Allen
This monthly series features poems by women of color in the early stages of their publishing careers. It is our intention to create more space at Perugia for the work of poets who are Black, Indigenous, and women of color (BIWOC). We hope using our platform to highlight this work will expand the readership of the poets we spotlight. This series aligns with Perugia’s mission to celebrate and support emerging women poets, inclusive of gender-expansive identities; featured poems will be from poets with no more than one published full-length collection. We’d love to hear from readers with suggestions for poems & poets to feature.
July 2025 Poet: Kenzie Allen
With Thirteen Moons on Your Back
for the desert tortoise like tree bark curled into whirlpools of stone, burrowed under earth while the sun burned down and Coyote roamed the sand—do we, too, return, each to our dens in the shivering dark, wear armor as a shelter we can carry, don't we, on your back, touch earth? Sometimes, ever so slowly, we learn of the sweetness of cactus fruit, mesquite grass, the arid wind as the sound of an ocean rustling in creosote, what the long-awaited rain can yet resurrect. Coyote watches. He marvels; what small wisdom, your survival, in this rising heat, in this strange home you have made.
Source
“With Thirteen Moons on Your Back” from CLOUD MISSIVES by KENZIE ALLEN © COPYRIGHT 2024. Used with permission of the publisher, Tin House, an imprint of Zando, LLC.
Poet Bio
Kenzie Allen is the author of Cloud Missives (Tin House, 2024). She is a Haudenosaunee poet and multimodal artist, and the recipient of a 92NY Discovery Prize, an inaugural James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets, the 49th Parallel Award in poetry, broadside prizes from Sundress Publications and Littoral Press, and fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Aspen Writers’ Foundation, and In-Na-Po (Indigenous Nations Poets). A finalist for the National Poetry Series, her poems have appeared in Poetry magazine, Boston Review, Narrative magazine, Poetry Daily, Best New Poets, and other venues. She is a first-generation descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin.
Kenzie’s most recent project is a multimodal book of poetry and creative ethnography that incorporates intergenerational histories and diasporic movements, Haudenosaunee traditions, and archival materials of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School. She received her PhD in English & Creative Writing from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, her MFA in Poetry from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, and her BA in Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at York University, where her research centers on documentary and visual poetics, literary cartography, and the enactment of Indigenous sovereignties through creative works.