Layli Long Soldier

When words are not enough, I enjoy making, and have cultivated a visual arts practice to accompany written texts, as a way to see and feel what language, itself, cannot fully articulate.

Layli Long Soldier is an Oglala Lakota poet, educator, and visual artist known for her research-based work in documentary poetics that draws from community conversation. Her other areas of focus include kinship and family relationships, parenthood, Lakota language and history, and her journey through reflexive writing-about-writing. Long Soldier has cultivated a visual arts practice to accompany her written texts as a way to see and feel what language, itself, cannot fully articulate.

Long Soldier’s first book, Whereas (​​Graywolf Press, 2017), utilizes prose, longform narrative sequences and disclaimers to confront the wording and empty gesture of S.J. Res 14, a congressional resolution of apology to Native Americans, passed as part of the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2010. The poems in the first half of Whereas contain strings of hyphenated words, irregular spacing, and abrupt line breaks, which complicate the process of reading and demonstrate the limitations of language when addressing historical injustices.

Her series of poems on the weather, titled Day Poems and Night Poems, commissioned by the Holt/Smithson Foundation, evolved into a large-scale outdoor art installation, which was featured in the Invisible Prairie (2023) exhibition at Tinworks Art in Bozeman, MT. For the installation, Long Soldier’s poems were spread across eight large steel panels with cutout text and mirrors, which generated an interplay between light and shadow. This work continues to evolve in collaboration with fellow Oglala Lakota artist Mikayla Patton, who will add visual elements to the panels. in preparation for its move to Lakota homelands at Racing Magpie in Rapid City, SD in 2025.

Long Soldier contributed narration and poetry to the 2022 documentary film Lakota Nation vs. United States, directed by Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli. The documentary explores the Lakota people's fight to reclaim the Black Hills, which were taken from them by the United States in violation of treaties. For the film, she composed a long poem titled "135 Xs", which refers to the signatures of the 135 tribal elders on the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie with the United States government.

Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, The New York Times, The American Poet, The American Reader, BOMB and elsewhere. Long Soldier has received numerous awards, including the Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature (2021), the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize (2021), the PEN/Jean Stein Award (2018), the National Book Critics Circle Award (2018), a Whiting Award (2016). She was a recipient of the National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (2015) and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry (2015).

She holds an M.F.A. from Bard College and a B.F.A. from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Long Soldier is a mentor in the M.F.A. Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and Endowed Chair of the M.F.A. Creative Writing Program at Texas State University.