Blood Snow

Finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize

Here, in a true Inupiaq voice, dg okpik’s relationship to language is an access point for understanding larger kinships between animals, peoples, traditions, histories, ancestries, and identities. Through an animist process of transfiguration into a Shaman’s omniscient voice, we are greeted with a destabilizing grammar of selfhood. Okpik’s poems have a fraught relationship to her former home in Anchorage, Alaska, a place of unparalleled natural beauty and a traumatic site of devastation for Alaskan native nations and landscapes alike. In this way, okpik’s poetry speaks to the dualistic nature of reality and how one’s existence in the world simultaneously shapes and is shaped by its environs.

dg nanouk okpik was born in Anchorage, Alaska and graduated from Salish Kootenai College with an AFA in Liberal Arts and Liberal Studies, The Institute of American Indian Arts with an AFA and a BFA in Creative Writing, and finally to Stonecoast College for MFA in Creative Writing. Okpik has won the Truman Capote Literary Award, An American Book Award for her first book, Corpse Whale, with University of Arizona Press and the May Sarton Award. Okpik resides in Northwest Montana.