In Kinsale Drake’s poem “Put on that KTNN,” she writes about driving to a hometown as a familiar station crackles to life on the car radio. From this corner of America, she creates her own country music — of Navajo voices alongside Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn, of drumbeats and guitar licks, of things wrought by nature and things made by humans, all of them rooted in the desert sand.

Kinsale Drake (Diné) is a poet, playwright, and performer based out of the Southwest U.S. She is a winner of the 2023 National Poetry Series Competition. Her poetry collection, The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket, was published by The University of Georgia Press in 2024. Drake’s work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Poets.org, Best New Poets, Black Warrior Review, Nylon, MTV, Teen Vogue, Time, and elsewhere. She recently graduated from Yale University, where she received the J. Edgar Meeker Prize, Academy of American Poets College Prize, Young Native Playwrights Award, and the 2022 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize. She is the founder of NDN Girls Book Club.

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The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket

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