The English Department Presents: Alanna Hickey, “Political Complaint and Spiritual Practice in the Ojibwe Elegy”

Alanna Hickey is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University. She specializes in Native American literatures, poetry and poetics, and early American literature and culture. Her current book project, The Forms of National Belonging: The Politics of Native American Poetry, illuminates the central role of poetry in Native American expressive cultures before the Native American Renaissance of the 1960s. It constructs a genealogy of verse written in English, Creek dialect, Anishinaabemowin, and Cherokee, showing how poets from a diverse set of Native communities adapted popular Euro-American poetic genres to accommodate pre-existing forms of Native expression and promote Indigenous spiritual and political life.