Toni Jensen teaches in our Creative Writing program and at the Institute of American Indian Arts. This year, she is enjoying several major accomplishments: a Creative Writing Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts; the publication of her memoir-in-essays, Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land; and her promotion to a tenured position here at the University of Arkansas. Read, below, a report on Toni’s recent achievements written by M.F.A. alum and current doctoral student Jesse Greenhill.
Some people would take offense at being called “a bag of snakes.” Not Toni Jensen—she knows that a woman needs a bag of snakes (or even three) if she wants to take care of herself and get anywhere in this world. If you’re lucky enough to take a class with her, and if you pay close attention, you’ll come away from the experience knowing how to gather and care for your own snakes. That bag will serve you well.
We’re lucky to have had Toni here with us for the past six years. She’s a rising star in her field and people are taking notice. We’re even luckier now that she’s accepted a tenured position—it looks like she’s going to be with us for a while! Toni primarily teaches craft courses and moderates workshops in fiction and creative non-fiction. In the classroom, she encourages conversation that is supportive and inclusive while not shying away from challenging and problematic topics. I’ve had several courses with Toni—one of the things that I admire most is the way she helps students recognize and bring forward latent or underdeveloped aspects in their own work. She can be subtle yet firm at the same time, and she will not tolerate the marginalization of anyone in her class.
This is a big year for Toni and she deserves it. In January, she was awarded a Creative Writing Fellowship of $25,000 by the National Endowment for the Arts. Toni was one of 36 writers to receive the award and she was selected from nearly 1,700 eligible applicants. “The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to support our nation’s writers, including Toni Jensen, and the artistry, creativity, and dedication that go into their work,” said Mary Anne Carter, chair of the National Endowment for the Arts.
I spoke with Toni about her award—she told me one secret is this: reapply every chance you get. “It’s just like getting published,” she said, “just keep sending stuff out. It’ll get picked up at some point. Years ago, I had a faculty mentor who taught me that, and it’s something I tell my students again and again.” Several of our M.F.A. students have benefitted from Toni’s goading, picking up their own publications and awards along the way.
Along with her NEA award, Toni has been generating buzz recently because of her new book, Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land, coming out September 8 from Ballantine. Carry is a memoir-in-essays about the author’s interactions with guns and gun violence as a Métis woman, a professor on an open-carry university campus, and the daughter of a father with a lifelong NRA membership. Interweaving personal narrative with history, Carry maps the violence enacted on both indigenous women’s bodies and indigenous land, violence that is mostly hidden, ignored, or forgotten. If September feels too long to wait, or if you’re still wondering about that “bag of snakes,” you can read an excerpt published in Ecotone.
Before you rush over to UAConnect to sign up for a class with Toni, you should know that Toni will be mostly gone in the fall. As part of her new appointment, she gets a semester off to focus on her own work. This fall (provided it’s feasible with COVID-19), she intends to travel the western states researching “small acts of resistance to large environmental impact projects.”
Thanks, Toni—we appreciate the knowledge, skills, and perspective that you bring to our program, and we look forward to your future successes!