KINSALE DRAKE
Photograph by Sydney Holmes
Kinsale Drake (Diné) is a winner of the 2023 National Poetry Series for her debut poetry collection THE SKY WAS ONCE A DARK BLANKET (University of Georgia Press, 2024). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Poets.org, Best New Poets, Black Warrior Review, Nylon, Teen Vogue, and elsewhere. She is the director of NDN Girls Book Club, a literary nonprofit for Indigenous peoples.
How many lives
can I hold in each chamber
of my heart?
I started writing as a young teenager because poetry was the most cohesive, most thoughtful way for me to understand my existence, mostly in the context of my intersecting identities.
July 14, 2024
Kinsale’s Poetry Prompt
How is your heart today? Write a poem to your heart, in the form of a letter or just addressing it in some way. Explore what kind of radical kindness you can offer your heart. Start with the senses and move outwards from those observations. What does each chamber hold? What are the beings that live there? What is the weight that it carries in your body? What is its geography? This is usually a nice meditation, and a thoughtful check-in with the self.
