JKS 2026 Spring Symposium :: “The First Seed/The Last Star: on Ecopoetics” :: Leslie Scalapino Lecture

Leslie Scalapino Lecture & Reading in Innovative Poetics feat. Layli Long Soldier

Location: Performing Arts Center, Arapahoe Campus, Naropa University

Layli Long Soldier is author of the collection Whereas (Graywolf Press, 2017), which won the National Books Critics Circle award, the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her poems and critical work have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The New York Times, American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review, and BOMB, among many others. In 2015, Long Soldier was awarded a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. She was awarded a Whiting Writer’s Award in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2018. In 2021, she received an Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature and the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize in the UK. Long Soldier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Bard College. She teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and serves as the 2024-25 Endowed Chair at Texas State University. She resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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The Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture in Innovative Poetics is an annual lecture series with a focus on critical analysis of innovative poetry, essays, plays and cross-genre work primarily by women poets. The series invites contemporary writers to present their work in the spirit exemplified by Scalapino’s own critical writing and editorial vision as publisher of O Books.

The Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture is made possible through generous support from E. Tracy Grinnell, Thomas J. White and the Leslie Scalapino – O Books Fund.

Leslie Scalapino (July 25, 1944 – May 28, 2010) was born in Santa Barbara, California and raised in Berkeley. She traveled throughout her youth and adulthood to Asia, Africa and Europe — including Tibet, Bhutan, Japan, India, Mongolia, Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere — and her writing was intensely influenced by these experiences. She published her first book, O and Other Poems, in 1976. In 1986, she founded O Books, dedicated to publishing innovative works by young and emerging poets, as well as prominent and established writers. She also taught writing for nearly 25 years at various institutions, including Bard College (16 years in the MFA program), Mills College, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the California College of Arts in San Francisco. She lived with Tom White, her husband and friend of 35 years, in Oakland, CA until her death in 2010.

Scalapino is the author of thirty books of poetry, prose inter-genre-fiction, plays, and essays. Recent works include The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom (The Post-Apollo Press), Flow-Winged Crocodile and A Pair / Actions Are Erased / Appear (Chax Press), two plays published in one volume, The Animal is in the World like Water in Water (Granary Books), a collaboration between Scalapino and artist Kiki Smith and Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows (Starcherone Books), which is a pair, or preceding volume, to The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom. Scalapino’s It’s go in horizontal/Selected Poems, 1974-2006 was published by University of California Press at Berkeley in 2008. Other books of Scalapino’s poetry include Day Ocean State of Stars’ Night (Green Integer), a collection of eight years of writing; Zither & Autobiography (Wesleyan University Press), The Tango (Granary Press), a collaboration with artist Marina Adams, Orchid Jetsam (Tuumba), Dahlia’s Iris—Secret Autobiography and Fiction (FC2 Publishers); a reprint of the prose work Defoe by Green Integer; and It’s go in/quiet illumined grass/land (The Post-Apollo Press). A revised and expanded version of her essay book How Phenomena Appear to Unfold (originally published by Potes & Poets) was released in 2011 by Litmus Press.