Contemporary Indigenous Authorship: Author Spotlights

Tommy Orange is the author of There There, a multi-generational, relentlessly paced story about a side of America few of us have ever seen: the lives of urban Native Americans. One of The New York Times' top books of 2018 and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, There There shows us violence and recovery, hope and loss, identity and power, dislocation and communion, and the beauty and despair woven into the history of a nation and its people. Orange talks about his craft, the writing process, and Native American history and culture, often with meticulously researched visual presentations.

[Orange] is a 2014 MacDowell Fellow and a 2016 Writing by Writers Fellow, as well as a recent graduate from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Tommy Orange is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, and was born and raised in Oakland, California. He now lives in Angels Camp, California, with his wife and son.

-Penguin Random House

Joy Harjo, (born May 9, 1951, Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S.), American poet, writer, academic, musician, and Native American activist whose poems featured Indian symbolism, imagery, history, and ideas set within a universal context. Her poetry also dealt with social and personal issues, notably feminism, and with music, particularly jazz.

An enrolled member of the Creek tribe, Harjo was the daughter of a Creek father and a Cherokee-French mother. She was a graduate of the Universities of New Mexico (B.A., 1976) and Iowa (M.F.A., 1978). She later taught at several American colleges and universities, notably the University of New Mexico (1991–97) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2013–16), where she served as professor of American Indian studies and English. In 2016 she joined the faculty at the University of Tennessee.

Harjo’s first volume of poetry, The Last Song (1975), introduced her remarkable observations and insights into the fragmented history of indigenous peoples. In her third collection, She Had Some Horses (1983), she wove prayer-chants and animal imagery into her verse. The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (1994) is concerned with the opposing forces of creation and destruction in modern society. Her other poetry collections include What Moon Drove Me to This? (1979); Secrets from the Center of the World (1989), prose poetry, with photographs by Stephen Strom; In Mad Love and War (1990), the winner of a 1991 American Book Award; Fishing (1992); A Map to the Next World: Poetry and Tales (2000); and How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems (2002). In Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015), Harjo chronicled the joys and struggles of everyday life of Native Americans, beginning with the Trail of Tears, the forced relocation in the 1830s of Eastern Woodlands Indians of the Southeast region of the United States. Her poetry was honoured with the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award (2015) and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (2017). In 2019 she was named the 23rd poet laureate of the United States, the first Native American to hold the post.

Harjo also published the young-adult book For a Girl Becoming (2009), the prose and essay collection Soul Talk, Song Language (2011), and her memoir, Crazy Brave (2012), which in 2013 won an American Book Award and the PEN Center USA prize for creative nonfiction.

In addition to her literary output, Harjo played saxophone and was a vocalist with her own band, Poetic Justice, and with Arrow Dynamics, a group with which she toured. In 2009 she was the recipient of a Native American Music Award for best female artist of the year. She released several albums of original music, notably Red Dreams, a Trail Beyond Tears (2010). Harjo debuted her one-woman show, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, in 2009.

-The Editors of Encyclopedia Brittanica

Louise Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota in 1954. As the daughter of a Chippewa Indian mother and a German-American father, Erdrich explores Native-American themes in her works, with major characters representing both sides of her heritage. In an award-winning series of related novels and short stories, Erdrich has visited and re-visited the North Dakota lands where her ancestors met and mingled, representing Chippewa experience in the Anglo-American literary tradition. Many critics claim Erdrich has remained true to her Native ancestors’ mythic and artistic visions while writing fiction that candidly explores the cultural issues facing modern-day Native Americans and mixed heritage Americans. An essayist for Contemporary Novelists observed that “Erdrich’s accomplishment is that she is weaving a body of work that goes beyond portraying contemporary Native American life as descendants of a politically dominated people to explore the great universal questions—questions of identity, pattern versus randomness, and the meaning of life itself.” In addition to her numerous award-winning novels and short story collections, Erdrich has published three critically acclaimed collections of poetry, Jacklight (1984), Baptism of Desire (1989) and Original Fire: New and Selected Poems (2003)...continue reading here.

-Poetry Foundation

Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas is an award-winning visual contemporary artist, author and professional speaker. His work has been seen in public spaces, museums, galleries and private collections across the globe. Institutional collections include the British Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum and Vancouver Art Gallery. His large sculptural works are part of the public art collection of the Vancouver International Airport, City of Vancouver, City of Kamloops and University of British Columbia. Yahgulanaas's publications include national bestsellers Flight of the Hummingbird and RED, a Haida Manga. When not writing or producing art, Yahgulanaas pulls from his 20 years of political experience in the Council of the Haida Nation and travels the world speaking to businesses, institutions and communities about social justice, community building, communication and change management. His most recent talks include the American Museum of Natural History and TEDxVancouver.

Yahgulanaas became a full-time artist after many decades working in the Haida Nation's successful campaign to protect its biocultural diversity; however, he began to play as an artist much earlier. As the descendant of iconic artists Isabella Edenshaw, Charles Edenshaw and Delores Churchill, his early training was under exceptional creators and master carvers of talented lineage. It wasn't until the late 1990s after an exposure to Chinese brush techniques, under the tutelage of Cantonese master Cai Ben Kwon, that he consciously began to merge Haida and Asian artistic influences into his self-taught practice, and innovated the art form called "Haida Manga."

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-Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas