Annie Wenstrup (Dena’ina) is the author of The Museum of Unnatural Histories (Wesleyan University Press in March 2025). Annie is the recipient of the 10th annual New England Review Emerging Writer’s Award and is the 2024 Stephen Donadio Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Scholar. In 2023, she received the Alaska Literary Award and support from the Rasmuson Foundation. Annie has held a Museum Sovereignty Fellowship with the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center (Alaska office) supported through a Journey to What Matters grant from The CIRI Foundation and was an Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow in 2022 and 2023. Her poems have been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Ecotone, Poetry, and elsewhere. She lives in Fairbanks, Alaska with her family where she serves as a coordinator for Indigenous Nations Poets.
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The Museum of Unnatural Histories: Poems
The Museum of Unnatural Histories : Poems- Print Books
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The Museum of Unnatural Histories: Poems
The Museum of Unnatural Histories : Poems- Print Books
- Bookshop
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The Museum of Unnatural Histories: Poems
The Museum of Unnatural Histories : Poems- Print Books
- Bookshop
"Innovative and exacting, The Museum of Unnatural Histories threads women's voices, primarily through the lens of a museum curator and the relayed stories of Ggugguyni. Through dioramas, ekphrasis, theatrical forms, and curations, Annie Wenstrup offers a mode of self-actualization contrary to Western impositions of assimilation and self-erasure. Here, you'll find voice, vision, and breadth. Wenstrup is an architect of language at the height of her craft." —Sarah Ghazal Ali, author of Theophanies
"Wenstrup's The Museum of Unnatural Histories investigates elusive, interstitial spaces—those that haunt lineages, bodies, aesthetics, and language. These conceptually deft and astonishingly original poems resonate with fierce intelligence, perceptive juxtapositions, and defiant lyricism. An electrifying and unforgettable debut." —Katherine Larson, author of Radial Symmetry
"Sweeping in their consideration of home and location of self/selves, desiring a new encounter between story, history, and present self/selves, and imaginative in its use of the landscape and orientation of the page, Annie Wenstrup's poems reimagine the boundaries of story." —Abigail Chabitnoy, author of In The Current Where Drowning is Beautiful [on The Museum of Unnatural Histories]
These poems bring together the sacred and profane and make them speak to each other until they have forgotten their differences. Wenstrup is a formally inventive writer, harnessing footnote and sidebar to witty and thoughtful effect. She interrogates history and its institutions, reminding us that beauty and commerce, nostalgia and revision, the mythic and the quotidian, are not opposites but kin. The work is harrowingly intimate—yet, in her playfulness, she reminds us that disruption can be joyful.