Layli Long Soldier w/ Lena Khalaf Tuffaha at Seattle Public Library

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Registration is required. This event is held in the Microsoft Auditorium on Level 1 of SPL Central Branch.

In We, Layli Long Soldier examines what it means to be in community, to be in relation with family, nation, history, and language. We is the first-person plural, the pronoun of inclusion in English. It is also Wé, the Lakota word meaning “blood”—what is shared and what is shed.

In this ingenious and insightful arrangement of poems, lyric essays, and her own visual artworks presented in full color, Long Soldier creates unique spaces of collaboration, mentorship, and shared knowledge. The 184 X’s signed to a broken treaty, the fringes of a winged dress braided in honor of children lost to Indian boarding schools, and intricate Lakota star quilts become shapes and patterns that convey collective kinship, memory, and grievance. “From this day forward,” Long Soldier writes, “I declare a war of language.”

We is a visionary new collection by a writer and artist whose unfolding works are among the most groundbreaking of our time.

Layli Long Soldier is a poet, artist, and citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. She is the author of WHEREAS, a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award and winner of the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award. Long Soldier has also received a 2016 Whiting Award, a 2021 Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, the 2021 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize in the UK, and the 2025 C.D. Wright Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2024, she received an Emmy Award for her poetry in the documentary film Lakota Nation vs. United States. She teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is the author of three award-winning books of poetry, Water & Salt (Red Hen, 2017), Kaan and Her Sisters (Trio House, 2023), and Something About Living (University of Akron, 2024). Something About Living won the 2024 National Book Award, an Arab American Book Award, a Washington State Book Award, and an American Library Association’s Notable Book. Tuffaha is also an essayist and translator. Her work has been published in journals including Michigan Quarterly Review, Mizna, the Nation, Prairie Schooner, and Poets.org. In 2022, she was the curator of the poetry translation series Poetry from Palestine at the Baffler magazine. She won the John Fredrick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation from the Poetry Foundation for her translations of the late Zakaria Mohammed’s poems in that series. She is currently translating a manuscript of his selected works.