Literature

Megan Stielstra

Author Megan Stielstra tells the story of how she first crossed paths with "The Chronology of Water," Lidia Yuknavitch's award-winning memoir — the anti-memoir that broke new ground for speaking with candor about the joy and the pain of living.

Alice Walker

Hope is a complicated, even slippery, word. One that demands a poet’s voice. Here’s Alice Walker, reading her poem “Hope is a Woman Who Has Lost Her Fear.”

The flurry of creative forces around the brain.

Where does creativity come from? And what exactly is going on in your brain when the Muse descends?

Terese Mailhot

Author Terese Mailhot's best-selling debut book "Heart Berries" is a slim, devastating memoir of a childhood filled with abuse, set on the Seabird Island Band in British Columbia. She reads a passage to demonstrate the lyric quality of her prose.

Books on the shelf

David Treuer is Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation. He’s a literature professor at the University of Southern California, as well as a writer and a novelist. And he does not believe in putting fiction into ethnic boxes.

Kevin Goodan with all his brothers and step-father this summer.

Do you have to be Native American to write Native American fiction? Kevin Goodan grew up among the Salish people. His brothers and stepfather are tribal members. But Kevin is white.

The IAIA campus

A new wave of Native writers is coming of age. And at the center of it is a one-of-a-kind MFA program at the IAIA, in Santa Fe. Director Jennifer Foerster told Charles that the goal is to rewrite the literary landscape.

Person at the Institute for American Indian Arts.

A wide range of writers — now celebrated with commercial and critical success — work to celebrate an evolving literary canon without limiting it. 

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