VISITING WRITERS

Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo's eight books of poetry include Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, and She Had Some Horses. Harjo's memoir Crazy Brave won several awards, including the PEN USA Literary Award for Creative Non-Fiction and the American Book Award. She is the recipient of the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets for proven mastery in the art of poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a United States Artist Fellowship. In 2014 she was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. A renowned musician, Harjo performs with her saxophone nationally and internationally, solo and with her band, the Arrow Dynamics. She has five award-winning CDs of music including the award-winning album Red Dreams, A Trail Beyond Tears and Winding Through the Milky Way, which won a Native American Music Award for Best Female Artist of the Year in 2009. She is Professor of English and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Danielle Geller

Danielle Geller holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and was a recipient of a 2016 Rona Jaffe Writers' Award. She is a member of the Navajo Nation: born to the Tsi'naajinii, born for the white man. Her essays have appeared in Brevity, Silk Road, and The New Yorker; and in the forthcoming anthology This Is The Place (Seal Press, 2018).

Rebecca Roanhorse

Rebecca Roanhorse is a Science Fiction / Fantasy writer. Author of Trail of Lightning (The Sixth World, Book 1), and Storm of Locusts (The Sixth World, Book 2), both from Saga Press, and Race to the Sun, from Disney-Hyperion's Rick Riordan Presents. Her short story, "Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience," was chosen as Apex Magazine's Favorite Story of the Year, was a Hugo Award finalist, a Sturgeon Award finalist, a Locus Award finalist, and won the Nebula Award for the Best Short Story of 2017. She was also a Campbell Award Finalist. She is Ohkay Owingeh and African-American. Her husband is Navajo. She is also a lawyer based in Northern New Mexico. Her short stories have been anthologized in Deer Woman (Native Realities Press), Sunspot Jungle (Rosarium Publishing), New Suns (Solaris Press), and Simon Pulse.

IAIA MFA PROGRAM DIRECTOR

Jon Davis

Jon Davis is the author of four full-length poetry collections- Improbable Creatures, Preliminary Report, Scrimmage of Appetite, and Dangerous Amusements; five chapbooks; and Heteronymy: An Anthology, a limited-edition letterpress book in collaboration with the artist Jamison Chas Banks. Davis also co-translated Iraqi poet Naseer Hassan's Dayplaces. He has received a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry, the Lavan Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Off the Grid Poetry Prize, and two NEA Fellowships. He directs the MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where he has taught since 1990.


FACULTY

Ramona Ausubel is the author, most recently, of the novel Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (Penguin 2016). Her first novel, No One is Here Except All of Us, won of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and was a Finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. Her collection of stories, A Guide to Being Born, was one the New York Times' 100 Notable Books of the year and a San Francisco Chronicle best book of the year. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, One Story, Salon (online), The Best American Fantasy and was shortlisted in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading. A new collection of stories, Awayland, was published by Riverhead in March of this year.

Marie-Helene Bertino

Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of the novel 2 A.M. AT THE CAT'S PAJAMAS and the story collection SAFE AS HOUSES, and was the 2017 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Fellow in Cork, Ireland. Her work has received The O. Henry Prize, The Pushcart Prize, The Iowa Short Fiction Award, The Mississippi Review Story Prize, and has been twice featured on NPR's Selected Shorts. In addition to IAIA, she teaches at NYU and The New School and lives in Brooklyn, where she is finishing a new novel and collection. For more information and film recs, please visit: www.mariehelenebertino.com.

Sherwin Bitsui

Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is Diné of the Todich'ii'nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl'izilani (Many Goats Clan). He is the author of Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press, 2003) and Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009). His recent honors include a 2011 Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship and a 2011 Native Arts & Culture Foundation Arts Fellowship. He is also the recipient of a 2010 PEN Open Book Award, an American Book Award, and a Whiting Writers Award. His third collection of poems, Dissolve, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in the fall of this year.

Kimberly Blaeser

Kimberly Blaeser is a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she teaches Creative Writing and Native American Literatures. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Apprenticed to Justice, Absentee Indians and Other Poems, and Trailing You. Blaeser is Anishinaabe, an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, and grew up on the White Earth Reservation in northwestern Minnesota. She is the editor of Stories Migrating Home: A Collection of Anishinaabe Prose and Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. Blaeser is currently at work on a collection of "Picto-Poems" combining her photographs and poetry. Her creative nonfiction, short stories, and scholarship have appeared widely in journals and anthologies.

Cherie Dimaline

Cherie Dimaline  (Georgian Bay Métis) is most noted for her 2017 novel  The Marrow Thieves,  which won the Governor General's Award for English-language children's literature at the 2017 Governor General's Awards and the 2017 Kirkus Prize in the young adult literature category. She won the award for Fiction Book of the Year at the Anskohk Aboriginal Literature Festival for her first novel,  Red Rooms.  She has since published the novel  The Girl Who Grew a Galaxy  and the short story collection  A Gentle Habit . She was founding editor of  Muskrat Magazine , was named the Emerging Artist of the Year at the Ontario Premier's Awards for Excellence in Arts in 2014, and became the first Aboriginal writer in residence for the Toronto Public Library.

Jennifer Elise Foerster

Jennifer Elise Foerster,  an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts , received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts , and is completing a PhD at the University of Denver.  She is the recipient of a 2017 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University . A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, her first book of poems, Leaving Tulsa , was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2013. Her second book, Bright Raft in the Afterweather , is forthcoming in 2018. Her poems have recently appeared in Colorado Review, Eleven Eleven, The Brooklyn Rail,  and Kenyon Review Online .

Santee Frazier

Santee Frazier  is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. He holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts  and an MFA from Syracuse University . He is the recipient of various awards including: a Syracuse University Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship, The School for Advanced Research Indigenous Writer in Residence, and a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowship. His poems have appeared in American Poet, Narrative Magazine, Ontario Review, Ploughshares,  and other literary journals. His first collection of poetry, Dark Thirty,  was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2009.

Sydney Freeland

Sydney Freeland  (Diné) is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker. Her debut feature film, Drunktown's Finest , premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival  and went on to win a number of awards, including the Grand Jury Prize and HBO Outstanding First Feature awards at LA Outfest 2014, as well as a GLAAD Media Award nomination for Outstanding Feature. In 2016, she directed the web series Her Story,  which was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Short Form Drama. Sydney is also a recipient of the 2015 Fox Global Director's Initiative, 2015 Sundance Women's Fellowship , 2015 Ford Fellowship, 2014 Time Warner Fellowship, and a 2004 Fulbright Scholarship. She was selected to participate in both the 2010 Sundance Screenwriting and Directing Labs and the 2009 Sundance Native Lab. Recent projects include directing the Netflix original film Deidra and Laney Rob a Train  and directing episodes of the TV series Heathers and Grey's Anatomy .  Sydney currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Geoff Harris

Before becoming a freelance writer/producer, Geoff Harris was Vice President in charge of Story and Writer Development at NBC, where he worked for 12 years. He also has taught TV-writing intensive workshops for Native American and Latino writers, sponsored by ABC and NBC, as well as a Web Series writing class for MFA students at Cal State University, Los Angeles. Many of his workshop students have gone on to staff positions on TV shows. He blogs about television writing on the Save the Cat!  website.

Pam Houston

Pam Houston's most recent book is Contents May Have Shifted, published by W.W. Norton in 2012. She is also the author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, the novel, Sight Hound, and a collection of essays, A Little More About Me, all published by W.W. Norton. Her stories have been selected for volumes of Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards, The 2013 Pushcart Prize, and Best American Short Stories of the Century. She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA award for contemporary fiction, The Evil Companions Literary Award and multiple teaching awards. She is Professor of English at UC Davis, directs the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers and teaches in The Pacific University low residency MFA program. and at writer's conferences around the country and the world. She lives on a ranch at 9,000 feet in Colorado near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.

Toni Jensen

Stephen Graham Jones

Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet), is the author of sixteen novels and six story collections, and, so far, one comic book. Jones has been an NEA recipient, has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction and the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, has won a few This  is Horror Awards, and he's been a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award and the Shirley Jackson Award a few times each. He's also made Bloody Disgusting's Top Ten Horror Novels. Stephen lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Kristiana Kahakauwila

Kristiana Kahakauwila is a  hapa  writer of kanaka maoli (Native Hawaiian), German, and Norwegian descent. Her first book,  This is Paradise: Stories  (Hogarth, 2013), takes as its heart the people and landscapes of contemporary Hawai`i. She earned a BA in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Michigan. A former Fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, Kristiana currently lives in Bellingham, WA, where she is an Associate Professor at Western Washington University. Recent work has appeared in  RED INK ,  Kartika Review ,  Mistake House Magazine , and  GEO Magazine . She is currently at work on a historical novel set on the island of Maui.

Chip Livingston

Chip Livingston is the mixed-blood Creek author of four books: two collections of poetry, Crow-Blue, Crow-Black (2012) and Museum of False Starts (2010); a collection of short stories and creative nonfiction, Naming Ceremony (2014); and a novel, Owls Don't Have to Mean Death (2017). His writing has received awards from Native Writers' Circle of the Americas, Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, and the AABB Foundation. Chip's writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, South Dakota Review, Cincinnati Review, and on the Academy of American Poets' and Poetry Foundation's websites. He has taught at the University of Colorado, University of the Virgin Islands, Brooklyn College, and Regis University.

Terese Mailhot

Terese Mailhot is from Seabird Island Band. She graduated with an MFA from IAIA. She served as Saturday Editor at The Rumpus and was a columnist at Indian Country Today. Her work appears in Guernica, Pacific Standard, Elle, West Branch, Buzzfeed, The Atlantic, The LA Times, and elsewhere. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling "Heart Berries: A Memoir." She serves as faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts and she's a Tecumseh Postdoctoral Fellow at Purdue University.

Derek Palacio

Derek Palacio received his MFA in Creative Writing from Ohio State University. His short story Sugarcane appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013, and his novella, How to Shake the Other Man, was published by Nouvella Books. His debut novel, The Mortifications, was published in 2016 by Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group. He is the co-director, with Claire Vaye Watkins, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada. He lives and teaches in Ann Arbor, MI.

Ismet Prcic

Ismet Prcic was born in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina and immigrated to the United States in 1996. His debut novel Shards was published in 2011 by Black Cat, imprint of Grove Press to critical acclaim, winning the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for first fiction, the Writers Center First Novel Prize, the Oregon Book Award and many others. It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and has been translated into nine languages. A recipient of a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts award for fiction he is also a Sundance and Jerusalem screenwriting lab fellow. He co-wrote the screenplay for the film Imperial Dreams which premiered in January at this year's Sundance Film Festival and won the audience award in its category.

James Thomas Stevens

James Thomas Stevens is an Associate Professor in the BFA Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. A member of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation in upstate New York, Stevens grew up between three reservations, the two where his grandparents came from, Akwesasne Territory and Six Nations Reserve, and the one where they settled, the Tuscarora Nation. Stevens earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University. He has taught at Haskell Indian Nations University and the State University of New York at Fredonia. Stevens has published seven books of poetry, including Combing the Snakes from His Hair, for which he was awarded a 2000 Whiting Writer's Award, A Bridge Dead in the Water, Mohawk/Samoa: Transmigrations (with Caroline Sinavaiana), Bulle/Chimere, and Tokinish. His work has been anthologized in works such as Genocide of the Mind, Visit Teepee Town, and Sovereign Bones.

Ken White

Ken White is a co-writer and co-producer of the feature film Winter in the Blood, adapted from James Welch's novel of the same name, and co-director and co-writer of the short film Universal VIP. He has written or co-written ten feature scripts.  His poetry has appeared in The Boston Review, The Tusculum Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Versal, Omniverse, Manor House Quarterly, Spork, Horsethief, and Poets.org, among others. He is the author of the books of poems, Eidolon (Peel Press 2013), and The Getty Fiend (Les Figues Press 2017), as well as the chapbook Middlemost Constantine (Spork 2017).