Kenzie Allen

2022 Fellow, Indigenous Nations Poets

Kenzie Allen is the author of Cloud Missives (Tin House 2024). She is the recipient of a James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets, a 92NY Discovery Prize, and the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry. Kenzie is a direct descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. Born in West Texas, she now shares time between Toronto, Ontario; Stavanger, Norway; and Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Poems for A Tattered Planet

A series of poetic films by Indigenous Nations Poets and Overpass Light Brigade created at our 2023 mentoring retreat in Door County Wisconsin.

Publications

Ancient Light

Genre: Poetry

Publisher: Tin House

Publication Date: August 2024

Intimate, dissecting, and liberating, Cloud Missives is a poetry collection of excavation and renewal. Like an anthropologist entering a dig site and unearthing bones, Kenzie Allen reveals a life from what endures after tragedies and acts of survival. Across five sections, poems explore pop culture—the stereotypes in Peter Pan, Indiana Jones, and beyond—fairy tales, myths, protests, and forgotten histories, before arriving at a dazzling series of love poems that deepen our understanding of romantic, platonic, and communal love.

Cloud Missives is an investigation, a manifestation, and a celebration: of the body, of what we make and remake, of the self, and of the heart. With care and deep attention, it asks what one can reimagine of Indigenous personhood in the wake of colonialism, what healing might look like when loving the world around you—and introduces readers to a profound new voice in poetry.