Overview

With calm elegance and precise language, Rivers in My Veins is a work of lyric courage celebrating the connection we all share to the earth. Kara Briggs' poems sing her people, Sauk-Suiattle and Yakama, onto the pages. ""Land we live on land,"" she writes, calling us to embrace our kinship with the earth. As a career journalist, Briggs uses documentary poetry to expose the false settler-colonial narratives while innovating rhythms from the social dances of her tribes in poems that take the reader to the dance circle. She received the 2024 James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poetry for ""Acknowledgement Two,"" a poem in this collection about her uncle who fought for fishing rights. Her fierce love of lands, waters, and stories of her peoples are carried in familiar poetic forms-sonnet, pantoum, and haiku-as vehicles to carry the readers on a journey through our shared world of literary - and deeply alive - landscapes. In groundbreaking forms of her ancestors and for future generations, Briggs introduces profiles of a Yakama treaty fisherman, a great-great-grandmother basket maker, and a Sauk-Suiattle leader calling for accountability, sharing the humanity and modernity of Native peoples. She uses sonnets, pantoums, and haiku as familiar vehicles for readers as she carries them into unfamiliar history and perspectives. She questions our relationship with words about Indigenous peoples by exploring their etymologies. She engages literary ancestors, poets Carolyn Kizer and Janice Gould, re-examining their poetics in her own. Kara Briggs works on environmental issues with tribes on the West Coast and has a background in journalism and higher education. She is a former president of the Native American Journalists Association. She graduated in 2024 with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. This is her first poetry collection and her first publication with St. Julian Press.

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9781955194358

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Praise for - Rivers in My Veins With calm elegance, precise language, and the spirit of the Pacific Northwest, Kara Briggs sings her people onto the page. Rivers in My Veins is both protest and celebration, a reminder to readers that the Sauk-Suiattle, Wenatchee, Chelan, Entiat, and Skagit peoples are still harvesting, fishing, and remembering. Land we live on land, she writes, calling us to embrace our kinship with the earth. -Deborah Taffa, Whiskey Tender Rivers in My Veins is a work of lyric courage that celebrates the interconnectivity of the earth and her people while confronting, through unflinching investigative addresses, the false settler-colonial narratives and power structures within these narrative's problematic etymologies and extractive practices. Kara Briggs' tenacious spirit and fierce love of the lands, waters, and stories of her Coast Salish people makes Rivers in My Veins a powerful debut collection that will become a vital contribution to our shared world's literary-and deeply alive-landscapes. -Jennifer Elise Foerster, Editor - When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry With a journalist's eye for unflinching truth, Kara Briggs's Rivers in My Veins assembles precise language, lyric verse and innovative form to produce a finely wrought blend of Native perspective poetry. Briggs compels the reader to hold onto familiar narratives of landscape and family while learning more layers of story. At the heart of this collection, a drum of knowledge beats, aiming at nothing less than uplifting the experience of American Indians who are every bit as intellectual and human as the readers of this book. I have known Kara Briggs for many years waiting for this collection to come to light. Now we will be better as a nation for reading Rivers in My Veins. -Suzan Shown Harjo, Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient, Editor - Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations

Author Information

Kara Briggs is a writer and a poet who lives on the Tulalip Reservation in Washington state. She is a Sauk-Suiattle tribal citizen and a descendant of the Yakama Nation. In 2024, she completed her Master of Fine Arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where she studied with Navajo poet Esther Belin, with Oglala poet Layli Longsoldier, and with Mvskoke poet Jennifer Elise Foerster. She previously graduated from The Evergreen State College with a Master of Public/Tribal Administration. Her bachelor's degree in English is from Whitworth College in Spokane, her hometown.

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