"With touches of humor and the occasional sharp cultural criticism, the voice that emerges from these poems is that of a Dakota woman rooted in her world and her words. In this moving collection, Westerman reflects on history and family from a unique perspective, one that connects the painful past and the hard-fought future of her Dakota homeland. Grounded in vivid story and memory, Westerman draws on both English and the Dakota language to celebrate the long journey along sunflower-lined highways of the tallgrass prairies of the Great Plains that returns her to a place filled with "more than history." An intense homage to the power of place, this book tells a masterful story of cultural survival and the power of language"--

Gwen Nell Westerman is a poet, a visual artist, and a scholar. Her roots are deep in the landscape of the tallgrass prairie and reveal themselves in her art and writing. A member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, she lives in southern Minnesota, as did her father's Dakota people. Her mother's family is from the Flint District of the Cherokee Nation, and Gwen is also a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Neither of her parents spoke English when they were sent to boarding schools as small children, so she knows the important way language shapes who we are. She was appointed as the Poet Laureate of Minnesota in 2021.Her poetry is included in Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories at the Field Museum in Chicago, and has appeared recently in Yellow Medicine Review (Fall 2022); When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020); POETRY Magazine (2019); and New Poets of Native Nations: 21 Poets of the 21st Century (2018).

Her award-winning visual art is included in Quiltfolk Issue 13--Minnesota (2019) and Sewing & Survival: Native American Quilts from 1880-2022 by Teresa Duryea Wong. Her quilts are in the permanent collections of the Minnesota Historical Society, the Great Plains Art Museum, The Heritage Center of the Red Cloud Indian School, and The University Art Galleries at the University of South Dakota.