Author Biographies

DAVID J. CARLSON is Professor of English at California State University, San Bernardino.  He is the author of Sovereign Selves: American Indian Autobiography and the Law (University of Illinois Press, 2006) and Imagining Sovereignty: The Discourse of Self-Determination in American Indian Law and Literature (forthcoming, University of Oklahoma Press, 2016).   

MOLLY MCGLENNEN was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota and is of Anishinaabe and European descent. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of English and Native American Studies at Vassar College. She earned a PhD in Native American Studies from University of California, Davis and an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. Her creative writing and scholarship have been published widely. She is the author of a collection of poetry Fried Fish and Flour Biscuits, published by Salt's award-winning "Earthworks Series" of Indigenous writers, and a critical monograph Creative Alliances: The Transnational Designs of Indigenous Women's Poetry from University of Oklahoma Press, which earned the Beatrice Medicine Award for outstanding scholarship in American Indian Literature.

DENISE LOW, Kansas Poet Laureate 2009-2011, lives in Lawrence, Kansas. She founded the Creative Writing program at Haskell Indian Nations University. She is a free-lance writer and reviewer. Her family is unaffiliated Delaware and British Isles. Her most recent books are Melange Block, poetry from Red Mountain Press; Natural Theologies, critical essays about the grasslands from The Backwaters Press; and Ghost Stories, mixed genre from Woodley Memorial Press. She is director of four ledgers on the Plains Indian Ledger Art website (UC-San Diego).

KIM SHUCK is a poet and bead artist who has been published and shown in Asia, South America and Europe as well as all over North America. Born in her mother's hometown of San Francisco, Shuck had a very good seat from which to view the events of both late 60s/early 70s hippy/post hippy scene and the Red Power Movement. Kim cut her teeth on poetry readings that included Carolee Sanchez, Paula Gunn Allen and John Trudell as well as various beat poets. She is the winner of the 2005 Diane Decorah award for her 2006 collection Smuggling Cherokee. She spent some years on the board of directors for California Poets in the Schools and has taught poetry from the elementary school level to the university level. Her most recent collection of poems is Clouds Running In from Taurean Horn Press.

BILLY J. STRATTON (PhD, American Indian Studies—University of Arizona) is currently an assistant professor in the English department at the University of Denver. His teaching and research centers on contemporary American/Native American literature, critical theory and creative writing. His first book, Buried in Shades of Night, was published in 2013.