Lost and Found in Indigenous America
Indigenous American literature is not only the study of history. These works look at contemporary Native American life--while acknowledging the crimes of our history--and find all the typical joys and sorrows of life filtered through the particulars of indigenous experience.
About the authors
ALLISON HEDGE COKE is a Fulbright scholar, First Jade Nurtured SiHui Female International Poetry Award recipient, recent Dan and Maggie Inouye Distinguished Chair in Democratic Ideals, and Library of Congress Witter Bynner fellow. She has written seven books of poetry, one book of nonfiction, and a play. Came of age and spent younger adult life in North Carolina. Following former fieldworker retraining in Santa Paula and Ventura in the mid-1980s, she began teaching, and she is now a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside (UCR). Her latest release, Look at This Blue, is a 2022 National Book Award finalist. Hedge Coke is the editor of ten anthologies and has served as an editor and guest editor for several magazines and journals, most recently World Literature Today. A career community advocate and organizer, she most recently directed UCR’s Writers Week, the Along the Chaparral/Pūowaina project, and the Sandhill Crane Migration Literary Retreat and Festival. READ MORE ABOUT ALLISON
ANNETTE SAUNOOKE CLAPSADDLE is a citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and resides in Qualla, NC. She holds degrees from Yale University and the College of William and Mary. Her debut novel, Even As We Breathe (UPK 2020), was a finalist for the Weatherford Award, named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2020, and received the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award (2021). It also is the first novel published by a citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee. Clapsaddle’s work appears in Yes! Magazine, Lit Hub, Our State Magazine, and The Atlantic. She is a former secondary English and Cherokee Studies educator. Currently, Clapsaddle is an editor for the Appalachian Futures Series (UPK), serves on the Board of Directors for the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, and is the President of the Board of Trustees for the North Carolina Writers Network. READ MORE ABOUT ANNETTE
LEAH MYERS is a member of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe of the Pacific Northwest. She received an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of New Orleans, where she won the Samuel Mockbee Award for Nonfiction two years in a row. She now lives in Alabama, with roots in Georgia, Arizona, and Washington. Her work has previously appeared in, Fugue Journal, Craft Literary Magazine, High Shelf Press, and elsewhere. READ MORE ABOUT LEAH
About the Host
Jessica Cory teaches at Western Carolina University and is a PhD candidate specializing in Native American, African American, and environmental literature at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is the editor of Mountains Piled upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene (WVU Press, 2019) and the co-editor (with Laura Wright) of Appalachian Ecocriticism and the Paradox of Place (UGA Press, 2023). Her creative and scholarly writings have been published in the North Carolina Literary Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Northern Appalachia Review, and other fine publications. Originally from southeastern Ohio, she currently lives in Sylva, North Carolina.
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