Board of Directors

Jessica Moore Harjo, Ph.D.

Amber McCrary

Amber McCrary is Diné poet and zinester. She is Red House Clan born for Mexican people. Originally from Shonto, Arizona and raised in Flagstaff, Arizona. She earned her BA from Arizona State University in Political Science with a minor in American Indian Studies. She received her MFA in creative writing with an emphasis in poetry at Mills College.  McCrary is also the owner and founder of Abalone Mountain Press, a press dedicated to publishing Indigenous voices.

She is a board member for the Northern Arizona Book Festival and Words of the People organizations. She is the Arizona Humanities 2022 Rising Star of the year and a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation LIFT awardee.

Her debut poetry collection, Blue Corn Tongue: Poems in the Mouth of the Desert is out now from University of Arizona Press.  

You can find her poems, interviews and art at Yellow Medicine Review, POETRY Magazine, Room Magazine, Poets and Writers Magazine, The Navajo Times, Santa Fe Literary Review and Hayden’s Ferry Review.

Aimee Inglis

Aimee Inglis is a citizen of the Osage Nation born and raised in Anaheim, California, near the Santa Ana (Wanaawna) River, and currently living in the heart of the Osage Nation in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. She has worked in social movement organizations for housing and climate justice for fifteen years, has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts, and was a fellow with Indigenous Nations Poets. Her writing has appeared in Under a Warm Green Linden, Anaheim Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, About Place, and Forging.

Chelsea T. Hicks

Chelsea T. Hicks is Wahzhazhe of the Pawhuska District, and a citizen of the Osage Nation. The author of A Calm & Normal Heart, which won the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award and was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, she is an interdisciplinary writer and artist who began studying the Osage language in 2017. She has worked as a model since 2019, appearing on Vogue.com and walking runways in support of Indigenous designers. Through their art and modeling, they aim to serve as an advocate for Indigenous language learning for holistic health and Indigenous futuring. She is the founding artist of Words of the People, with a vision to support Indigenous language creative production. 

Currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Oklahoma in Interdisciplinary Studies, their past training is in creative writing and art via an M.A. at the University of California, Davis and an M.F.A. at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Their work contemplates rematriation as a form of language and land connection, and has appeared in Poetry, World Literature Today, Yellow Medicine Review, the Manetti Shrem Museum, Tulsa Artist Fellowship Flagship, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Past residencies include MASS MoCA, Northwestern Oklahoma State University, Elsewhere Studios and the Tulsa Artist Fellowship. 

Staff

executive director | Claire Maracle

Claire Maracle is a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, raised as a guest 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. As Executive Director of Words of the People, their decade of arts activism is driven by the belief that fluent futures are built not through preservation alone, but through unyielding visibility and the active, creative celebration of living languages.

An interdisciplinary artist and organizer, their leadership spans over a decade of arts activism. Claire’s work bridges storytelling, liberation, and collective care. They co-founded Poetic Justice, bringing literacy and poetry workshops to carceral settings, (now in every prison in Oklahoma) that provided a framework for education as liberation. They served as Creative Director & Lead Educator for Louder Than a Bomb Oklahoma, instrumental in helping Tulsa launch the first regional offshoot of the Chicago program. Claire dedicated their time to mentoring youth in spoken word as a tool for self-determination and collective healing.  Their poetry has appeared in This Land Press, Emerge Magazine, New Words Press, Frontier Poetry, Wayfarer Magazine and elsewhere.

Alec Tiger

Alec Tiger is an enrolled citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts in fiction, and in 2024 received the Harpo Foundation Native American Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center. He is currently working on his first novel. Outside of writing, Alec has spent his career working with Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities across the United States, leading projects spanning economic and community development. He has a particular passion for place-based land and community planning. Alec primarily supports Words of the People with grants, fundraising, and strategic planning. 

COLLABORATORS

Collaborators include the Institute of American Indian Arts. WTP is a grantee-partner of the Poetry Foundation.