Chabitnoy is a Koniag descendant (Aleut) and member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak. An award-winning writer, she is the author of In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful (Wesleyan 2022) and How to Dress a Fish (Wesleyan 2019), which was shortlisted for the 2020 International Griffin Prize for Poetry and winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award. Chabitnoy is an Assistant Professor of English at UMass Amherst. How to Dress a Fish addresses the lives disrupted by the Indian boarding school policy of the U.S. government—a collection in which Chabitnoy pays particular attention to the life story of her great-grandfather who was taken from Alaska to Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Chabitnoy’s work reminds its readers of the long histories of the institutionalization of Indigenous bodies, including the illegal practice of concealing Native human remains.

The reading is open to the public and is sponsored by the American and Native American Studies programs; the Native American Advisory Committee; the departments of History, Anthropology, and English; and the Native American and Indigenous Student Alliance.