Born in Minneapolis in 1997, Shaawan Francis Keahna carries his Midwest melancholy everywhere he goes. An enrolled member of the White Earth Band of Minnesota Ojibwe and Meskwaki Descendant, Shaawan’s work is preoccupied with kinship, blood memory, and the frigid, impersonal, omnipresent terror of our current digital age.
His first chapbook of comics and poetry, MAYDAY, was published by Bottlecap Press in June of 2023, right as he was driving through Canada on his way to Cranberry Lake Biological Station for SUNY-ESF’s inaugural Indigenous Writers Residency. It was there he began work on what would later become the bones of Let Them Despise Us, his forthcoming book-length collection of essays, memoir, and cultural criticism, recently workshopped at Tin House in February of 2025. In 2024, he received funding and institutional support from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation for his historical fiction novel No One Gets Out of Here Alive.
After a couple fickle stints as an actor, model, robotics technician and independent scholar, Keahna finally dedicated himself to a life as a working artist, debuting his new name alongside elder Joan Kauppi at the Miikanan Gallery’s 2023 springtime show, Aanikoosijigaade: It is linked. His visual art later appeared on the road with the Giizhigen Arts Incubator and at All My Relations Gallery. When he moved to Baltimore in 2024, Keahna found out that his film with Sky Hopinka, the award-winning Dislocation Blues (2017), had been acquired by the Baltimore Museum of Art for their permanent collection. He wrote about the BMA’s groundbreaking “Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum” exhibit that same year for First Nations Performing Arts before finishing his first novel, All These Ruined Places.
At present, Shaawan is working to divest from the attention economy by simplifying his digital life. He recently signed with Kent D. Wolf of Neon Literary and can best be reached through Backstage, email, or his website at shaawan.com. If you live in Baltimore, you will probably see him at a punk show or at the Parkway for one of their many free events.