Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner


Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner is a poet and climate change activist from the Marshall Islands.

Life and career

Jetnil-Kijiner was born in the Marshall Islands and raised in Hawaii. She attended Mills College in California and pursued an MA in Pacific Island Studies from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Jetnil-Kijiner's poetry highlights issues around the environment and climate change. She also explores social injustice including colonialism, migration, and racism.
Her first collections of poetry, entitled Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter, was published in 2017 by the University of Arizona Press. It is considered the first published book of poetry written by someone from the Marshall Islands.
She is a cofounder of the environmental nonprofit organization Jo-Jikum which aims to support Marshallese youth in taking action on climate change and environmental issues that affect the Marshall Islands.
Jetnil-Kijiner currently teaches at the College of the Marshall Islands as the Pacific Studies faculty instructor.

Accomplishments

In 2014, Jetnil-Kijiner was chosen to address the United Nations Climate Summit. She performed the piece, 'Dear Matafele Peinem', at the opening ceremony in New York. In 2015 she was invited to speak at COP21 in Paris.
In 2015 she was selected by Vogue magazine as one of 13 Climate Warriors and in 2017 named Impact Hero of the Year by Earth Company In 2012 she represented the Marshall Islands at the Poetry Parnassus Festival in London.

Notable works

''Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter'' (2017)

In 2017, Jetnil-Kijiner made history by being the first Marshallese author to publish a book, a collection of poems entitled Iep Jaltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter. Her book engages with themes of the human, socioeconomic, and environmental crisis that the Marshall Islands encountered due to the United State’s military occupation. Her poems outline the daily lives of the Marshallese as they follow their customs and traditions while experiencing environmental problems as a result of nuclear testings, colonialism, and climate change.

"Rise: From One Island to Another" (2018)

In 2018, Jetnil-Kijiner collaborated with Aka Niviâna, a climate change activist poet from Greenland, to write a poem about their stories of climate change. The poem, "Rise: From One Island to Another," explains the destruction of two opposite homelands and the reality of melting icecaps and rising sea levels. In an interview with Grist Magazine, Jetnil-Kijiner said that "when she found herself face-to-face with a physical body that threatens to submerge her ancestral homeland, she felt reverence, not anger."