The second poetry collection by award-winning author Jenny L. Davis (Chickasaw), Extant confronts the many ways in which Native Americans continue to be associated with the distant past and imagined, even today, as more animal than human. For more than a century, anthropologists, museum guides, and high school teachers have described Native American bodies, cultures, and languages as “endangered” or “almost extinct.” Through a combination of blackout poems, occasional poems, and free verse, Davis rewrites the narrative of what it means to exist, to live in a present shaped by colonial violence that emphasizes the power of survival. Drawing on online question forums, scientific studies, kitschy decor, and the day-to-day musings of an Indigiqueer Native woman, Extant stages encounters of Native survival within a world full of stars, cicadas, earthworms, and moss.
Jenny L. Davis is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an associate professor of anthropology and American Indian studies at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, where she is the director of the American Indian Studies Program and a founding co-director of the Center for Indigenous Science.
Her research has been published in the Annual Review of Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Gender and Language, Language & Communication, Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals, American Journal of Biological Anthropology, and The Routledge Companion to Public Humanities Scholarship, among others. Her creative work has most recently been published in American Indian Culture and Research Journal; Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism; SAPIENS; Transmotion; ANMLY; Santa Ana River Review; Broadsided; North Dakota Quarterly; Yellow Medicine Review; As/Us; and Raven Chronicles Journal.
She is the recipient of two book prizes: the 2019 Beatrice Medicine Award from the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures for Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance and the 2014 Ruth Benedict Book Prize from the Association for Queer Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association for her coedited volume Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality. In 2021 she received the Dynamic Woman of the Year Award from the Chickasaw Nation, which is given annually for significant contributions to the Chickasaw Nation and its people through community engagement and work preserving its linguistic and cultural heritage.
