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.
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.
LeAnne Howe is an American author and Eidson Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Georgia, Athens. She previously taught American Indian Studies and English at the University of Minnesota and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Maurice Frank Kenny was an American poet who identified as Mohawk descent.
Jim Northrup was an Anishinaabe newspaper columnist, poet, performer, and political commentator from the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation in Minnesota. His Anishinaabe name was "Chibenashi".
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 member 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.
Bao Phi is a Vietnamese-American spoken word artist, writer and community activist living in Minnesota. Bao Phi's collection of poems, Sông I Sing, was published in 2011 and, Thousand Star Hotel, was published in 2017 by Coffee House Press. He has written three children’s books published by Capstone Press. First book, A Different Pond received multiple awards, including the Caldecott Award, Charlotte Zolotow Award, the Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature for best picture book, the Minnesota Book Award for picture books.
Gordon Henry Jr. is a poet and fiction writer.
Charles Alexander is an American poet, publisher, and book artist. He is the director and editor-in-chief of Chax Press. Alexander also served as the Director of the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts from 1993 until 1995, and as book artist there through 1996. Alexander lives in Tucson, AZ with his wife the visual artist Cynthia Miller and his two daughters. In 2006 he received the Arizona Arts Award and in 2021 he received the Lord Nose Award for excellence in independent literary publishing.
Wang Ping is a Chinese American professor, poet, writer, photographer, performance and multimedia artist. Her publications have been translated into multiple languages and include poetry, short stories, novels, cultural studies, and children's stories. Her multimedia exhibitions address global themes of industrialization, the environment, interdependency, and the people.
Barbara Henning is an American poet and fiction writer. She is the author of eight books of poetry, four novels and a series of photo-poem pamphlets. Her recent novelized biography of her mother, Ferne, a Detroit Story, was named by the Library of Michigan as a Notable Book of 2023. She is also the editor of a collection of interviews, [Looking Up Harryette Mullen: Sleeping with the Dictionary and Other Works] and The Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins. Her work has been published in numerous journals. Some recent books of poetry and prose are Digigram ; a novel, Just Like That ; and a conceptual project, a collection of sonnets composed from 999 passages from 999 books in her collection, entitled My Autobiography. Prompt Book: Experiments in Poetry and Fiction is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil 2020). Poets on the Road, a Blog, soon to be released by City Point Press, celebrates Henning and Maureen Owen's extensive reading road trip in 2018 across the USA.
Kristin Naca is a Latina and Fillipina American poet.
Denise Sweet is an Anishinaabe poet. From 2004 to 2008, she served as the Wisconsin Poet Laureate.
New Rivers Press is an American non-profit publishing press located in Moorhead, Minnesota and affiliated with Minnesota State University Moorhead. As of 2020 they had published more than 400 books.
Will Alexander is an American poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and visual artist. He was the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry in 2001 and a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2002.
The Native Writers' Circle of the Americas (NWCA) is an organization of writers who identify as being Native American, First Nations, or of Native American ancestry.
Janet Holmes is an American poet and professor.
Gwen Nell Westerman is a Dakota educator, writer and artist. She is a professor at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and the Director of the Native American Literature Symposium. She was appointed by Governor Tim Walz as Poet Laureate of Minnesota in September 2021.
Kim Shuck is a Cherokee Nation poet, author, weaver, and bead work artist who draws from Southeastern Native American culture and tradition as well as contemporary urban Indian life. She was born in San Francisco, California and belongs to the northern California Cherokee diaspora. She is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and also has Sac and Fox and Polish ancestry. She earned a B.A. in art (1994), and M.F.A. in Textiles (1998) from San Francisco State University. Her basket weaving work is influenced by her grandmother Etta Mae Rowe and the long history of California Native American basket making.
Ralph James Salisbury was an American poet. His poem "In the Children's Museum in Nashville" was published in The New Yorker in 1960, making him one of the first self-identified Native American poets to receive national attention. His autobiography So Far, So Good won the 2012 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. His book Light from a Bullet Hole: Poems New and Selected was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009.
