N. Scott Momaday
N. Scott Momaday's baritone voice booms from any stage. The listener, whether at the United Nations in New York City or next to the radio at home, is transported through time, known as 'kairos"and space to Oklahoma near Carnegie, to the "sacred, red earth" of Momaday's tribe.
Born Feb. 27, 1934, Momaday's most famous book remains 1969's House Made of Dawn, the story of a Pueblo boy torn between the modern and traditional worlds, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize and was honored by his tribe. He is a member of the Kiowa Gourd Dance Society. He is also a Regents Professor of Humanities at the University of Arizona, and has published other novels, memoir, plays and poetry. He's been called the dean of American Indian writers, and he has influe
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Vine Deloria Jr.
Vine Victor Deloria, Jr. was an American Indian author, theologian, historian, and activist. He was widely known for his book Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), which helped generate national attention to Native American issues in the same year as the Alcatraz-Red Power Movement. From 1964–1967, he had served as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, increasing tribal membership from 19 to 156. Beginning in 1977, he was a board member of the National Museum of the American Indian, which now has buildings in both New York City and Washington, DC.
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Deloria began his academic career in 1970 at Western Washington State College at Bellingham, Washington. He became Professor of Political Science at the -
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Zora Neale Hurston
Novels, including Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and nonfiction writings of American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston give detailed accounts of African American life in the South.
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In 1925, Hurston, one of the leaders of the literary renaissance, happening in Harlem, produced the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! alongside Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman shortly before she entered Barnard College. This literary movement developed into the Harlem renaissance.
Hurston applied her Barnard ethnographic training to document African American folklore in her critically acclaimed book Mules and Men alongside fiction Their Eyes Were Watching God . She also assembled a folk-based performance dance group that recreated her Southern t -
Alec Nevala-Lee
I was born in Castro Valley, California and graduated from Harvard College with a bachelor's degree in classics. My book Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction (Dey Street Books / HarperCollins) was a Hugo and Locus Awards finalist and named one of the best books of the year by The Economist. I'm also the author of the novels The Icon Thief, City of Exiles, and Eternal Empire, all published by Penguin; my short stories have appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Lightspeed Magazine, and The Year's Best Science Fiction; and I've written for such publications as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, The Daily Beast, Salon, Longreads, The Rumpus, a
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Héctor Tobar
Héctor Tobar, now a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and a novelist. He is the author of Translation Nation and The Tattooed Soldier. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of the city of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three children.
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Bruce Barcott
Bruce Barcott is an American editor, environmental journalist and author. He is a contributing editor of Outside and has written articles for The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Mother Jones, Sports Illustrated, Harper's Magazine, Legal Affairs, Utne Reader and others. He has also written a number of books including, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier (1997) and The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird (2008). In 2009 he was named a Guggenheim Fellow in nonfiction.
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Ernest Poole
Ernest Poole graduated from Princeton University in 1902. He worked as a journalist and was active in promoting social reforms including the ending of child labor He was a correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post in Europe before and during World War I.
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His novel The Harbor (1915) is the work for which he is known best.It is set largely among the proletariat of the industrial Brooklyn waterfront, and is sympathetic with socialism. It is considered one of the first American fictional works to present a positive opinion of trade unions.
Poole was the first recipient for the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1918 with his novel, His Family.
He died in Manhattan, New York on January 10, 1950. -
Quan Barry
Born in Saigon and raised on Boston’s north shore, Quan Barry is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the author of four poetry books; her third book, Water Puppets, won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and was a PEN/Open Book finalist. She has received NEA Fellowships in both fiction and poetry, and her work has appeared in such publications as Ms. and The New Yorker. Barry lives in Wisconsin.
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Susan Richards
Susan Richards has a BA in English from the University of Colorado and a Master of Social Work degree from Adelphi University. She lives in Olivebridge, New York, with three dogs, two cats, and four horses.
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Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. -
Margaret Wilson
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
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American novelist Margaret Wilhelmina Wilson in 1923 married G.D. Turner and afterward resided in England. She was awarded the 1924 Pulitzer Prize for The Able McLaughlins .
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James Welch
James Welch was a Blackfeet author who wrote several novels considered part of the Native American Renaissance literary movement. He is best known for his novel "Fools Crow" (1986).
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His works explore the experiences of Native Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries. He worked with Paul Stekler on the documentary "Last Stand at Little Bighorn" which aired on PBS. -
Lynne Tillman
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Here’s an Author’s Bio. It could be written differently. I’ve written many for myself and read lots of other people’s. None is right or sufficient, each slants one way or the other. So, a kind of fiction – selection of events and facts.. So let me just say: I wanted to be a writer since I was eight years old. That I actually do write stories and novels and essays, and that they get published, still astonishes me.
My news is that my 6th novel MEN AND APPARITIONS will appear in march 2018 from Soft Skull Press. It's my first novel in 12 years.
Each spring, I teach writing at University at Albany, in the English Dept., and in the fall, at The New School, in the Writing Dept.
I’ve lived with David Hofstra, a bass player, for many years. It makes -
Joy Harjo
Bio Joy Harjo
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Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is a member of the Mvskoke Nation. She has released four award-winning CD's of original music and won a Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for Best Female Artist of the Year. She performs nationally and internationally solo and with her band, The Arrow Dynamics. She has appeared on HBO's Def Poetry Jam, in venues in every major U.S. city and internationally. Most recently she performed We Were There When Jazz Was Invented at the Chan Centre at UBC in Vancouver, BC, and appeared at the San Miguel Writer’s Conference in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Her one-woman show, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, which features guitarist Larry Mitchell premiered in Los Angeles in 2009, w -
Billy Collins
William James Collins is an American poet who served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He was a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, retiring in 2016. Collins was recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library (1992) and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004 through 2006. In 2016, Collins was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As of 2020, he is a teacher in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.
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Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan is an American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism.
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Denis Johnson
Poet, playwright and author Denis Johnson was born in Munich, West Germany, in 1949 and was raised in Tokyo, Manila and Washington. He earned a masters' degree from the University of Iowa and received many awards for his work, including a Lannan Fellowship in Fiction (1993), a Whiting Writer's Award (1986), the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from the Paris Review for Train Dreams, and most recently, the National Book Award for Fiction (2007).
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William Styron
William Styron (1925–2006), born in Newport News, Virginia, was one of the greatest American writers of his generation. Styron published his first book, Lie Down in Darkness, at age twenty-six and went on to write such influential works as the controversial and Pulitzer Prize–winning The Confessions of Nat Turner and the international bestseller Sophie’s Choice.
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Louise Erdrich
Karen Louise Erdrich is a American author of novels, poetry, and children's books. Her father is German American and mother is half Ojibwe and half French American. She is an enrolled member of the Anishinaabe nation (also known as Chippewa). She is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant Native writers of the second wave of what critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance.
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From a book description:Author Biography:
Louise Erdrich is one of the most gifted, prolific, and challenging of contemporary Native American novelists. Born in 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota, she grew up mostly in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her parents taught at Bur
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Leslie Marmon Silko
Leslie Marmon Silko (born Leslie Marmon; born March 5, 1948) is a Native American writer of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, and one of the key figures in the First Wave of what literary critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance.
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Silko was a debut recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Grant, now known as the "Genius Grant", in 1981 and the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994. She currently resides in Tucson, Arizona.
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Joy Williams
Williams is the author of four novels. Her first, State of Grace (1973), was nominated for a National Book Award for Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Quick and the Dead (2000), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her first collection of short stories was Taking Care, published in 1982. A second collection, Escapes, followed in 1990. A 2001 essay collection, Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Honored Guest, a collection of short stories, was published in 2004. A 30th anniversary reprint of The Changeling was issued in 2008 with an introduction by the American novelist Rick Moody.
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Her stories and essays are frequently anthol -
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer (also credited as Robin W. Kimmerer) (born 1953) is Associate Professor of Environmental and Forest Biology at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF). She is the author of numerous scientific articles, and the book Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. She is Potawatomi and combines her heritage with her scientific and environmental passions.
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Eula Biss
Eula Biss holds a BA in nonfiction writing from Hampshire College and an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. She is currently an Artist in Residence at Northwestern University, where she teaches nonfiction writing, and she is a founding editor of Essay Press, a new press dedicated to innovative nonfiction. Her essays have recently appeared in The Best Creative Nonfiction and the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction as well as in The Believer, Gulf Coast, Columbia, Ninth Letter, The North American Review, The Bellingham Review, the Seneca Review, and Harper’s.
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Victoria Chang
Victoria Chang's latest book of poems is With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Corsair in the UK), which received the Forward Prize in Poetry for the Best Collection. Her most recent book is The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022). Her prose book, Dear Memory, was published by Milkweed Editions in 2021. Her recent book of poems, OBIT, was published in 2020 by Copper Canyon Press. It was named a New York Times Notable Book, as well as a TIME, NPR, Publisher's Weekly, Book of the Year. It received the LA Times Book Prize, the PEN Voelcker Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Award. It was also a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the NBCC, and long listed for the NBA. She is the Bourne Chair of Poetry and the
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Jean Stafford
Jean Stafford was an American short story writer and novelist, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford in 1970.
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Ada Limon
Ada Limón is the author of three books of poetry, Lucky Wreck, This Big Fake World, and Sharks in the Rivers. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from New York University. Limón has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and was one of the judges for the 2013 National Book Award in Poetry. She works as a creative writing instructor and a freelance writer while splitting her time between Lexington, Kentucky and Sonoma, California (with a great deal of New York in between). Her new book of poems, Bright Dead Things is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2015.
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Helen Macdonald
Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, and naturalist. They are the author of the bestselling H Is for Hawk and Vesper Flights along with Shaler’s Fish, a history of falconry, and two other books of poetry. They've written and presented award-winning TV documentaries for PBS and the BBC. Prophet is their first novel.
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Reginald Dwayne Betts
Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, essayist, and national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice. He writes and lectures about the impact of mass incarceration on American society. He is the author of three collections of poetry, Felon, Bastards of the Reagan Era, and Shahid Reads His Own Palm, as well as a memoir, A Question of Freedom. A graduate of Yale Law School, he lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with his wife and their two sons.
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Natalie Díaz
Natalie Díaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012. Her second poetry collection, Postcolonial Love Poems is published by Graywolf Press in 2020. She is 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, a Hodder Fellowship, and a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency, as well as being awarded a US Artists Ford Fellowship. Díaz teaches at the Arizona State Un
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Susannah Cahalan
Susannah Cahalan is the New York Times bestselling author of "Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness," a memoir about her struggle with a rare autoimmune disease of the brain. She writes for the New York Post. Her work has also been featured in the New York Times, Scientific American Magazine, Glamour, Psychology Today, and others.
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Tommy Orange
Tommy Orange is a recent graduate from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is a 2014 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2016 Writing by Writers Fellow. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He was born and raised in Oakland, California, and currently lives in Angels Camp, California.
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Kate Baer
Kate Baer is the 3x New York Times bestselling author of What Kind Of Woman, I Hope This Finds You Well, & And Yet. Her work has also been published in The New Yorker, Literary Hub, Huffington Post and The New York Times.
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Joy Sullivan
Joy Sullivan is a poet, teacher, and author of the national bestseller Instructions for Traveling West.
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She received a Masters in poetry from Miami University and has served as the poet-in-residence for the Wexner Center for the Arts. Her work has appeared in places like Goop, Oprah Daily, and The Sunday Paper among many others.
In addition to leading international writing retreats, Joy has guest-lectured in classrooms from Stanford University to Florida International University and is the founder of Sustenance, a community designed to help writers revitalize and nourish their craft. Read her thoughts on the creative life in her Substack newsletter, Necessary Salt. -
Bernard Malamud
Bernard Malamud was an American novelist and short story writer. Along with Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, he was one of the best known American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His 1966 novel The Fixer (also filmed), about antisemitism in the Russian Empire, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
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Virginia DeJohn Anderson
Virginia DeJohn Anderson is Professor of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the author of New England's Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America, and American Journey: A History of the United States.
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Robert Lewis Taylor
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1959) for The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters
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T.W. Robertson
Thomas William Robertson (9 January 1829 – 3 February 1871), usually known professionally as T. W. Robertson, was an English dramatist and innovative stage director best known for a series of realistic or naturalistic plays produced in London in the 1860s that broke new ground and inspired playwrights such as W.S. Gilbert and George Bernard Shaw.
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Robert Olen Butler
“I’ll never stop believing it: Robert Olen Butler is the best living American writer, period.”
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– Jeff Guinn, Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Robert Olen Butler has published sixteen novels—The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, Fair Warning, Hell, A Small Hotel, The Hot Country, The Star of Istanbul, The Empire of Night, Perfume River—and six volumes of short fiction—Tabloid Dreams, Had a Good Time, Severance, Intercourse, Weegee Stories, and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Butler has published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, From Where You Dream, edited with an introduction by Janet -
Philip J. Deloria
Philip J. Deloria is Professor of History at Harvard University, where his research and teaching focus on the social, cultural and political histories of the relations among American Indian peoples and the United States, as well as the comparative and connective histories of indigenous peoples in a global context.
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Caroline Jane Knight
Caroline Jane Knight shares more than Jane Austen's name and DNA. As a direct descendant of Jane's brother, Edward Knight, Caroline is the last of the Austen Knight family to grow up at Chawton House on the estate where her fifth great-aunt Jane Austen lived and enjoyed the most productive period of her writing career. Caroline explored the same places around Chawton House and its grounds as Jane did, dined at the same table in the same dining room, read in the same library and shared the same dream of independence.
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Caroline's early life was filled with the delights of living in a sixteenth-century English manor, the good cheer of family gatherings and centuries-old Christmas traditions in the Great Hall of Chawton House, the beauty of a cou -
Edward Hirsch
Edward Hirsch is a celebrated poet and peerless advocate for poetry. He was born in Chicago in 1950—his accent makes it impossible for him to hide his origins—and educated at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in Folklore. His devotion to poetry is lifelong.He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, the Prix de Rome, and an Academy of Arts and Letters Award. In 2008, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
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Edward Hirsch’s first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers (1981), received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from N -
Edwin O'Connor
Edwin O'Connor was an American journalist, novelist, and radio commentator who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1962 for his novel The Edge of Sadness (1961). His ancestry was Irish, and his novels concerned the Irish-American experience and often dealt with the lives of politicians and priests.
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Jean Stafford
Jean Stafford was an American short story writer and novelist, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford in 1970.
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Mary Karr
Mary Karr is an American poet, essayist and memoirist. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. She is the Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.
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Karr was born January 16, 1955, in Groves, a small town in East Texas located in the Port Arthur region, known for its oil refineries and chemical plants, to J. P. and Charlie Marie (Moore) Karr. In her memoirs, Karr calls the town "Leechfield." Karr's father worked in an oil refinery while her mother was an amateur artist and business owner.
The Liars' Club, published in 1995, was a New York Times bestseller for over a year, and was named one of the year's best books. It delves vividly and often humorously into her deeply trouble -
Louis Bromfield
Louis Bromfield was an American author and conservationist who gained international recognition winning the Pulitzer Prize and pioneering innovative scientific farming concepts.
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Bromfield studied agriculture at Cornell University from 1914 to 1916,[1] but transferred to Columbia University to study journalism. While at Columbia University, Louis Bromfield was initiated into the fraternal organization Phi Delta Theta. His time at Columbia would be short lived and he left after less than a year to go to war. After serving with the American Field Service in World War I and being awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor, he returned to New York City and found work as a reporter. In 1924, his first novel, The Green Bay Tree, won instan -
Leslie Marmon Silko
Leslie Marmon Silko (born Leslie Marmon; born March 5, 1948) is a Native American writer of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, and one of the key figures in the First Wave of what literary critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance.
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Silko was a debut recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Grant, now known as the "Genius Grant", in 1981 and the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994. She currently resides in Tucson, Arizona.
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Richard Bradford
Richard Bradford was an American novelist, best known for his 1968 novel Red Sky at Morning, a film version of which was released in 1971.
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Dina Gilio-Whitaker
Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) is the policy director and a senior research associate at the Center for World Indigenous Studies and teaches American Indian Studies at California State University San Marcos. She is the coauthor, with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, of “All the Real Indians Died Off” and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans. She lives in San Clemente, California.
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John Fire Lame Deer
John Fire Lame Deer was a Mineconju-Lakota Sioux born on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. His father was Silas Fire Let-Them-Have-Enough. His mother was Sally Red Blanket. He lived and learned with his grandparents until he was 6 or 7, after which he was placed in a day school near the family until age fourteen. He was then sent to a boarding school, one of many run by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs for Indian youth. These schools were designed to “civilize” the Native Americans after their forced settling on reservations.
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Lame Deer's life as a young man was rough and wild; he traveled and rode the rodeo circuit as a rider and later as a rodeo clown. According to his personal account, he drank, gambled, womanized, and once went on a severa -
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Poet and writer Alison Hawthorne Deming was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1946. She earned an MFA from Vermont College and worked on public and women’s health issues for many years. A descendant of the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, Deming is native to New England, but has studied and taught in many other regions as an instructor and guest lecturer. Her books of poetry include Science and Other Poems (1994), winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Praising the volume, judge Gerald Stern wrote: “I greatly admire Alison Deming’s lucid and precise language, her stunning metaphors, her passion, her wild and generous spirit, her humor, her formal cunning. I am taken, as all readers will be, by the knowled
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Celeste Fremon
An Award-winning journalist whose articles have been syndicated worldwide by Universal Press and The Los Angeles Times Syndicate. She is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Magazine, plus numerous national magazines. She has followed Father Greg and his work with the gangs for four years. She lives in Los Angeles with her son.
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Paula Gunn Allen
Paula Gunn Allen was a Native American poet, literary critic, lesbian activist, and novelist.
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Born Paula Marie Francis in Albuquerque, Allen grew up in Cubero, New Mexico, a Spanish-Mexican land grant village bordering the Laguna Pueblo reservation. Of mixed Laguna, Sioux, Scottish, and Lebanese-American descent, Allen always identified most closely with the people among whom she spent her childhood and upbringing.
Having obtained a BA and MFA from the University of Oregon, Allen gained her PhD at the University of New Mexico, where she taught and where she began her research into various tribal religions.