Cranberry Lake Biological Station
Indigenous Writer in Residency

Kurt Naquin (they/them; Houma) is a qualitative researcher, Indigenous scholar, and creative writer from the Gulf South, currently based in North Carolina. They are a PhD candidate at North Carolina State University where their research focuses on relational and Indigenous approaches to climate adaptation planning and positions cultural programming as critical adaptation strategies. Their creative writing draws on the Houma creation story, Gulf South tenacity, family recipes, and the region’s environmental justice and political history to explore change, uncertainty, belonging, and continuance in the face of climate change and land loss. While at Cranberry Lake, they plan to work on a collection of poetic essays titled Recipes for Ancestral Transformations and short fiction exploring entwined political and ecological histories in the Indigenous Gulf South.

Claire Maracle is a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) member of the Six Nations of the Grand River,  raised on Muscogee, Osage, and Cherokee land. This experience directly informs their work in rematriation and their conviction that language is the key to transcending displacement. They are Executive Director of Words of the People, an Indigenous Language creative organization. Their poetry has appeared in This Land Press, Anti Heroin Chic, Emerge Magazine, New Words Press, Wayfarer Magazine and elsewhere.

Hannah Chouteau is a Tsistsistas and Kaáⁿze (Southern Cheyenne and Kaw) writer from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She is currently working on her M.F.A. in fiction and screenwriting at the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers. Her work explores themes of displacement, homelands and haunting and has been featured in Tupelo Quarterly, where she was a finalist for the Prose Prize in 2024.