Poet Abigail Chabitnoy’s most recent poetry collection, How to Dress a Fish, won the Colorado Book Award in Poetry in 2020 and was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is a mentor for the Institute of American Indian Arts (AIA) and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in its creative writing MFA. She is a Koniag descendant and member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak. Her forthcoming book, due out from Wesleyan Press, is In the Current Where Drowning is Beautiful. We sat down to talk about advocacy, responsibility, and craft.
The Writer: You’ve just started teaching at UMass Amherst, which has a broader remit than the Institute of American Indian Arts. What’s it like to go from a place that is so centered around advocacy to a more mainstream institution?
One of the great things about AIA is it advocacy based, but it’s also a space where the writers don’t have to necessarily play into stereotypes. They’re not expected to perform identity. It’s advocacy in the sense that it argues for Indigenous writers and artists to be able to be taken at their level of craft and not for just where they come from. Although, of course, where we all come from is going to influence that perspective. So in that way, working with the students at UMass, it’s a lot of that same kind of
