On Thursday March 9 from 6-7:30 pm, Mandy Smoker Broaddus and Natalie Peeterse will share highlights of how the book, Thunderous, came to life and read a selection. Thunderous is a children's graphic novel grounded in contemporary Indigenous experiences while also centering traditional Lakota ways of knowing, language, and identity.
Register online at tinyurl.com/thunderousMT to participate from home or meet in the Teen Corner on the 2nd floor to catch the watch party at the library.
Mandy Smoker Broaddus Bio:
Mandy Smoker Broaddus is a member of the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes of the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana. She has served at as an K-12 educator and administrator and tribal college instructor. She also worked as the Indian education director for the state of Montana for ten years and is currently employed by the non-profit, Education Northwest as a Senior Advisor for Native Education and Culturally Responsive Practice. She serves as an appointee by President Obama on the National Advisory Council on Indian Education.
She holds an MFA from the University of Montana in Missoula, and is the author of one collection or poetry and a children’s graphic novel, Thunderous. In 2019 she was recognized as an alumna of the year by the University. She was poet laureate for the state of Montana from 2019-2021. She has also received a regional Emmy award for her work as a writer/consultant on the PBS documentary Indian Relay.
Natalie Peeterse Bio:
Natalie Peeterse is the co-author of the graphic novel Thunderous. Her poetry chapbook Black Birds : Blue Horse, An Elegy won the Gold Line Press Poetry Prize in 2011. A second poetry chapbook, Dreadful : Luminosity, Letters, was published by Educe Press in the spring of 2017. She was included in I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights (Lost Horse Press), and several other anthologies. She has an MFA from the University of Montana and has been a fellow with the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a participant at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, an artist in residence at the Caldera Institute, a participant in the 2018 US Poets in Mexico in Merida, Yucatan and most recently a Visiting Scholar at the University of Washington’s Whiteley Center at the Friday Harbor Laboratories. She is a recipient of the 2013 Artist Innovation Award by the Montana Arts Council. She lives in Helena, Montana where she works on Open Country Press.