Poet explores native Alaskan roots, set to speak at Saint Vincent

Abigail Chabitnoy, a published poet and 2009 graduate of Saint Vincent College, will return to the college’s Unity campus on March 13, to kick off the spring semester of its 10th annual Visiting Writers Series.

Chabitnoy will speak at 5 p.m. in the Luparello Lecture Hall at the Sis and Herman Dupré Science Pavilion. She’ll also announce the three student winners of the annual Ragan Poetry Contest, for which she is judge, and the trio will read their works.

The event is open to the public at no charge.

A member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska, Chabitnoy is of Unangan and Sugpiaq descent. Those groups are among native peoples who have inhabited areas of Alaska.

Chabitnoy’s first full-length book of poetry, “How to Dress a Fish,” is scheduled for release by Wesleyan University Press. It addresses lives that were disrupted by U.S. Indian boarding school policy — including that of her great-grandfather, Michael Chabitnoy, who was taken in 1901 from a Baptist orphanage on Wood Island, Alaska, and sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.

Her poems also have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Nat. Brut, Red Ink and Mud City Journal.

She was an associate editor for the Colorado Review at Colorado State University, where she received her master’s degree in English.

The Visiting Writers Series brings writers and literary translators from across the country to read and discuss their work at Saint Vincent College.

Jeff Himler is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Jeff at 724-836-6622, jhimler@tribweb.com or via Twitter @jhimler_news.