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Audre Lord, Meridel Le Sueur and Adrienne Rich at a writers' workshop in Austin, Texas

Born into a family of social and political activists, 

- a history of Minnesota - and the novel 

. An actress and a journalist, Le Sueur was blacklisted in the 1950s as a communist, but by the 1970s she was hailed as a proto-feminist for her writings in support of women's rights. In her later years, Le Sueur lived in St. Paul, and wrote popular children's biographies. She was heavily influenced by poems and stories that she heard from Native American women, which you can see in this poem, "Dead in Bloody Snow:"

Where they pursued and shot into the river crossing

And cry with the women crying from the marsh

Rising from our dusty dead the sweet grass,

The skull marking the place of loss and flight

A people's dream that died in blood snow.

- "Dead in Bloody Snow," by Meridel Le Sueur, as it appears in the anthology 

The Wind Blows, The Ice Breaks: Poems of Loss and Renewal by Minnesota Poets

. Reprinted here with permission from the editor.

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State of the Arts Blog

Marianne Combs

Author

Meridel Le Sueur takes on the voice of the ghost of an Native American woman.

Mn poetry: Meridel Le Sueur’s “Dead in Bloody Snow”

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