Annie Wenstrup
Picador Guest Professor of winter 2026/27
Annie Wenstrup is a Dena’ina poet, editor, and creative writing teacher based in Fairbanks, Alaska. She is the author of The Museum of Unnatural Histories (Wesleyan University Press, 2025) and a recipient of the 2025 Whiting Award. Her work has appeared in publications including Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The New England Review, and Poetry Northwest. Wenstrup is a Senior Editor for Poetry Northwest’s Native Torchlight Series and an editor of Untitled: An Indigenous Poetry Anthology, forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. She has taught creative writing through the Institute of American Indian Arts continuing education program and is a fellow of Indigenous Nations Poets. In the winter semester of 2026/27, she will join Leipzig University as the Picador Chair for Literature.
Upcoming Event
Leipzig, December 9: TOUCHES. TRACES. ECHOES.
What connects us to the memories, histories, and legacies of people we never met?
Could it be a story, a place, an object, or a material trace? And how do we remain connected to histories that reach us only through fragments, stories, and absences?
Leipzig University welcomes Dena’ina poet and essayist Annie Wenstrup as the Picador Guest Professor for winter term 2026/27 . Rooted in Dena’ina stories and shaped by questions of inheritance, memory, and belonging, her work explores how we relate to what has been passed down to us, and to what remains only partly accessible. Her poetry collection “The Museum of Unnatural Histories” approaches these questions through the form of an imagined museum.
The event takes place in the presence of Heidi Specker’s exhibition Damenzimmer/Herrenschnitt. A Homage to Aenne Biermann, which is currently displaced at GfZK and engages with collections, family memories, historical research, and material legacies. After the reading and talk, all guests are invited to visit the exhibition, either on their own or with a tour guide.
