Indigenous Voices: Greg Sarris & Jennifer Foerster in Conversation

Part of Indigenous Voices
Sponsored by Telegraph Hill Arts and Literature
Co-presented with Heyday an independent, nonprofit publisher founded in 1974 in Berkeley, California.

Join us as we welcome Greg Sarris and Jennifer Foerster to share their latest works — The Last Human Bear and The Maybe-Bird. This evening kicks off our Native American Heritage Month series, celebrating Native voices in literature and community.

Free to attend — RSVP required to reserve your seat.

Speakers

Greg Sarris is an enrolled member of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and is currently serving his seventeenth consecutive elected term as chairman of the tribe. He is the author of several books, including the novel Grand Avenue, which he adapted for an HBO miniseries and co-executive produced with Robert Redford; the novel Watermelon Nights; Weaving the Dream, a biography of Mabel McKay; Becoming Story, a memoir; and the story collections How a Mountain Was Made and The Forgetters. Formerly a full professor of English at UCLA, Sarris serves on the University of California Board of Regents and the Sundance Institute Board, and he holds the Distinguished Emeritus Graton Endowed Chair in Native American Studies at Sonoma State University. He lives in Sonoma County, California. (Photo by Beowulf Sheehan)

Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of three books of poetry, The Maybe Bird (The Song Cave, 2022), Bright Raft in the Afterweather (University of Arizona Press, 2018), and Leaving Tulsa (University of Arizona Press, 2013), and served as the Associate Editor of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (W.W. Norton, 2020). 

She is the recipient of a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Robert Frost Fellow in Poetry at the Breadloaf Writers Conference and a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Jennifer received her PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver, her MFA from the Vermont College of the Fine Arts, and is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA).