An inaugural selection of the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature program, The Radiant Lives of Animals by Linda Hogan is a hybrid work weaving together prose, poetry, and illustrations. The collection connects Indigenous understandings and Hogan’s own relationships to animals and the natural world, a reminder for readers to pause, and reflect.
Join Linda Hogan in conversation with Rena Priest, Washington State Poet Laureate, on Native storytelling, and writing the environment. Presented in partnership with the National Book Foundation.
Linda Hogan is internationally recognized for her poetry, fiction, and essays, and for lyrical work which illuminates a new environmental and indigenous activism as well as Native spirituality. A member of the Chickasaw Nation and a former faculty member at the Indian Arts Institute, she is Professor Emerita at the University of Colorado. Her works include the novels Mean Spirit (Norton, 1991), a winner of the Oklahoma Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Solar Storms (Norton, 1997), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Power (Norton, 1999); and People of the Whale (Norton, 2009). In poetry, The Book of Medicines (Coffee House Press, 1993) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other poetry has received the Colorado Book Award, an American Book Award, and a prestigious Lannan Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. In addition, she has received a NEA fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas. Her most recent awards were the 2016 Thoreau Prize from PEN and a Native Arts and Culture Award. Learn more.
Rena Priest is a poet and an enrolled member of the Lhaq’temish (Lummi) Nation. She has been appointed to serve as the Washington State Poet Laureate for the term of April 2021-2023. She is a Vadon Foundation Fellow, and recipient of an Allied Arts Foundation Professional Poets Award. Her debut collection, Patriarchy Blues, was published by MoonPath Press and received an American Book Award. She is a National Geographic Explorer (2018-2020) and a Jack Straw Writer (2019). She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Learn more.