Indian Country Today Celebrates 2017 National Student Poet Kinsale Hueston

Indian Country Today congratulates Kinsale Hueston, one of several National Student Poets crowned this year. The Navajo poet is a senior at St. Margaret's Episcopal School in California and her award is one of the most prestigious opportunities for young poets in the United States. "The National Student Poets Program is a project of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, which administers the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards," Tanya H. Lee explains. Let's pick up with the story there: 

The Navajo student will go to Washington, D.C., at the end of August for the official award ceremony at the Library of Congress. The weekend will include a private workshop with the 21st US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera. Awardees will travel to communities, libraries and museums as literary ambassadors over the next year, and receive a $5,000 academic award.

“I’m so grateful for this opportunity I can’t even put it into words,” Hueston told ICMN. “I never imagined I could be on this track doing what I loved—I really love writing and being an activist and sharing my work and my poetry and sharing my identity. I just find it incredible.”

Hueston was born and raised in southern California. “My mom grew up on the Navajo Reservation in Navajo Mountain, Utah. When I was growing up we would take a lot of trips out to the reservation. I would always love coming out and talking to my family, my cousins, and a lot of what I wrote in my early poetry was about being home on the reservation,” she said.

But, the Navajo student explained, “as I grew older I had trouble staying connected to my culture while I was in California. Poetry was my way of reconnecting with my roots and my Native American heritage.”

Read on at Indian Country Today. Congratulations, Ms. Hueston!