Esther Belin

ebelin@msu.edu

Audrey & John Leslie Endowed Chair in North American Indian and Indigenous Literary Studies

English

Biography

“My expression is a liberation functioning as a contrived reality boxed into Indian.”

Esther G. Belin is the author of two poetry collections, From the Belly of My Beauty, and Of Cartography, and co-editor of The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature. An urban Indian, born at an Indian Health Service hospital and raised in the greater Los Angeles area, Belin’s early writing addressed the everyday microaggressions of racialized trauma, oppression and general ignorance about Indian tribes and people in the United States.

Her creative process is rooted to the concept of kinship and the responsibility of reciprocity, a key connection across Indigenous philosophies. From this process of connectivity, Belin’s method is rooted to the crux of Indigenous epistemologies and pedagogies.

She serves on the Board of In-Na-Po and is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Durango, Colorado.

Works

From the Belly of My Beauty (University of Arizona Press, 1999)

Of Cartography (University of Arizona Press, 2017)

The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature (University of Arizona Press, 2021)

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