POETRY :: Trickster Academy/ Jenny L. Davis

Jack and Indian Collector

Fee-fi-fo-fum,

I smell the bones of an Indian,

Be he alive, or be she dead

I’ll grind their flesh and keep the head

Bones for the classrooms, bones for the labs, bones by the thousands, laid out on slabs

Join us for a reading from the collection, “Trickster Academy,” from poet and scholar Jenny L. Davis (Chickasaw)

**About the Collection

Trickster Academy is a collection of poems that explore being Native in Academia—from land acknowledgement statements, to mascots, to the histories of using Native American remains in anthropology. Jenny L. Davis’ collection brings humor and uncomfortable realities together in order to challenge the academy and discuss the experience of being Indigenous in university classrooms and campuses. Organized around the premise of the Trickster Academy— a university space run by, and meant for training, Tricksters— this collection moves between the personal dynamics of a Two-Spirit/queer Indigenous woman in spaces where there are few, if any, others and a Trickster’s critique of those same spaces.

—University of Arizona Press

“The poems in Davis’s collection lean into the creative ironies only a slippery operator like Trickster could unearth, stemming from Chickasaw oral traditions and storied experiences. Distinctive about Trickster Academy is Davis’s teasing of language, which complicates the reductive impulses of Western institutionalization, anthropological canonization, and social ostracization. This twenty-first-century two-spirit, Indigenous poetic narrative continually jabs at destructive assumptions about Native life as it carves beautiful, yet deeply complicated, connections to homelands. All readers will love how the collection builds upon foundational Native writers who turn to the generative nature of trickster-as-poet, rendering carefully the unburdened imaginings of Indigenous realities and futures.”

—Molly McGlennen, author of Our Bearings

**About the Author

Jenny L. Davis is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she is the director of the American Indian Studies Program. Her creative work has been published in Transmotion; Anomaly; Santa Ana River Review; Broadsided; North Dakota Quarterly; Yellow Medicine Review; As/Us; Raven Chronicles; and Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance and exhibited at the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture & Lifeways and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts.

This is a no cost virtual gathering.

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**About ATNSC: We are a socially engaged artist-led urban retreat, residency, research and exhibition space in the historic Buckeye-Shaker neighborhood.