Dr. Kimberly (Roppolo) Wieser is Undergraduate Director and an Associate Professor of English, as well as an affiliated faculty member with Native American Studies and Environmental Studies at the University of Oklahoma, and directs the activities of the Native Writers Circle of the Americas at OU. Dr. Wieser serves on the board of the University of Oklahoma Arts and Humanities Forum and is one of the co-chairs for the NCTE/CCCC American Indian Caucus.
Dr. Wieser is one of the co-authors of Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, named one of the most important books in her field in the first decade of the 21st century by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. Her book Back to the Blanket: Recovered Rhetorics and Literacies in American Indian Studies—winner of the NWCA First Books Award for Prose 2004—was published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2017. Her poetry collection Texas . . . to Get Horses was published by That Painted Horse Press in 2019.
She is currently editing Indians, Oil, & Water: Indigenous Ecologies and Literary Resistance/Poetry and Prose Honoring the 25thAnniversary American Indian & Indigenous Storytelling Literary Festival with Dr. Rain Prud’homme-Cranford (University of Calgary), which contains a forward by Jeanetta Calhoun Mish, former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma, and includes works by noted authors such as US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo and National Book Award Finalist Honorèe Fanonne Jeffers. This volume, funded by University of Oklahoma’s Faculty Investment Program and OU Arts and Humanities Forum, is forthcoming from That Painted Horse Press in 2021. Dr. Wieser is also editing, with the help of research assistant OU English doctoral student Brian Daffron, American Indian Literature: An Encyclopedia for Students, which is forthcoming from Greenwood/ABC-CLIO. Dr. Wieser is a managing editor with Constellations: A Cultural Rhetorics Publishing Space and is currently co-editing with Dr. Ersula Ore (Arizona State University) a symposium in the December 2020 issue of College Composition and Communication tentatively titled “Diversity is Not Justice—Working Toward Radical Transformation and Racial Equity in the Discipline.”
She has written and published individual poems, academic articles, and chapters in academic collections, short stories, book reviews, and reference entries. She is a playwright, screenwriter, and actress, with two of her most recent roles being on AMC’s The Son and in the independent film Thistle Creek.
American Indian rhetorics, literatures, critical theories, gender studies
Texas . . . to Get Horses (That Painted Horse Press, 2019)
Back to the Blanket: Recovered Rhetorics and Literacies in American Indian Studies (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017)
Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008)
“Healing the ‘Man of Monstrous Dreams’: Indian Masculinities in Ceremony.” Leslie Marmon Silko: Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead, Gardens of the Dunes. Studies in Contemporary North American Fiction Series. Ed. David Moore. (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2016)
“‘Who is Cherokee?’: Federal Recognition, Culture, and Rhetorical Sovereignty.”Southeastern Indian Literature. Ed. Marcia Haag. (University of Nebraska Press, 2016)
