Kim Shuck

Kim Shuck is San Francisco’s seventh poet laureate and the first from a recognized Native Nation. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, she addresses the disappearance of native women in the United States in her poetry book, Murdered Missing, winner of the 2019 PEN Oakland Censorship Award. During her reading at Haskell Indian Nations University, she opens up about how her book came to be after the disappearance of her own daughter. She also reads from the book that celebrates her city and won the 2020 Northern California Golden Poppy Book Award for Poetry:  Deer Trails: San Francisco Poet Laureate Series No. 7. There’s also a reading from her “Early Day” Series about an offensive statue that has since come down, recorded at the San Francisco Public Library, where she is curating another series by fellow poets during the pandemic called Poem of the Day.  Her 2020 collection from Mammoth Publications, Whose Water, is now out.

(Photo by San Francisco Public Library CC BY 3.0)