By KARA BRIGGS

You and I, and Spilyáy

With You and I, and Spilyáy, Kara Briggs emerges as a poet whose words sing across the natural world. Her poetics are inextricably Indigenous to the Cascade Mountains and Northwest Coast of the Pacific Ocean, while radiating with the rhythms of social commentary.

She draws deeply from her Sauk-Suaittle, Skagit, Entiat, Chelan,
Wenatchee and Yakama lifeways, while employing documentary poetry crossed with mythology to explore her personal journeys and dialogues with fellow travelers on the roads to liberation across the Pacific Rim, around the world, and into the spirit world.

The luminous You and I, and Spilyáy tracks Spilyáy, the most prominent trickster coyote in the Ichishkíin Sɨ́nwit language and cultures adjacent to the Columbia River, footprints and swish of tail, across the collection, across time both geologic and malleable. Deeply
journalistically observed, this poetry is a haunting and incisive antidote for our current times, while calling all to remember that love is the real atmospheric force we need.

Praise for You and I, and Spilyáy

The news out of Washington, D.C., is dire, but a counter movement is coming out of Washington State. The poems of Kara Briggs sing, dance, and inspire. They promise a better life–a better future for all. — Pat Matsueda, managing editor of Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing,  co-editor Ms. Aligned 2016 and 2026.

“With a journalist’s eye for detail and a mystic’s celebration of the surreal, Briggs explores faith and doubt, life and death, and what it means to witness to what happens in between these states
of being and awareness.” — Sarah K. Carey

“Here is Briggs’ language that brims with terrors and wonders of the heart/lands of the Pacific Rim…Here is poetry that contains Indigenous women’s wisdom and Whitman-esque multitudes to sustain anyone “longing for connection, for the world to hear their
pleas.” — Sandra Yannone, author of Fire at the Big Top.

This collection is an antidote for the times we are living in – and a reminder through incision and lyricism that love is our only real choice, and our hope still rests in the words of Martin Luther King that the long moral arc of the universe bends toward justice.
— Dr. Elizabeth Parent, Yu’pik/Dineh, professor emerita San Francisco State

Grounded in living memory, Briggs brings tenderness and moral urgency to poems shaped by inheritance and renewal. Moving from her early childhood amid the Civil Rights era in California’s Central Valley to the Murdered and Missing Peoples to the wonder of the Pacific Rim, the poems compare the figure Spilyáy with modern day
forces the endanger Pacific salmon, clean water and sacred places, asking what it means to remember rightly, to grieve and to remain answerable to the future. — Saint Julian Press

Additional credits:

Publisher Saint Julian Press, Houston

Spilyáy art Isabel Deaver

Author photography Renee Rausch

Red Drum by Brenda Xyolholemo:t Crabtree

Design Smythtype Design

ABOUT AUTHOR AND POET

KARA BRIGGS

Kara Briggs’ first book Rivers in My Veins was published by Saint Julian Press in 2024, the same year she received the James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poetry. A journeyman writer, Kara launched her career in journalism, later public affairs. She consulted with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian during its first decade on the National Mall and has supported tribes across the West across her professional roles.

Now an executive leader of environmental and art organizations, Kara is a Sauk-Suiattle tribal citizen and a direct Yakama descendant. Born in Honolulu, Hawai’i, she was a toddler in California’s Central Valley and primarily grew up Spokane, Washington and Spirit Lake, Idaho. She now lives on an original allotment on the Tulalip Reservation with her husband John Thunderbird Campbell. They forest farm on their land near the Salish Sea and within view of the North Cascades. She primarily works regionally and nationally from home, allowing her to keep cultural practice with her Sauk-Suiattle and Yakama families.

She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Institute of American Indian Art, and Master of Public Administration from The Evergreen College, and a bachelor’s degree in English from Whitworth College.

Kara Briggs
Media Packet

Contact Kara by email for interviews, reviews and other media outreach.

News Release for Rivers in My Veins and Kara Briggs

Press Release from Saint Julian Press

About Rivers in My Veins

Announcement James Welch Prize

Support for Bookstores

Bookstores may contact Kara at kara@karabriggs.com to request wholesale ordering information.

Reading Poster for bookstores and other venues: the book cover art plus space to write in pertinent information

Poem One

Poem Two 

Poem Three 

Poem Four 

 

Advance Praise for Rivers in My Veins

With calm elegance, precise language, and the spirit of the Pacific Northwest, Kara Briggs sings her people onto the page. River in my Veins is both protest and celebration, a reminder to readers that the Sauk-Suiattle, Wenatchee, Chelan, Entiat, and Skagit peoples are still harvesting, fishing, and remembering. Land we live on land, she writes, calling us to embrace our kinship with the earth.

– Deborah Taffa, Whiskey Tender

"Rivers in My Vein's" is a work of lyric courage...

“Rivers in My Veins” is a work of lyric courage that celebrates the interconnectivity of the earth and her people while confronting, through unflinching investigative addresses, the false settler-colonial narratives and power structures within these narrative’s problematic etymologies and extractive practices. Kara Briggs’ tenacious spirit and fierce love of the lands, waters, and stories of her Coast Salish people makes “Rivers in my Veins” a powerful debut collection that will become a vital contribution to our shared world’s literary—and deeply alive—landscapes.

– Jennifer Elise Foerster, editor of  When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry

Advance Praise for Rivers in My Veins

With a journalist’s eye for unflinching truth, Kara Briggs’s Rivers in My Veins assembles precise language, lyric verse and innovative form to produce a finely wrought blend of Native perspective poetry. Briggs compels the reader to hold onto familiar narratives of landscape and family while learning more layers of story. At the heart of this collection, a drum of knowledge beats, aiming at nothing less than uplifting the experience of American Indians who are every bit as intellectual and human as the readers of this book. I have known Kara Briggs for many years waiting for this collection to come to light. Now we will be better as a nation for reading Rivers in My Veins.

– Suzan Shown Harjo, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, editor of  Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations 

More Advance Praise for Rivers in My Veins

In groundbreaking forms and language that speak directly to her ancestors, elders, and future generations, Kara Briggs amplifies the legacy of her Sauk-Suiattle and Yakama peoples and of Native American poets writing before her to place her family and tribal histories outside of the parenthesis forever. Reading River in My Veins remains a journey in poetry that I will carry in my veins forever. I am grateful; I am humbled, but most importantly, I am eager for the conversations that Briggs’ debut river of poetry will provoke in American letters.

– Sandra Yannone. author of The Glass House and Boats for Women

Advance Praise for Rivers in My Veins

The poems in Kara Briggs’s debut, Rivers in My Veins, awe with their gorgeous imagery and their unparalleled wisdom. They will make you cry, cause you to seethe with anger, and comfort you with their testimony of resilience. Deeply embedded in the culture of the Coast Salish and Interior Salish peoples, Rivers in My Veins is spiritual, ascendant, and damning. In some poems, Briggs pierces the reader by bringing home the personal toll caused by devastating colonial acts like the flooding of Celilo Falls, while in others she insightfully meditates on the meanings of fraught terms like “sovereignty” and “apology.” The book moves from breathless love poems such as “Ancestor Moon,” where the speaker is “turned to mist,” to poignant explorations of the tragedy of in-fighting within the speaker’s Tribal community. The strikingly lyrical poems in Rivers in My Veins beguile with their beauty and at the same time teach you how to live.

– Ann Tweedy, author of The Body’s Alphabet and A Registry of Survival

Order Rivers in My Veins from leading online retailers, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, or your local bookstore.

Wholesale Orders

Book sellers email Kara Briggs to obtain whole sale information.

Contact Kara Briggs

To schedule a reading by email at kara@karabriggs.com

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Available Sept. 12, 2024

Rivers in My Veins

Native American, Women, Nature Poetry

Rivers in My Veins is a paperback collection of lyrical and documentary poetry. While it is available at popular online retailers including Amazon, Barns and Noble, and Bookshop; I am offering signed copied dedicated to yourself or your friends from this website. Please type into the note section the name to which you want the book inscribed, or else I can simply sign and date. We will ship through U.S.P.S., to get the book more quickly please use one of the other retailers. We charge a flat rate for shipping and handling that is good anywhere in the U.S. Please contact Kara by email for international orders.
Rivers in My Veins - $18.00

Available Sept. 12, 2018

Celilo

A signed numbered art print for the poem Celilo

The broadsheet art print of the poem Celilo is a limited edition. The poem features the publicly available tribal language names for waterfalls in Washington, Oregon and Idaho above a modified image of the historic Celilo Falls. This print is only available from this site. It features one of the poems in Rivers in My Veins. We charge a flat rate that is good anywhere in the U.S.
Order the art prints - $100.00