About Annie
The Museum of Unnatural Histories
The Museum of Unnatural Histories, Annie's debut poetry collection, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press (March 2025).
The collection delicately parses personal history in the space of an imagined museum. Meticulously refined and delicately crafted, Wenstrup’s poems weave together the lived experiences of an Alaskan Native person and the histories of unresolved colonial violence in “an authorial reckoning//with what remains.”
Outside the Museum of Unnatural Histories Ggugguyni, the Dena’ina Raven, and The Museum Curator collect discarded French fries, earrings, and secrets—or as The Curator explains, together they curate moments of cataclysm. Inside the museum, their collection is displayed in installations that depict the imagined Indigenous body. Every artifact contains competing stories, while some display cases are left empty.
Into this “distance between the learning and the telling,” Wenstrup inserts The Curator and her sukdu’a, her own interpretive text. There, The Curator questions the space between her familial history and colonial constructs of authenticity. In particular, the poems explore how women experience embodiment when they are seen through filters of race, gender, and class: “Always, I’ve known I embody that which harms me.” At the heart of the sukdu’a is the desire to find a form that allows the speaker’s story to be heard.
Through love letters, received forms, and found text, the poems reclaim their right to interpret, reinvent, and even disregard artifacts of their own mythos to imagine a future that exists despite the series of disasters and apocalypses documented inside the museum. Eventually it begins to dawn on us that this museum may not be separable from the world, and that there may be no exit from its unnatural histories, composed of beauty and foil wrappers, wilderness and contaminated waters. Here, it is up to each one to “decide/who you must become.”
Bio
Originally from Anchorage, Alaska, she now lives in Fairbanks with her family. Annie received her Bachelors of Fine Arts from the University of Fairbanks Alaska and her Masters of Fine Arts from Stonecoast, the University of Southern Maine's low-residency program.
Annie's Writing is Supported by:
The New England Review and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (2024)
The Alaska State Council for the Arts in partnership with the Alaska Arts and Culture Foundation
Alaska Literary Award (2023)
The Rasmuson Foundation (2023)
Virginia Center for the Creative Arts
(2023).
Indigenous Nations Poetry.
Inaugural and Returning Fellow (2022, 2023)
Inuit Art Quarterly.
Indigenous Art Writing Fellow (2023)
Smithsonian Arctic Studies
Fellow (2021)
Storyknife.
Fireweed Fellow (2021)
Poets & Writers and Reese's Book Club
Open Doors Grant Recipient 2021
The CIRI Foundation
Grant and Scholarship Recipient
Indigenous Nations Poets
Annie is the Alumni and Donor Relationship Coordinator for Indigenous Nations Poets.
You can learn more about Indigenous Nations Poets and how In-Na-Po works to support emerging and established Indigenous Poets HERE.
Support Indigenous Nations Poets HERE
To contact Annie about how you or your organization can partner with Indigenous Nations Poets you may reach her at annie@indigenousnationspoets.org