CMarie Fuhrman reads Linda Hogan's "The Sandhills"

View all films

CMarie Fuhrman reads Linda Hogan's "The Sandhills"

Linda Hogan’s poem “The Sandhills,” performed by CMarie Fuhrman. “The Sandhills” is the first film in Above Strands of Earth: Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation at Tippet Rise.

Above Strands of Earth: Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation at Tippet Rise is a project created in partnership with Tippet Rise’s sister organization, the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, and produced in collaboration with the Academy of American Poets.

Directed by Irish photographer and filmmaker Matthew Thompson, the films were captured in locations on the land at Tippet Rise and throughout the art center’s artistic spaces.

The Sandhills

The language of cranes
we once were told
is the wind. The wind
is their method,
their current, the translated story
of life they write across the sky.
Millions of years
they have blown here
on ancestral longing,
their wings of wide arrival,
necks long, legs stretched out
above strands of earth
where they arrive
with the shine of water,
stories, interminable
language of exchanges
descended from the sky
and then they stand,
earth made only of crane
from bank to bank of the river
as far as you can see
the ancient story made new.

Linda Hogan

Photo by Matthew Thompson

CMarie Fuhrman

Poet, non-fiction writer, and educator CMarie Fuhrman was born in Colorado. She grew up closely connected to the living world around her; as she told Western Colorado University, “When [her] parents told stories, nature was a character.” Fuhrman, who is of Southern Ute and Italian heritage, earned a BA in English and creative writing and an MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction from the University of Idaho. She also holds degrees in administration of justice, exercise physiology, and Indigenous studies.

Fuhrman is the author of the chapbook Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems (Floodgate, 2020) and co-editor of the anthologies Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Conversation, and Craft (Tupelo, 2019) and Cascadia: A Field Guide Through Art, Ecology, and Poetry (Mountaineers Press, 2023). Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in journals including Emergence Magazine, Poetry Northwest, Platform Review, Yellow Medicine Review, Cutthroat, Whitefish Review, Northwest Review, Broadsided Press, Taos International Journal of Poetry and Art, as well as several anthologies.

A recipient of the Burns Award for Poetry and a Grace Paley Fellowship, Fuhrman has taught and led workshops at many schools, universities, and institutions, including the University of Idaho, the University of Montana, Boise State University, Hudson Valley Writers Center, Blue River Writers Conference, and Hugo House. She has held residencies at Port Townsend Writers Conference, Bloedel Reserve, and Storyknife. She serves on the boards of Tupelo Press, Idaho Center for the Book, and Broadsided Press.

Fuhrman is a regular columnist for the Inlander, as well as translations editor for Broadsided Press and creative non-fiction editor for both High Desert Journal and Upstreet. She also directs the Elk River Writers Workshop. Currently, Fuhrman is Director of Poetry for Western Colorado University’s MFA in Creative Writing program, where she also teaches nature writing. She is the 2021–2023 Idaho Writer in Residence. Fuhrman resides in the mountains of West Central Idaho with her partner, Caleb, and their two dogs, Carhartt and Cisco.

Discover more on CMarie Fuhrman

Text: Read “Kokanee” by Fuhrman at Terrain
Video: Fuhrman performs at a reading for Great River Review
Audio: Fuhrman reads her essay “Coyote Story” for Emergence Magazine Podcast

Photo by: Larry Henderson

Linda Hogan

Linda Hogan is an internationally recognized speaker, environmentalist, and writer across genres. Born in Colorado, Hogan has Chickasaw roots based in South Central Oklahoma. In the 1950s, her uncle, Wesley Henderson, helped establish the White Buffalo Council in Denver to support Indigenous people displaced by the Relocation Act. Hogan was raised by a family of storytellers and traveled during some of her childhood due to her father’s military career. However, she found community in her Chickasaw family in Oklahoma and in the Indigenous inhabitants of Denver. Hogan earned her BA from the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs and her MA in English and creative writing from the University of Colorado–Boulder. She began to write in her late twenties: while working with disabled children, she read poems by Kenneth Rexroth on her lunch breaks, and she soon found the confidence to work on her own poetry.

Hogan published her first book of poetry, Calling Myself Home, in 1978. She has since come out with nine further collections, including Seeing Through the Sun (University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), winner of the American Book Award, and The Book of Medicines (Coffee House Press, 1993), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Colorado Book Award. Most recently, Hogan has released Pulitzer Prize nominee Rounding the Human Corners (Coffee House Press, 2008); the long poem and one-woman performance piece Indios (Wings Press, 2012); Dark. Sweet. (Coffee House Press, 2014), a collection of new and selected poems; and A History of Kindness (Torrey House Press, 2020), which won the Oklahoma Book Award. Hogan’s poetry has also garnered her State Arts Board grants from both Colorado and Minnesota and a Lannan Literary Award.

As a writer and thinker, Hogan’s focuses encompass nature and environmental issues, indigenous spirituality and culture, female embodiment and power, and tribal history.
In addition to her poetry, Hogan has written highly praised novels and non-fiction works, many addressing these topics. Mean Spirit (Atheneum, 1990), her first novel, captured the experience of Osage families in the 1920s; it was a finalist for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize and winter of the Oklahoma Book Award and the Mountains and Plains Book Award. Her novels Solar Storms and Power were finalists for the International Impact Award, and her fiction has won her National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships. Hogan’s recent nonfiction includes The Radiant Lives of Animals (Beacon Press, 2020), The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir (Norton, 2002), and the co-written Sightings: The Mysterious Journey of the Gray Whale (National Geographic Books, 2002). She has also edited several anthologies on nature and spirituality.

Hogan’s many further honors include the Thoreau Prize from PEN America, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, a Native Arts and Culture Award, a Pushcart Prize, and membership in the Chickasaw Hall of Fame. She has spoken at the United Nations Forum and the Environmental Literature Conference in Turkey. Hogan was involved for nearly two decades with the Native Science Dialogues and the new Native American Academy, as well as spending time at the SEED Graduate Institute in Albuquerque. A dedicated conservationist, Hogan volunteers and consults in wildlife rehabilitation and endangered species programs. She is currently on the board of advisors for Orion Magazine, among others. Hogan has taught at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Colorado College, the University of Colorado, and Indian Arts Institute, as well as serving as writer in residence for the Chickasaw Nation. She teaches creative writing workshops for all ages and travels widely for readings and lectures.

Discover more on Linda Hogan

Text: Read four poems by Hogan at World Literature Today

Video: Watch short programs on Hogan from Chickasaw TV

Text: “Bear Fat” by Hogan at The American Poetry Review