Discussing Thunderous with Mandy Smoker Broaddus and Natalie Peeterse 

When:   March 9, 2023 from 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Where:  
IN PERSON WATCH PARTY:  Great Falls Public Library, small meeting room (to watch together)
ONLINE:  Format: Zoom Webinar, registration required ahead of time
Registration Link:  www.tinyurl.com/thunderousMT 

What:  Join us at the Library for a watch party or participate via Zoom from the comfort of your home.  Mandy Smoker Broaddus and Natalie Peeterse will share highlights of how their latest book Thunderous came to life.  They will read selections and discuss writing and the special nature of graphic novels.   Thunderous is a children’s graphic novel grounded in contemporary Indigenous experiences while also centering traditional Lakota ways of knowing, language and identity. 

Mandy Smoker Broaddus Bio:
Mandy Smoker Broaddus is a member of the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes of the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana. She has served as an K-12 educator and administrator and tribal college instructor. She also worked as the Indian education director for the state of Montana for ten years and is currently employed by the non-profit, Education Northwest as a Senior Advisor for Native Education and Culturally Responsive Practice. She serves as an appointee by President Obama on the National Advisory Council on Indian Education. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana in Missoula, and is the author of one collection or poetry and a children’s graphic novel, Thunderous.. In 2019 she was recognized as an alumna of the year by the University. She was poet laureate for the state of Montana from 2019-2021. She has also received a regional Emmy award for her work as a writer/consultant on the PBS documentary Indian Relay.

Natalie Peeterse Bio:  
Natalie Peeterse is the co-author of the graphic novel Thunderous.  Her poetry chapbook Black Birds : Blue Horse, An Elegy  won the Gold Line Press Poetry Prize in 2011. A second poetry chapbook, Dreadful : Luminosity, Letters, was published by Educe
Press in the spring of 2017. She was included in I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human
Rights (Lost Horse Press), and several other anthologies. She has an MFA from the University of Montana and has been a fellow with
the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a participant at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, an artist in residence at the Caldera Institute, a participant in the 2018 US Poets in Mexico in Merida,  Yucatan and most recently a Visiting Scholar at the  University of Washington’s Whiteley Center at the Friday Harbor Laboratories. She is a recipient of the 2013 Artist Innovation Award by the Montana Arts Council. She lives in Helena, Montana where she works on Open Country Press.