Kinsale Drake: NDN Girls Book Club

Image courtesy, Kinsale Drake

Kinsale Drake: NDN Girls Book Club
By: Savignon Swimmer

In the artistic Indigenous community, it often falls on the youth themselves to share and support each other’s work, as it’s unfortunately common for their accomplishments to go completely unnoticed. Whether it be through collaborations, shoutouts, or a simple repost, there’s an undeniable emphasis surrounding youth celebrating fellow artists’ work, and creating spaces to highlight and talk about one another. One such champion of this welcoming mindset is Kinsale Drake, an award-winning poet/editor/playwright whose work has been featured across a number of distinguished publications.

One need only glance over their portfolio to see how Kinsale strives to promote fellow creatives’ art, even building up their own platforms to do so. Kinsale is the editor for Changing Wxman Collective, an online literary magazine that publishes a variety of mediums from BIPOC artists of marginalized genders, as well as providing resources for others to run their own community workshops. Earlier last year, Kinsale wrote an article for Teen Vogue which highlighted the accomplishments of 11 Indigenous youth, garnering attention across Turtle Island.

Their most recent venture is the revitalized NDN Girls Book Club, a group founded by Kinsale to share Native literature and inspire young writers to continue following their passions. With a full launch slated for later this year, we were lucky enough to learn some more about this group from Kinsale themselves, and hear about the journey which brought them here.

Can you give us a short introduction about yourself?

Hi She Towers! My name is Kinsale Drake and I’m Nat’oh dine’é, born for Bilagaana. I’m a poet and performer currently based out of the Southwest. I edit Changing Wxman Collective and run NDN Girls Book Club and I just graduated from college.

For those who don’t know, can you describe to us what NDN Girls Book Club is and what work you do?

NDN Girls Book Club brings free literary and writing workshops, Indigenous author talks, programming, and pop-ups to Native peoples, mainly Native youth and girls. It’s been a continuation of the work I’ve been doing for the past five or six years as a poet, a lot of which has been holding multimedia writing workshops at schools. 

Everyone is welcome to support and enjoy our free events, but I really wanted to make a space where Native book nerds could just come together, write, support each other, and talk and where young Native people could feel supported in their creative endeavors. 

We also have been doing a bunch of giveaways for our soft launch thanks to a grant from First Peoples Fund. That means we’ve been sending out books by Native authors for free to our community members, followers, Native readers, and tribal libraries, and supporting indie Indigenous bookstores like Quiet Quail Books in the process!

Can you tell us about your experiences with literature, has reading always been something important to you?

I loved reading so much as a kid. I was super into fandoms and YA literature, but also just loved discovering new favorite books. I had phases where I was obsessed with Jane Eyre, Percy Jackson, High Fidelity, Louise Erdrich… I even used to run a fan account for a book series. 

I was lucky enough to be surrounded by people who loved books, too; my grandpa used to collect them and passed his love down to my mom, who is probably the most proficient reader I’ve ever met. She’s the reason I love Jane Austen and romance novels. Recently, I’ve been trying to get her into poetry. My dad is into history and we’re really similar because we tend to get easily obsessed with specific books, but we read a lot of fiction together, like The Night Watchman and How High We Go in the Dark.

I learned how to write by reading because I was such a shy kid and never took any classes before college or shared my poems with anyone, even my family. In high school, my life totally changed because I got into Leslie Marmon Silko, Natalie Diaz, Louise… They taught me how to write about identity and relationships to the external world, and have just been teaching me more and more since then.

When did you first visualize NDN Girls Book Club? How has it evolved and grown since you first came up with the idea?

I wanted something like NDN Girls Book Club since I was a kid. Middle school, probably, was the first time I thought about it because I wanted to talk about this Native character from a popular book series online, and the only people who got what I wanted to talk about were other Native fans! We could talk about stereotypes, for example, like why it was weird for this character to wear feathers and we didn’t have to explain ourselves and our discomfort. 

Later, when I was a National Student Poet, I had a lot of practice running writing workshops with other young people, and I always used lots of Native authors’ work as examples. That got me more into the workshop side of things, and connected me with a broader community of readers and writers I could begin to collaborate with. Last year, I started hosting pop-ups and readings with other Native women- and queer-run organizations, like Shy Natives, Quw’utsun’ Made, and Abalone Mountain Press… that was the more “official” beginning of NDN Girls Book Club. Eventually, I made merch from a drawing of a Diné girl reading to raise funds for free workshops, and that got people excited, especially the cute pink sweatshirts and holographic stickers. 

Now that I’ve graduated, I’m fully invested in writing and teaching workshops through NDN Girls Book Club and excited to see where things take us.

Can you tell us about your work as a poet and what sort of experiences you’ve had because of that?

I started writing as a kid, but as I mentioned I was pretty private about it. I actually didn’t have my first poetry reading until I was a National Student Poet, but that experience was really invaluable because I learned how to teach poetry and write poetry at the same time. I’ve gotten to travel a lot for work, and read on some really fun stages, even MTV. But my favorite thing has been to meet and work with people who are literally my idols, from Heid Erdrich to my cohort of Indigenous Nations Poets Fellows, Laura Tohe, Luci Tapahonso, Joy Harjo, Claudia Rankine… Other emerging Native writers who are doing great things like Sareya Taylor, Ha’ani San Nicolas, Danielle Emerson. 

A lot of my work has been collaborative, like Changing Wxman, which operates as an arts and literary journal. That’s allowed me to meet so many amazing writers and artists whom I always want to share with other people, that I try to platform whenever I can.

Where are you hoping to see NDN Girls Book Club be in the next five years?

I want NDN Girls Book Club to reach exponentially more libraries, indie bookstores, and Native students and readers. Definitely in-person author talks, more pop-ups and book festivals. Meeting some book baddies in real life.

Where can our readers learn more about and follow your work?

You can reach me at @kinsalehues on Instagram and @KinsaleDrake on Twitter! @NDNGirlsBookClub has an Instagram and a page here (our site is launching later this spring). Come read Elatsoe with us this month! Join the club. We have a talk with Darcie Little Badger on February 4th. Come nerd out with us anytime. Baddies read (and listen to) Native lit!