With a pink truck, a poet’s heart, and a whole lot of free books, award-winning Diné poet Kinsale Drake—founder of the NDN Book Club—is driving change (literally) by delivering Native literature and radical love across the country.
A bright pink four-wheel truck nicknamed Pinky the Rezmobile drove across the Navajo and Hopi nations in April 2024. Between the six stops the truck made, 10,000 free books written by Native authors were distributed. NDN book club, “a 501(C)(3) organization that uplifts native literature on every level,” according to its founder, the writer Kinsale Drake, organized the book drop. The club also provides free community workshops, literature talks, support for tribal libraries and bookstores, resources for young writers, and you can find a poet map of Native authors on its website, among other initiatives. Although the idea for the club came to Drake as a girl, who craved a community around literature, she officially launched it in April 2023, months after she graduated from Yale University.
As a young girl, Drake didn’t see herself in what she read, which isn’t surprising given that Native Americans comprise one percent of the publishing industry, according to a 2023 survey. When Drake’s English teacher assigned Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, to her as a teenager, it changed Drake’s perspective. “To know that there was language afforded to the life experiences that I was sharing with other Native peoples, to know that there was a place for myself in that canon was really life-changing,” says Drake.
Reading Native writers unlocked Drake’s creativity and inspired her to write more. Poetry can sometimes feel inaccessible or exclusive because of the way it’s taught, but the more Drake read the more she realized that poetry was “always a part of our communities. It was always a part of our language and a part of our ways of thinking,” she says. It “was kind of a moment where you’re like, Oh, I belong to these histories…And in fact, there are other ways of looking at poetry…that have been around longer than even what we think of as Western romantic poetry.”
This realization, and the impact of Native writers, inspired Drake to start NDN Book Club and also propelled her writing career. Drake started writing poetry as a girl, but before Erdrich, poetry felt like a technical skill to master. Thanks to Erdrich’s writing, poetry then morphed into an art form in which Drake could express herself.
Over the last eight years, Drake has published countless poems and received numerous awards such as the Adroit Prize for Poetry and the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, and she was featured in Time magazine. In 2024, Drake published her first collection of poems, The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket, a winner of the 2023 National Poetry Series. In the poem “Ancestors’ wildest dreams,” Drake’s favorite in the book, she seamlessly weaves references to Instagram and being drunk on a Denny’s floor with ayóó ánííníshní and Dloh, words meaning I love you and strawberry in Diné Bizaad, the Navajo language. Through her poetry, Drake deconstructs simplistic stereotypes of Native culture that historically saturated literature. “My writing is interested in the ability of humans to hold a number of contradictions within their identities to illuminate the flawed constructions of those identities while also allowing for diverse, multifaceted, and imperfect depictions of Indigenous existence,” says Drake.
Lucky for us, Drake continues to write. She usually writes at night when she’s snuggled under a pile of blankets with her cat close by. To fuel her writing process, Drake listens to her body and reconnects with nature. “It’s not just I’m hungry, it’s not just I’m thirsty. It’s also when was the last time I walked around a body of water? When was the last time I stood in the sun? When was the last time that I felt the seasons change?” says Drake. “Those are all touchstones for your body, connecting with the external world, which is an important part of living our lives and finding inspiration.” She’s currently working on a second collection of poems and hopes to write romantic comedy and Young Adult books in the future.
When Drake isn’t writing she’s working on NDN Book Club, including planning another book drop this May. to the Tlingit and Haida communities in Alaska. Travel on this trip may be by boat, but Pinky the Rezmobile remains part of Drake’s dreams. “Our radical dream would be to have this pink mobile library that we can just drive from res to res. We just want to keep getting these books out to people, get them in the hands of our youth and those families, and just get these stories out there.”
Kinsale Drake Photo Courtesy Of Erica Elan
