Claire Maracle

Claire Maracle is a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, raised as a guest on Muscogee, Osage, and Cherokee land. 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. Claire’s work bridges storytelling, liberation, and collective care. They co-founded Poetic Justice, bringing literacy and poetry workshops to carceral settings, (now in every prison in Oklahoma) 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.  Their poetry has appeared in This Land Press, Emerge Magazine, New Words Press, Frontier Poetry, Wayfarer Magazine and elsewhere.