Denise Sweet
Wisconsin's Poet Laureate

Featured Speaker, Saturday, Oct. 4, Edgerton Public Library reading room
"title TBD "

An Anishinaabe (White Earth) poet and university professor, Sweet was named Wisconsin’s second Poet Laureate by Gov. Jim Doyle in September 2004. The author of “Songs for Discharming,” Sweet replaced the state’s first Poet Laureate, Ellen Kort. Named an Outstanding Woman of Color by the University of Wisconsin System in 1995, Sweet was sponsored by the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City as one of five U.S. Native American authors sent to the First World Congress of Indigenous Literatures of the Americas in 1998. Sweet works at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay as a professor of humanistic studies. She teaches creative writing, literature and mythology there. Also involved in fieldwork among the Mayan peoples of the Yucatan Peninsula and Guatemala, Sweet has read her poetry at roughly 100 appearances throughout America, Canada, Mexico and Guatemala. She has served as poet-in-residence at various public and tribal schools, as well as at the Grand Marais Art Colony in northern Minnesota. Her most recent project is a book of poetry, “As Those With Faith Will Do.” Sweet has been an adjunct instructor at the College of the Menominee Nation and currently serves as an adjunct instructor at Mount Senario College. She is director of “Who We Are, What Is Ours,” a UW-Green Bay pre-college, young writers’ workshop for students of color. Sweet participated in 1998’s Project the Earth Journey, a walk from the Red Cliff Chippewa Reservation on Lake Superior to Madison’s state capitol. The walk garnered support for a state constitutional amendment to protect air, water, and other forms of “common property.” Sweet received the Diane Decorah Award for Poetry in 1995 from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, as well as 1998’s Posner Award for Poetry from the Wisconsin Council of Writers.

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