Linda LeGarde Grover will join the Minnesota Humanities Center at the American Indian Community Housing Organization in Duluth on Wednesday, July 12, at 5:30 p.m., for a special offsite event discussing her new book,The Sky Watched: Poems of Ojibwe Lives as part of the Minnesota Writers Series. Grover will also join in conversation with Dr. Jill M. Doerfler, head of American Indian Studies at University of Minnesota-Duluth, about the joys and complexities of leading a life devoted to writing and poetry, and the ways in which poetry has connected her further to her Native culture.

Please register here in advance of this event. If cost is a barrier, please contact Jessica Rust at jessica@mnhum.org before registering.

Reaching from the moment of creation to a newborn’s cry, The Sky Watched gives poetic voice to Ojibwe family life. In English and Ojibwe, those assembled here—voices of history, of memory and experience, of children and elders, and the Manidoog, the unseen beings who surround our lives—create a collective memoir in poetry as expansive and particular as the starry sky. 

"The Sky Watched is truly a gift of collective memory through generations broken by genocide and colonization. " —Colors of Influence

"This book of poems is much more than a collection of poetry: it is documentation of our existence as Ojibwe people, of our historical struggles and our strong resilience. Linda LeGarde Grover creates beauty, using words to form pictures and evoke emotion about our past and give vision to our future as a people. This collection is a testament to the fact that when our elders say, 'we are each given a song,' Grover was given, and gives to us, many songs. Read each word as a gift."—Marcie Rendon, author of the Cash Blackbear Mystery Series

"Remember, remember, remember, Linda LeGarde Grover’s wonderful book demands. And she does. Again and again. Old tales from the Ojibwe tradition and new stories from mission schools and relocations where ‘a tangle of children smell home in their dreams.’ She captures the taste of recipes and the feel of beading bracelets alongside injustices minor as a navy bean and major as a lost language. These are poems as sad and essential as a field of cotton flowers. You will remember them."—Jeffrey Thompson, author of Birdwatching in Wartime and Fragile