ASU Professor, Laura Tohe, Becomes Navajo Nation Poet Laureate

Laura Tohe is the second poet to serve in this role, which was created in 2013. She will hold the position until 2017. More:

Laura Tohe, a poet and writer living in Mesa, has been chosen as the poet laureate for the Navajo Nation. As a published and acclaimed author and poet Tohe sees this new posting as an opportunity to expand the visibility of Native American authors and encourage the newest generation of students to write and explore their culture.

As a young girl growing up in Fort Defiance on the Navajo Reservation, Tohe sought to break free from the isolated community, and lacking television or any modern forms of entertainment she found that escape at the library where the books she discovered took her far beyond the confines of the reservation.

“I knew much more existed outside my little community and the towns my family drove to for shopping and entertainment,” Tohe said. “From the library books I checked out, I traveled to other places and times.”
However, it was not until she was attending college at the University of New Mexico that she discovered Native American poetry – she had never taken an interest in poetry before but was able to connect through shared experience and developed a love for the art form.

“I knew then that that was what I was going to do for the rest of my life,” she said.

Fulfilling her creed, Tohe became an English professor at Arizona State University and has been publishing her poetry and writing for more than three decades. Her poetry is written both in Navajo and English and often revolves around her experience on the Navajo Nation, including the time she spent in a Native American boarding school, which was chronicled in her book, “No Parole Today.” [...]

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