The spring 2026 Midwest Poets Series lineup continues with a reading by Layli Long Soldier, an award-winning poet known for "Whereas" — winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. Long Soldier creates work that powerfully explores language, history, and Native identity. 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.

A Q&A and light reception will follow the event. This event is FREE and open to the public.