About Me
Claire Maracle is a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, born in Mankato, MN and raised as a guest on Muscogee, Osage, and Cherokee land (Tulsa, OK). This experience directly informs their work in rematriation and their conviction that language is the key to transcending displacement. As Executive Director of Words of the People, their decade of arts activism is driven by the belief that fluent futures are built not through preservation alone, but through unyielding visibility and the active, creative celebration of living languages.
An interdisciplinary artist and organizer, their leadership spans over a decade of arts activism. They co-founded Poetic Justice, bringing literacy and poetry workshops to carceral settings that provided a framework for education as liberation. They served as Creative Director & Lead Educator for Louder Than a Bomb Oklahoma, instrumental in helping Tulsa launch the first regional offshoot of the Chicago program. Claire dedicated their time to mentoring youth in spoken word as a tool for self-determination and collective healing. They are a 2026 SUNY ESF Indigenous Writer in Residency at Cranberry Lake Biological Station and a 2026 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop Alumni. Their poetry has appeared in This Land Press, Emerge Magazine, New Words Press, Frontier Poetry, Wayfarer Magazine and elsewhere.
Claire Maracle 