Acclaimed Diné poet, Jake Skeets, recently named the third Navajo Nation Poet Laureate and a proud UNM Creative Writing alumnus, returned to campus to kick off Native American Heritage Month with the keynote lecture for the 4th Annual Luci Tapahonso Distinguished Indigenous Speakers Series. The event, organized by UNM’s Institute for American Indian Research and sponsored by the English Department and Center for the Southwest, was held on Tuesday, November 4, 2025, from 4:00 to 6:00 PM in Hodgin Hall’s Bobo Room.
Skeets’ lecture, titled, “Arrived / Arriving: Native Literature Beyond the Renaissance” challenged the temporal frameworks often used to discuss Native literature. He argued that Native writing has always been central to American letters and that its repeated erasure reflects broader imperial and carceral logics shaping literary institutions today. The talk invited audiences to view Native literature not as a resurgence but as a continuous emergence that resists containment, defies assimilation, and refuses linearity, spotlighting queer Native writers whose work embodies this resistance through formal experimentation and radical presence.
Skeets is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, winner of the National Poetry Series, American Book Award, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Whiting Award, and the forthcoming collection Horses. His work has appeared in Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, and The Paris Review. His honors include an NEA Grant for Arts Projects, a Mellon Projecting All Voices Fellowship, and the 2023 to 2024 Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. He currently teaches at the University of Oklahoma. Visit his website at https://jakeskeets.com/ .
The Luci Tapahonso Distinguished Indigenous Speaker Series honors Diné poet and UNM alum Luci Tapahonso, celebrating Indigenous voices in literature, art, and scholarship. Past speakers include Sarah Deer (2022), Diane Wilson (2023), and Nancy Mithlo (2024).
