AuTHor Thursday: To the Local Poets

April is National Poetry Month.

Here on AuTHor Thursday, we have featured a few local poets. Thus, today, I invite you back to those local poet features.


Denise Lajimodiere
She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Pembina Chippewa, a poet, and Assistant Professor in Educational Leadership at North Dakota State University. Her poetry collection is entitled Dragonfly Dance.

Madelyn Camrud
She asks some excellent poetic questions:

Finally, I want to ask some questions. Doesn’t being a poet have as much to do with how you view the world as with it does with writing poetry? Isn’t it possible you’ve always been a poet though you might not have written poems?  Do you think you’re too busy to write poems? Isn’t poetry a place to go early mornings, at bedtime, and on Sundays?  Will there ever be enough time to live the introspective life you crave? Meanwhile, isn’t it enough to look in and out the windows of your life, to look forward and backward in your mind? Symphonic music in the background, birds, trees, and flowers in season, aren’t those lovely human faces and hearts, family and a few close friends, all you need to write poems?

Cindy Nichols
Her poems have appeared in a variety of national journals, including The Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, Cimarron Review, and Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics.

Heidi Czerwiec
She is a poet, essayist, translator, and critic who teaches at the University of North Dakota, where she is the poetry editor of North Dakota Quarterly. She is the author of two recent poetry collections – Self-Portrait as Bettie Page and A Is For A-ké, The Chinese Monster – and the forthcoming lyric essay sequence Sweet/Crude: A Bakken Boom Cycle, and the editor of North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets.