Deborah Miranda | |
---|---|
Born | |
Education | Ph.D., English |
Alma mater | University of Washington |
Occupation(s) | Poet, Professor |
Spouse | Margo Solod |
Children | Miranda and Danny |
Parent(s) | Alfred Edward Robles Miranda and Madgel Eleanor (Yeoman) Miranda |
Deborah A. Miranda is an American writer, poet, and professor of English at Washington and Lee University.
Miranda attended Wheelock College with a focus on teaching moderate special needs children. After receiving her B.S., she earned her MA and Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington. She went on to become Thomas H. Broadhus professor of English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, where she taught creative writing, with a research interest in Native American culture. In her scholarship, Miranda explores the ways in which the American canon has repressed and subjugated Indigenous culture, while giving breath to other historically marginalized groups, such as the Chicanos and Chicanas, African Americans, Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, Appalachians, Southern Americans, and more. [1] In 2012, Miranda received a Lenfest Sabbatical Grant for her project "The Hidden Stories of Isabel Meadows and Other California Indian Lacunae". [2] In 2015, she won a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. [3]
Miranda maintains a blog and Twitter account known as BAD NDNS, where she writes about her life, poetry, and essential histories.
One of Miranda's major works is Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2013), in which she discusses the multiple time-frames and decades that the Esselen Nation and California Indians have dealt with. Also included in this memoir are Miranda's encounters with her family endeavors and actual news clippings and testimonies to emphasize the hardships felt at this time. [4] Through these archival texts and her own personal testimony Miranda provides a unique exploration of the legacies of Indigenous genocide in California. [5]
In 2017, Miranda was a co-editor of the two-spirit literature collection Sovereign Erotics. [6] She is considered one of many important two-spirit writers working to reclaim buried histories of third genders from colonial erasure. [7]
Other major books include:
Miranda's poetry is widely anthologized, and she also writes scholarly articles tackling such issues as racism, colonialism, misogyny, intergenerational trauma, childhood trauma, identity, environmental crises, the political climate, and linguistic barriers. Some examples include:
Miranda is a descendant from what are known as "Mission Indians," Indigenous peoples of many Southern California tribes who were forcibly removed from their land into several Franciscan missions. [4] She is a member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation, a non-profit organization based in Monterey, California. [9]
Bobbi Lee Maracle was an Indigenous Canadian writer and academic of the Stó꞉lō nation. Born in North Vancouver, British Columbia, she left formal education after grade 8 to travel across North America, attending Simon Fraser University on her return to Canada. Her first book, an autobiography called Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel, was published in 1975. She wrote fiction, non-fiction, and criticism and held various academic positions. Maracle's work focused on the lives of Indigenous people, particularly women, in contemporary North America. As an influential writer and speaker, Maracle fought for those oppressed by sexism, racism, and capitalist exploitation.
Gerald Robert Vizenor is an American writer and scholar, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation. Vizenor also taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Director of Native American Studies. With more than 30 books published, Vizenor is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.
The Esselen are a Native American people belonging to a linguistic group in the hypothetical Hokan language family, who are Indigenous to the Santa Lucia Mountains of a region south of the Big Sur River in California. Prior to Spanish colonization, they lived seasonally on the coast and inland, surviving off the plentiful seafood during the summer and acorns and wildlife during the rest of the year.
Paula Gunn Allen was an American poet, literary critic, activist, professor, and novelist. Of mixed-race European-American, Arab-American, and Native American descent, she identified with her mother's people, the Laguna Pueblo. Gunn Allen wrote numerous essays, stories and poetry with Native American and feminist themes, and two biographies of Native American women. She edited four collections of Native American traditional stories and contemporary writing.
Nora Marks Keixwnéi Dauenhauer was a Tlingit poet, short-story writer, and Tlingit language scholar from Alaska. She won an American Book Award for Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802 And 1804. Nora was Alaska State Writer Laureate from 2012 - 2014.
Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. She was also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms. Harjo is a citizen of the Muscogee Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv. She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an MFA degree at the University of Iowa in its creative writing program.
Nellie Wong is an American poet and activist for feminist and socialist causes. Wong is also an active member of the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women.
For the American educational theorist and educator, see Janet Hale.
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Alma Luz Villanueva is an American poet, short story writer, and novelist.
Isabel Meadows was an Ohlone ethnologist and the last fluent speaker of the Rumsen Ohlone language. She also spoke Esselen. She worked closely with the anthropologists from the Smithsonian Institution for more than five years in order to document her culture and language. Her work is considered fundamental in the study of Ohlone languages.
Tiffany Midge is a Native American poet, editor, and author, who is a Hunkpapa Lakota enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux.
The Rumsen are one of eight groups of the Ohlone, an indigenous people of California. Their historical territory included coastal and inland areas within what is now Monterey County, California, including the Monterey Peninsula.
Deena Metzger is an American writer, healer, and teacher whose work spans multiple genres including the novel, poetry, non-fiction, and plays. Metzger is a creative writing teacher and feminist scholar. In the 1960s and 1970s Metzger was a member of the Critical Studies faculty at the California Institute of the Arts, taught English at Los Angeles Valley College, and was on the faculty of the Feminist Studio Worship. Metzger also founded the writing program at Woman's Building in Los Angeles. Metzger was a contributing editor to Chrysalis: A Magazine of Women's Culture that ran from 1977 to 1980 in Woman's Building.
Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir is a mixed-genre book by Deborah Miranda published by Heyday Books in 2013. The book is part tribal history of the California Mission Indians and part family memoir. It combines different media and genres including oral histories, newspaper clippings, anthropological recordings, poems, and personal reflection to narrate the stories of Miranda’s family, who were members of the Ohlone/Costanoan – Esselen Nation, along with the experiences of California Indigenous people from the time of the Spanish missions into the present.
Esther Belin, who has work published under Esther G. Belin, is a Diné multimedia artist, writer, poet, writing instructor, and addiction counselor. The Before Columbus Foundation chose From the Belly of My Beauty for the American Book Award after the book was published in 1999. She was one of the editors of The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature that was published in 2021. It is on the Lists of Best Books, 2010-2023 of the American Indians in Children's Literature (AICL).
Marian Adele Longfellow O'Donoghue was an American writer, one of the founders of the National League of American Pen Women, in 1897.
There There is the debut novel by Cheyenne and Arapaho author Tommy Orange. Published in 2018, the book follows a large cast of Native Americans living in the Oakland, California area and contains several essays on Native American history and identity. The characters struggle with a wide array of challenges, ranging from depression and alcoholism, to unemployment, fetal alcohol syndrome, and the challenges of living with an "ambiguously nonwhite" ethnic identity in the United States. All of the characters unite at a community powwow and its attempted robbery.
Lucille Lang Day is an American poet, writer, and science and health educator. Day has authored or edited 20 books and is a contributor to over 50 anthologies. She is best known as a poet and writer for her award-winning memoir, Married at Fourteen: A True Story, for her integration of science imagery and concepts into poetry and for advocating use of poetry as a tool in environmental activism. As a science and health educator, her many achievements have included promoting science education for girls and serving as codirector of Health and Biomedical Science for a Diverse Community, a project that was funded by the National Institutes of Health and aimed to make biomedical science more accessible to underrepresented minorities.