Melissa Kwasny, Montana Poet

Melissa Kwasny is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently The Cloud Path (Milkweed Editions 2024), winner of the High Plains International Book Award and featured in New York Times Magazine. Her first full length nonfiction book, Putting on the Dog: The Animal Origins of What We Wear, explores the cultural, labor, and environmental histories of clothing materials provided by animals. She is also the editor of two anthologies: I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poets in Defense of Global Human Rights and Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950. She was Montana Poet Laureate from 2019-2021, a position she shared with M.L. Smoker.